There are good faith arguments for applying smarter sorting / filtering to the stream.
For example, if someone follows two people and one person simply tweets at 1000x the rate of the other, I would argue that it would be better UX if the rare tweet from the other person gets more weight.
Another thing Twitter does is show you popular things that have been liked by the people you follow. It might be way too much to show you every thing that every person you follow has liked every time. But it can introduce some interesting content to your stream to see such second-tier content.
I don't see how promoted content plays into it since you can interpolate it anywhere.
If only they weren't inane. I think Twitter is probably the worst in terms of 'promoted content' because it always seems to serve up the same ad several days in a row and it's always something surprisingly off-topic. I'd be browsing my feed full of political news, movie trailers, and animal photos... and get an ad for ketchup. How on Earth could I confuse that for a real tweet or something my friends would retweet? A ketchup ad? Mental.
This doesn't make much sense to me. You don't need complicated algorithmic sorting and filtering to inject an ad space after every fifth tweet. Even the client can do that.
You see many more outlier tweets with thousands of likes when your feed is interspersed with "most liked by follows and follows of follows", as opposed to just "tweeted by follows". I think that improves the signal to noise ratio of the feed.
But yeah, I wish a simple timeline was the default, and twitter stopped switching away from it.
For anyone interested in this, google “hacker news gravity algorithm” to see an interesting example of how sorting was done here at one time (as I understand it the algorithm has evolved).
For example, if someone follows two people and one person simply tweets at 1000x the rate of the other, I would argue that it would be better UX if the rare tweet from the other person gets more weight.
Another thing Twitter does is show you popular things that have been liked by the people you follow. It might be way too much to show you every thing that every person you follow has liked every time. But it can introduce some interesting content to your stream to see such second-tier content.
I don't see how promoted content plays into it since you can interpolate it anywhere.