Slashdot Mirror
Twitter's Timeline Option Puts Important Tweets Up Top (engadget.com)
Twitter is doing its best to make sure you see the best content in your timeline (at least thats what its hoping its doing with today's announcement of a new timeline option). The new feature drops what Twitter determines are the best tweets at the top of a user's timeline. For now, this feature is optional, so users can opt-in to see this timeline. In the coming weeks, it will slowly be rolled out to all users.
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Maybe twitter will be able to do better at reading my mind to determine what I want to read, maybe not.
So long as I can disable it, I'm fine with it for now.
What's the over/under on Slashdot incorporating a timeline on its front page?
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
This is not about "important" tweets any more than the "Trust and Safety Council" is about "harrassment" or "trolling." It's about controlling which content everyone is allowed to see (i.e. making it more like television).
Yes it'll be opt-out eventually,
Will it? Will it be "opt out" like Yahoo's "important posts" in Yahoo Groups are "opt out"? I'm referring to the ads that show up mixed in with the actual group messages.
I'm pretty sure that important stories and world-news stories are going to keep getting enough likes to keep them on top.
I'm sorry, but if I'm not following someone or something, I don't want to see their twits ever. I don't care if a million strangers all vote up a twit telling them about cheap viagra, I don't want to see it, and it isn't important. And don't dismiss the idea that if voting up twits makes them show up on more screens that twit-spammers won't create the users to vote their stuff up.
How can this feature exist when 'important tweet' is somewhere between 'theoretical' and 'logically impossible', and definitely not easy to find in the wild?
"Important"
It's not a feature.
It's a bug.
We Said Edit!
Listen to your users. Don't insult them.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
people still use yahoo groups?
"Important tweets", and it's said with a straight face as if such a thing actually exists.
"Important tweets" are like "important theological questions"....they basically don't exist, although I'd bet there are definitely tweets that are more important than any theological question.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
it's fun watching tech/social companies implode, where do they get this stuff?
Q: we have to be more relevant, stats show we're lagging, ideas?
A: yeah, let's do something stupid that no one will like, we can get away with it for awhile because we're leaders in our domain.
Hello uber surge pricing, hello facebook targeted ads/privacy, hello paypal 6 month buyer protection, etc.
At least google is at least paying attention a little, goodbye plus.
Wait, don't people still use USENET?
I don't want algorithms deciding what's important to me, but I would like something that filters out duplicate (or near duplicate) posts. I like using twitter as a kind of RSS feed, but I'm tired of media outlets retweeting the same stuff, several times an hour, all day long. I could probably get through my feed in half the time if all that spam was filtered out.
No, this system doesn't inject new stuff. It reorganizes people you already follow. If you use Twitter to follow a bajillion human rights or news feeds (like a big part of their userbase), it means you'll mostly see the stuff with a lot of likes up top, and junk tweets with no info probably won't spam you. If you don't follow them you won't see them, aside from the sponsored stuff, and everybody's gotta make a living.
Usenet has had a signal/noise ratio of about 1% since the late 90s. Who the hell wants to maintain killfiles? It sure isn't most users, who keep spamming up groups with responses to trolls.
at least thats what its hoping its doing
Come ooooon.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
There seem to be (mostly) two types of social media users: those who like/subscribe/follow everything that moves, and those that use it to keep track of specific topics or groups and have relatively few follows.
For the first group, a curated timeline might make more sense. There is a lot of garbage out there, and sorting through hundreds of posts a day is too much work to be done manually for most people. On the other hand, for people who only get a small amount of new content pushed to them daily, screwing up the sorting makes it incredibly hard to make sure you haven't missed anything.
Facebook handles this distinction poorly. Let's hope Twitter does a better job.
As long as you can opt out it's fine by me but I'm not convinced this'll be an option in the long run.
One thing that gives me some hope is that Twitter is not as populas as Facebook so they're more likely to turn around decisions that most users dislike
If the strictly chronological order disappears, so will all those users who need time-based stuff like weather, live event tweeting, etc.