Nice for some things. Absolute death for discovery in a lot of cases though. Either trim your follows down dramatically, or miss some incredible stuff...

there is nothing to discover anymore. everyone is retweeting the same stories. and the best bet at discovering is via soomeone you follow

Same here, and it blows my mind that we're in such a minority.

This is what YouTube's Subscriptions tab does and I hate it. Rarely uploading quality creators are hidden in a sea of daily uploads from channels which focus on regular uploads rather than quality.

I think there is a place for a smarter algorithm than "ORDER BY date DESC", but one that is not designed to manipulate users into addiction.

Yeah it s not good for youtube because youtube doesnt have retweets, so people subscribe to everything they like. On twitter you can subscribe to a few people and they ll still retweet most of the stuff that the algorithm would give u

Is that actually possible on Twitter? (I have an account but don't use it.) I do believe them that when a user follows several 100+ other users, it would probably be impossible to read every tweet chronologically.

i always use chronological, atm following very few people, but in the past following too many to keep up w/.

even when following too many to read everything, i preferred chrono because it would yield a coherent slice of what was happening. an unbiased sample.

twitter is basically a medium for conversation.

imagine there's a large party. would you rather listen to an out-of-order "most important" set parts of the conversation, or just a slice of conversation from a particular time?

well, actually, both can be interesting, but generally the slice is more coherent. :-)

Assuming we're talking about the timeline "latest" mode (rather than "top"), IIRC in the past the used to do the home timeline processing on the read paths, but have long since opted to optimize for read latency, thus the heavy lifting is performed during the insertion, so in broad strokes, when someone post a tweet, the three main things that happen are:

1. Insertion of tweet to tweets table.

2. Insertion of that tweet-id to the home timelines of all that user's followers.

3. Insertion of that tweet-id to the user-timeline of that user.

On the read-path, if I'm not mistaken, the only join that happen is between the requested timeline and the tweets table (which is replicated across cluster of machines but not partitioned, or at least I remember reading that was the case not many years ago)

Yes. It is. It's been an option since... forever? Many many years at least. https://i.imgur.com/JM6saa2.png

For about a week they made a change that prevent that chronological timeline from being the default, but they reasonably quickly rolled that back. https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/14/22977782/twitter-default-...

I use lists by subject matter, including a list of personal contacts.

I then use tweet deck which shows a column of tweets per list.

As these are separated by subject and are chronological, it makes it far easier to follow.

Impossible to read, maybe. Impossible to display, definitely not.

Sort by recent is an available setting. Whether you can keep up with the volume is up to how many people you choose to follow.