I used to be in the chronological only camp, but trying to be on twitter where one or two people I follow post like every 30 minutes and other people who's stuff I wanna see has days/weeks/months/years between posts it just doesn't really work out. Facebook has similar problems: I'm a member of a handful of groups and if I set my default feed to chronological using F.B. Purity lots of stuff I would wanna see gets buried.

Tangent: what I really want is a way to only see stuff that people I follow/am friends with made themselves and skip re-tweets, quotes, etc

I don't mind this idea, tbh, as impossible to police as it would be. Social media still has negative impacts to mental health without the algorithmic feeds but at least it'd be a lot easier to control.

I feel like this is overblown. If you spend any time on the likes of Telegram or Whatsapp you’ll know that the lack of a feed doesn’t prevent viral content from spreading. It’s just something inherent to people and mass communication.

What does that mean? What qualifies algorithmic and what qualifies as a feed?

Clearly, HN itself needs to drop anything except for "new", which makes that a pretty useless website. What if someone were to curate the best of HN on another site? would that be an algorithmic feed? what if it were all manual? what about if it were mostly automatic?

Is filtering the set of public posts down to only the ones from users that I follow an algorithmic feed? It's certainly not just chronological.

Certainly you mean that youtube autoplay could only what? Like it must just play videos from the same user and in published order? could users define playlists that it would autoplay in?

Google search results are certainly algorithmic, is that a feed? what if I include site:twitter.com? Can a twitter-like site have an API? Is it a requirement that the 3rd party developers cannot create an algorithmic feed from that?

What about a dedicated sports feed on twitter? is that algorithmic if whether a tweet is considered sports or not is done automatically?

Just like HN, reddit is pretty much done for as any non-tiny subreddit is going to only have a chronological spammed feed. In fact, this plan doubly benefits spammers: (1) you can't filter out spam because that's algorithmic and (2) you have to look at the spam because it must be shown in chronological order.

I mean, the whole idea very clearly means that you shutdown any site featuring user generated content of HN's size or larger (and probably to bit smaller as well).

Do book stores need to stock their books in published order?