With reverse chronological timeline, it's harder to build a advertising profile.

While it's important to know what tweets a user is interacting with, the personalization option can surface more things as "You might like", "You follow x, and he liked", "Interesting tweet on the topics you follow/might like" and so on. Whether or not you choose to interact with anyone or more of those is a signal, and helps with advertising (if advertising is a question of "What tweet/content you are likely to interact with?"). Other than brands, most twitter influencers, or would-be influencers end up spending money on twitter ads to gain followers.

With a reverse chronological timeline, it's hard to surface those tweets from outside the network without a jarring experience. They also realize the power of defaults and hence they decided to take away the default option.

As a side-note: a good test of when social networks turn the corner and become evil is when they start conflating liking and sharing by implementing the "You follow x, and he liked" feature that you described. Since this clearly violates the user's intention (if you wanted to share something, you would have shared it), this serves as a subtle but distinct signal that manipulating users has become more important than listening to them.

> a good test of when social networks turn the corner and become evil is

... when they are created.

Social networks are inherently evil, that's their business model: manipulate users into addiction and serve ads.

How do non-evil social networks look like? They're forums, plain old forums.

But you don't become an ultra trillionaire with PhpBB.

When I joined FB there were no ads and a chronological feed and everything was awesome. Reddit was awesome.

Nowadays they are an evil manipulation mess, but I don't think it is an inherit property of social networks.

Phase 1: user acquisition.

Phase 2: profit (through using and abusing their users).

Both steps are written in stone in their business plan on day 1, you just don't know it.

As a user you were still in phase 1.

Similar story with image hosting websites. First they don't have ads and load fast and don't really have image restrictions. Then they start adding restrictions and ads.

Profit doesn't have to be equivalent to abuse. The idea that you have to abuse your users to make a profit is a relatively new one pioneered by Silicon Valley scum thanks to anti-competitive practices and lax/non-existent regulation.

Before this, we had centuries of businesses who were sustainable by just charging a fair premium on the goods they sold to their customers, and both sides were happy enough with the transaction to continue.

Well, considering the context of this thread, are there any social networks not working based on the Silicon Valley model? I don't know any.

The phone company? You pay them a fee for access and that's it - they have no incentive to prioritize certain callers over others for "engagement"'s sake.

In this context social networks = social media = Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and their ilk, we can't really include AT&T in this conversation :-)

Why not? My point is that a communications network doesn't have to be hostile. It is possible to run a communications platform and get people to pay for it.

Back in the day? Maybe. Today? Yeah, sure you could create something and try to charge people, but most people are now used to free + ads.

You'll never get enough traction to break through to the mainstream, unless something radical changes.

i'd argue social networks only become evil if the want to grow revenue and earnings and more importantly keep growing them at some fixed rate y/y for too long (otherwise they get recategorized as value instead of growth and all the juicy multiples disappear from their stock grants...)

Or federated like the Fediverse applications, i.e. Mastodon. It's much harder to squeeze users because they can leave you without loosing their social network.

> Social networks are inherently evil, that's their business model

What's evil about Mastodon, Matrix, Pleroma, diaspora, etc?

The fact that if they're good they're not adopted, I guess?

I don't know anyone using any of those networks.

Disagree here - you can insert things into a chronological timeline just fine - it's no more jarring than an algorithmic one.

Nothing wrong with showing me, and clearly denoting, a tweet that I might like in between other tweets I browse.

Don't understand this black and white thinking.

I agree that's a possible reason. But I don't think it's specifically necessary for Twitter, especially the sort of power user who wants a chronological timeline.

Whether or not they show topic data for a particular tweet, they generally have it. I only use the chronological timeline, and I cleared out the interests list a year or two back, but they have built up a profile of hundreds of interests for me.

I suspect forcing the ranked timeline on people is all about a small portion of Twitter juicing their engagement metrics, with no grand cross-team strategy in play.

Hotels can try boosting user retention, as measured by minutes spent in the room, by hiding guests' belongings while they are away.

That's pretty much the thinking behind layouts of malls and grocery stores.

Grocery stores put common items like milk way in the back, in order to have you traverse the whole store and get exposed to as many meters of shelf as possible. They generally also like to change placement of product, to make sure you don't learn the layout and get too efficient at navigating.

Malls try to balance enabling people to find what they are looking for, but also make sure they don't find it too easily so that people can wonder about and be exposed to as many stores as possible.

If you enter the Dubai Mall from the metro, there's a big sign that points to the left and says "Food Court". You'd get to the food court much faster if you turn right.

Don't forget IKEA.

I went the other day just to look at a dining table. It was only in the 3rd or 4th showroom. Of course, to get out I had to wander through the majority of like 13 or 14 other showrooms because you pretty much can only take the linear path to get to an exit.

Besides the shortcuts mentioned by the sibling comment, you can also just go from the exit (yes, you can enter through the exit), straight to the warehouse.

You need to know the name of what you're looking for and then use their kiosks to find where the thing is in the warehouse and just pick it up directly.

This trick turns 1 hour trips through Ikea into 5 minute trips.

I'd imagine anyone concerned about efficiancy at Ikea would just order online.

The value proposition of the long Ikea walks is the set up rooms showing how the products look in use, allowing you to visualise before you buy. I take a friend and a coffee and take my time at Ikea.

