[berberous]

People shit on the algorithmic feed, but I love it. I’m too busy to wade through bad/boring tweets, and don’t want to spend all day scrolling. I can check it once or day or less and the algorithmic sorting surfaces the best content right at the top.

That said, I don’t really need a smarter algorithm than “show my tweets with a lot of favorites”.

Just like a prefer to have Reddit sort by best vs new.

[fluidcruft]

My experience is that the algorithmic feed just wants to firehose 99.9% sensationalist trending muck I don't want from people and topics I don't want to follow or read about on twitter.

[meowface]

For me the absolute worst of the worst is the "More Tweets" list under certain tweets. It's basically designed to be the most sensationalist, polarizing, "hot take"ist bullshit imaginable. I'm not sure I've ever read a single thing worth reading in that section.

A rather meta example: scroll down to the "More Tweets" section under this recent Elon Musk tweet - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525738556102164480

I don't know what it might curate for each person reading this, but I'll bet you'll see what I'm talking about.

[mlindner]

I think this is a difference between the desktop and web experience because I don't see any "more tweets" section. If I scroll, I just get autoloading of more replies to the tweet.

[code_duck]

Not sure whether you’re on desktop or mobile, but I only get “More Tweets” on the mobile website if I’m not signed in. Otherwise it’s as you describe, only replies.

[meowface]

That's funny because it's the exact opposite for me. I'm on desktop and I see it only when logged in. When not logged in, I only see replies.

[code_duck]

I have made more observations and it seems to have to do with how you arrived at the post. If I click on it from browsing my timeline, it does not show “more tweets“. If I click through to it from a link somewhere external, such as a link in an article, it does. I’m sure that somewhere there is a thorough analysis of this.

[yamazakiwi]

1 use case of the The More Tweets feature being useful is for following E-Sports.

I don't follow every player, coach, or organization and it's common for me to see 1 tweet from one of my follows and the More Tweets to contain content I want to consume from the 1000's of others talking about this specific scene.

I'd also recommend not using the More Tweets feature for anything too popular as it's like reading a youtube comments section.

[rockinghigh]

These are tweets Twitter wants to hide because they are deemed toxic.

[meowface]

Sorry, to be clear I'm talking about the "More Tweets" list at the bottom. What you're referring to is the "Show more replies" link which requires a click to unroll.

[aeturnum]

I also really like the algorithmic feed. Though it's interesting that you like it because you check it infrequently - for me, it works because I check it often, so it's "close to chronological but with extra surprises" which I like.

I think the algorithmic feed actually does a good job of promoting the things Twitter does well and I wonder how many people who hate it actually just disagree with the Twitter devs about how the service should work.

[matthewdgreen]

Twitter has a function for identifying content you'd like others to see in your own timeline: it's called retweet. It also has a function for identifying content that is noteworthy but failed to meet the higher bar, and that's called "favorite" (I still prefer "like", but whatever.) At some point Twitter's algorithm began using favorites to serve the purpose previously served by retweets, and the quality of the timeline has been in free-fall since then.

[VectorLock]

I've been a long-time Twitter user and I recently switched to "See latest Tweets instead" and I had the same conclusion, the "algorithm" was actually doing a decent job of surfacing new stuff for me that I liked. I missed it pretty quick and switched back. I think doing the manual curation to tell the algo what you _don't_ want to see helps immensely.

[affectsk]

I'm actually with you on this one!

In my case, the algo is pretty good at surfacing useful tweets and people: both new stuff that I find relevant, and tweets from the people I'm following that I missed.

So I generally use lists to interact with different groups of people I'm already interested (including the ones I'm following) and the homepage is great for discovery.

[projektfu]

The algorithmic feed would keep showing things I had already seen and bury interesting tweets from people I actually follow in favor of outrage-of-the-day type stuff.

There was a period of time when Twitter was testing an interface that had the two feeds on tabs and it kept reverting back to the algorithmic tab. I almost quit.

[jklinger410]

People like to trash on algorithmic feeds, but they secretly love them. YouTube for instance compared to Odysee.

[klyrs]

People like to trash on heroin, but they secretly love it. But people quit heroin too, because of the harms.