"User engagement" is not a single, well-defined, easily measurable thing.

For one thing, it's easy for A/B tests to show something that looks good in the short term, but has longer-term negative effects. If your goal is to iterate quickly and stop your test as soon as you think it shows a positive result, you'll never see that.

But more to the point, there's no guarantee that the "user engagement" metrics Twitter cares about are actually a proxy for what users really want. If it takes me more time and more clicks to find the information I want -- enough to be annoying, but not quite enough to drive me away from the site -- that probably gets counted as "engagement".

I guarantee Twitter’s data scientists are using more than just “amount the user is clicking” to decide whether a UI or ranking change is beneficial.

it's hilarious that your main defense of twitter's design decisions is an appeal to twitter's own authority.

"twitter is doing these things for a reason and surely these reasons are good, otherwise they wouldn't be doing them!"

case closed my circular dude

I think something like this circular logic is actually useful, and in some sense true. It might better phrased as "companies which usually make bad financial decisions die, so the decisions of a company which hasn't died are probably financially beneficial." Further qualifiers could be added to account for longevity of a company (we might put more faith in a company which has spent longer not dying), earning reports, and the fact that a good decision isn't necessarily beneficial (just probabilistically so given available knowledge), but the basic reasoning seems valid.

It's hilarious that you think Twitter has not tested chronologically-ordered UIs.

You could apply this reasoning to literally anything, because every organisation / nation state / what have you has at some point and in some form considered the consequences of their actions. History shows that internal evaluation is an imperfect science. I suspect you know this and only reserve this extremely circular reasoning for cases which you already agree with. It would be easier to admit you've already formed an opinion and don't care to change it under any circumstance, rather than weakly appeal to Twitter's own authority to justify their actions.

It is not just an appeal to Twitter’s authority. It’s an informed opinion based off working in a similar field and conversing with others in this field. So unless you can come up with some concrete data supporting your points, instead of just attacking mine, you are unlikely to change my opinion.

"User engagement" is a euphemism for "eyes on screen for as long as possible" and is a good metric for selling ads (the best one really).

It's not a very good metric for measuring actual usefulness to users at all though.

We need a business model for social media where incentives for companies and their users actually line up.

Nonprofit? A service that does what you likely desire would cost in the eight digits a year to provide for the whole world.

Wikipedia gets along just fine.

"nonprofit" is not code for "zero revenue"

Wikipedia's costs are extremely small relative the service usage. They don't have a lot of active development (relatively), and they don't need a ton of expensive infrastructure (relatively). Twitter's annual operating costs are in the $2+ billions. Wikipedia's are in the ~$60 millions. Not to say a non-profit twitter couldn't exist - this just feels like an unfair comparison. Just because two services are popular tech services doesn't mean they are apples to apples to operate.

We have an example of a service similar to twitter that's effectively free to run due to it's distributed nature in Mastodon/ActivityPub. Being financially sustainable without having to resort to dark patterns could just be an engineering question.

I've always asserted that Twitter should have been a protocol, not a startup.

Dorsey has done three recent podcasts (two on JRE, one on Tales From the Crypto) where he states that he thinks there will be a decentralised blockchain based Twitter competitor in the future. I've taken that as a given for years, but to hear the CEO spell it out in public is pretty crazy. He wasn't even cornered into it, but rather brought the topic up himself.

I read that as Dorsey pandering to the audience. There is no room for a blockchain-based twitter competitor, because there is no sensible application of blockchain to the domain.

In 2019 you're more or less correct, but only due to cost and time constraints. Short-form public messaging on the blockchain already exists[0], it's just prohibitively expensive and slow. Imagine a blockchain with cheap, fast transactions. This should be harder to censor than other distributed solutions like a federated network or a similar scheme hosted on IPFS since you're taking the whole chain with you in the event of censorship, whereas the other schemes allow just the hosts of particular data to be targeted. Even before the economics work for full-on blockchain twitter, we might see a cheaper blockchain/IPFS hybrid where at least some metadata is censorship resistant. Unless the government wins the war on information, I'm reasonably convinced that a better blockchain twitter is coming.

[0]: https://cryptograffiti.info

I'm sure a gigantic portion of Twitter's operating costs are the once necessary to monetize their users. I have a feeling the product that is for the users would be much closer to Wikipedia-level costs.

If the feed shows me a pseudo-random sample of recent tweets, and each time I refresh I get a slightly different view, of course I'm going to keep refreshing to see if there's anything new or anything that I haven't been shown yet. But most of the time, I just keep seeing the same thing over and over. Imagine if your email client did this.

“User engagement” on social media platforms in 2019 is a proxy for “triggering users emotional responses and luring them into internet arguments”

Min maxed “user engagement” is almost certainly a net negative for society at large

"More engaging" does not automatically equal "better for users" or "what most users want".

It correlates with what users want better than what a handful of HN professional contrarians think they want.

I'm not so sure about that.

What a contrarian thing to say.