[lapinot]

Depends on the "algorithm"! At this point "algorithm" in the context of social media doesn't mean anything sensible. A very common "algorithm" used to order messages in email inboxes is by "read/unread" status, which very much helps you catch up efficiently. Chronological sorting is very limited, in comparison with the myriad of other ways you could organize such data.

[dsr_]

The best way is threading, which combines chronological, unread status, and the tree structure of replies.

Everything else is either an attempt to do less work or an attempt to shape user experiences for your own goals.

Threading requires two data elements per message, generated at the time of message creation: a unique-enough message ID, and the parent message ID. The client needs to have a method of storing 1 bit of state per message, either locally or on a home server. If messages have a timestamp, then a high-water mark is a useful heuristic. If the messages have required subjects, tags or topic groups, you can significantly improve both performance and user experience.

Usenet shall be resurrected, time and time again.

[082349872349872]

I use newsboat, so it picks everything up in chronological (modulo feed oddity) order, but displays only "unread" items to me.

On top of that is further organisation: non-HN feeds are batched together in a single display, but HN often produces more than a screenful (~70) of unreads, so then I have hotkeys that filter out alphabetic subsets: A-G, H-R, or S-Z. That normally suffices to avoid any scrolling, but when I haven't been following RSS for several days, I also have filters that further limit to a single day, either 1, 2, 3, or 4 days ago.

Although the underlying data is kept chronologically indexed by newsboat, and I can always refer to it that way (frex the concrete splits AG/HR/SZ were determined by querying newsboat's SQLite instance) it by no means prevents layering a myriad (well 20, not counting newsboat's ad-hoc command line filter interface) of other ways to organise on top.

PS thank you for reminding me to finally look up how to turn off threading (View»Organise by Conversation) in the mac default mail proggy!

[Turing_Machine]

> At this point "algorithm" in the context of social media doesn't mean anything sensible.

Generally it means "select the material and the ordering in the manner that maximizes revenue for the platform's owners". I'd call that a sensible (if morally questionable) strategy for the owners.