[hirundo]

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.

[mipmap04]

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).