Didn't work for my usecase there. I specifically went to check out a table in person. Not necessarily buy it. It was only on display in a showroom, not the warehouse section.

Yeah, that sometimes happens. I don't really understand why they don't have all their products in the warehouse. Plus they don't deliver some stuff, despite the fact that they deliver almost everything. It's quite confusing.

Funny you mention the delivery thing. When I was in the store, I checked the website for a couple of tables. According to the site neither were deliverable to me (in a major city, FWIW).

So I went up to a couple salespeople and asked why. They couldn't say why, just that they did have it in stock at this warehouse and they themselves could ship it for X fee.

I don't really get it. They said maybe they were out of stock at the factory or online order fulfillment center. But the pages said they were available.

Generally Ikea stores have a few shortcuts, but you usually have to pay attention to find them.

I heard from a friend that they're only there for IKEA staff to get around the store faster. I'm sure IKEA would otherwise do away with them.

> I heard from a friend that they're only there for IKEA staff to get around the store faster.

I doubt it. They are even marked on in store navigation. Example, https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*ZSJ1cE-FjFzNjIVz8l0a4Q.jp...

> Grocery stores put common items like milk way in the back, in order to have you traverse the whole store and get exposed to as many meters of shelf as possible. They generally also like to change placement of product, to make sure you don't learn the layout and get too efficient at navigating.

Wonder if the covid-catalyzed uptake on grocery pickup options will change this in any way. I certainly discovered the joys of making grocery errands much more efficient, to the point where the decided majority of my store runs are pickup-only: I don't waste time navigating the store.

(And hey, the store can show me random products based off ML analysis of my purchase history, win-win.)

Obviously they can't analyze your purchase history in-store, but I do like how sometimes grocery stores put commonly bought items together. For example the supermarket I often go to has marshmallows, Hershey's chocolate, and graham crackers together. They also keep cans of beans (and perhaps other stuff that goes in chili? I can't remember) by the ground beef.

This just moves the tracking, stalking & dark patterns online.

I wonder how much of this is an urban legend

There's a reason why refrigerated items are usually at the back: fridges usually face a wall. You can have a shelf at the back sometimes but that's not always possible

Also, for those quick purchases you can always go to somewhere closer, a gas station, etc.

In fact in Europe some places do have the quick purchases right in front of the store so you don't need to go around (Tesco as an example).

I think store documentation from the 'food store franchise' have been publicly shared in Sweden and had instructions on how you should place the milk.

The dairy section is the most infuriatingly obscure section in Swedish stores. To the point that I've seen it hidden away in a small subsection only accessible by a rather narrow entrance.

Nah, I saw this on my last shopping trip to a mega grocery. Bought basically all the items on my list on the right side of the store (produce, other food stuffs) and then had to walk past a half dozen aisles filled with random crap (non food) to get eggs from the dairy section.

Conversely at my local supermarket (major chain), the milk, meat, fruit and veg are all near the front of the store and easily accessible.

Also, why would your eggs be in the dairy section?

> They generally also like to change placement of product, to make sure you don't learn the layout and get too efficient at navigating.

I dont know if this is really happening. Grocery stores where I go are fairly static. They change layout once in years and larger one have big signs that tell you where what roughly is.

Hotels don’t make money if you stay in the room, it actually costs them money in terms of electricity. But they do want you to spend money so they might indeed do things such as banning outside food deliveries or making the basin un-pluggable so that you can’t do your own laundry.

There was a case a few years ago where a Marriott got fined for blocking outside wifi.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/03/marriott-fin...

>Hotels don’t make money if you stay in the room, it actually costs them money in terms of electricity.

No, them renting the room to you - when you'll usually be out of it most of the day - is absolutely how they make money. Maybe in Las Vegas the room rate is a loss leader but your average business hotel is 100% making their profit on the room.

That's my kind of hotel, just a business that makes their money on exactly what the fuck it looks like they're making the money on.

I once stayed at a place that had super, super cheap refreshment rates on the mini-fridge. Cheaper if you got them at a store obviously, but not punishing like most other hotels, less than double the supermarket rate. Guess what? I made them tons of money, it was super convenient, I didn't go out of my way to avoid them.

What I mean is the hotel doesn’t make more money if you stay inside the room, which was GP’s premise that they would want to entice guests into spending more hours in the room. They would prefer that guests leave the room and go to the bar or restaurant for instance.

This is funny but on a side note, isn't this exactly what some casinos and some malls/stores do? I once spent one hour in a duty free mall because it was like a maze and I couldn't find the exit.

Which is what pissed me off the most about TikTok for the brief period I used it.

They would just show me random shit basically irregardless of date.. and that's not at all what I wanted. I found it to be an new source- of sorts. I'm not saying a good one, but at least it was somewhat interesting to may see peoples perspective on some topic. But what I found is it would just show me stuff that could be months old, days old etc instead of prioritizing like.. top day things.

I haven't used it during the russia/ukraine time.. but I can't imagine how wildly inaccurate of a picture you would get if you are viewing stuff completely out of date order. Yeah they put the date on the video.. but that doesn't really help, everything is still all over the place.

For all Reddit's faults- I can at least go there, take a look at some of the top headlines in some subreddits.. and know if I see something it's recent unless I am looking otherwise.

It's also because there's power in being able to influence when people see something. It's harder to spot when that occurs when your timeline isn't chronological.