It's because the majority of users are being fed more content than they can consume, whether that's through a large count of follows or global search results or a discovery tab. In that case, you need some method by which to decide what subset of that content to show to the user. Chronological ("show me the latest 50") is one option, but is it the best, for however one defines "best"? The people running these things seem to think it is not the best, for however they define "best", so we see the various discovery algorithms and all their associated pros & cons.

> majority of users are being fed more content than they can consume

That is a group of users.

Another group of users follows only few active others and therefore sees only little content, but the platforms wants to show them something new all the time, to keep the platform "relevant" (in order to show more ads)

This then of course ignore the fact that they probably purposely follow only few.

Clearly the service is not designed for people to only engage with a few folks, it's meant to be a zeitgeist firehose. If you're only following a few people it's like using a spreadsheet for tracking household frozen pizza inventory.

The tool might be more sophisticated than you need but following only a few people is totally fine and should not be overrun with algo content just to promote ad revenue to the platform owner. Maybe the people you want to follow are only on said platform so you are required to consume it that way.

This is a spot-on, although incredibly weird, analogy for it. It only works if you use it. You get out what you put in.

> That is a group of users.

It's the majority of users. Those who "follows only few active others" are a very small subset.

This is a result of the algorithm. It also forces people who would prefer to only be following updates from an intimately curated group to have to pick what they've explicitly taken the time to select out of a pile of crap.

I think one issue I see on Facebook is, it went from being very personal, to just being a mix of other social media norms. Which adds noise. If Facebook had a "Show me only relevant personal things" timeline, I'd use it. They used to let you define a custom timeline, where you group x number of friends, it was much nicer than the standard since I could weed out people depending on what type of content I wanted. I've stopped using FB for a while now though.

The "information overload" problem always seems like a problem invented by the creators of these platforms to project on their users and justify coercive behavior.

A lot of it comes down to revealed preferences: people genuinely do just engage a lot more with algorithmic ranking. However I'm coming to believe the best algorithm at any given time is contextual - what content do you want to see? How much content is out there, and how much of it is within reach of your existing following network? Currently if you want to engage with stuff in a different mode, you just have to jump apps entirely, I'm hopeful Bluesky is able to serve a broader set of needs by just letting you pick what algorithm you're using.

Good news! Bluesky does default to chronological, but also provides other options.

Chronological is ideal for personal feeds -- family and friends, maybe some professionals and curators you follow, your preferred brands, your local public services, maybe keyword/topic subscriptions, etc. A few hundred or a few thousand explicit subscriptions with output sized to match how often you check your feeds and how much you care about missing things when you don't.

Like maybe you, that's all I want, so it feels like chronological should just be the default option that all this algorithm and trending business is nonsense. I just want a nice aggregation of the information I know I want from the sources I personally know, appreciate, and can contextualize.

But "at scale" you end up with a lot of users who are more interested in idle discovery, seeing what their peers are seeing so they can talk about it, etc -- as well as platform maintainers hearing the siren call of advertising and paid placement as way to offset the high costs of maintaining a multimedia network for millions upon millions of users. Together, this becomes the wind behind algorithmic feeds and paid visibility features, because the algorithmic feeds are something users actually enjoy and breaking away from chronological feeds opens tons of revenue opportunities in an expensive and intensely competitive business.

I no longer expect to find my kind of service from any platform that's positioned for the global mainstream. The winds are always going to take that somewhere else, even if it looks promising today.

There's a Discover tab. If you want to discover things, use it. Tiktok follows a similar approach for their secondary feeds.

I don't want to discover anything on my personal feed unless it comes from one of the sources that I have chosen to follow, and I want information relayed to me in the order in which it is posted. For Discover, I couldn't care less.

Agreed. They kind of just overthought the experience to try to game engagement and clicks. Chronological should be the default, anything else should be up to the user but I know that doesn't quite make money for the apps the same way...

TIL priority inbox is trying to keep me in Gmail longer.

I could understand feeding people rage-bait content as a method of false engagement but these are people you followed. Most liked/boosted/retweeted among the people you want updates from seems ideal.

edit:n/t

A better analogy would have been spam filters.

In addition to all the other reasons social networks are incentivized to feed you content that maximizes how long you spend on the site/app: I think some of this comes from a combination of social networks that mirrored real-world networks (and thus create social incentives to follow people you might otherwise not want to), social networks on which people post a firehose of content, and Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).

Some people use Facebook as a primary means of keeping in touch with family.

Some people's Facebook networks mirror their family-and-friends networks.

It's socially awkward to unfollow your relatives, even if you don't particularly want to see what they post, or can't deal with the volume they post.

But it's not socially awkward for Facebook to notice what you do and don't engage with, and try to show you more of what you engage with, regardless of who you follow.

If you treat following someone on X, or Fediverse, or Bluesky, as nothing more or less than a means of seeing what they post, then you can carefully and selectively choose who you follow, such that your chronological timeline is a manageable amount of content. You can choose, for instance, to not follow people who post a massive amount of content, or whose content you mostly don't want to see. You can make lists for people whose posts you might want to sample from time to time and not read all of. You can rely on other people you do follow to repost things that are interesting.

But if you're following so many people, or such high-volume people, that your chronological timeline is a firehose you can't possibly read all of, then an algorithmic timeline becomes more tempting.

I agree, but some people use social media to follow 1000s of other users. Some kind of “hot right now” or “high engagement since you last logged on” setting might be nice for them.

I think it's super interesting you believe the social companies care about what is 'nice for the user' as opposed to what is nice for the advertisers, audience/data brokers, and the investors.

The reason algorithmic ordering is so common is because that's what gives the most runway for advertising, behavior manipulation/tracking, and its downstream financial effects.

> reason algorithmic ordering is so common is because that's what gives the most runway for advertising

You’re both right. Algorithmic feeds boost engagement, both by surfacing the most-engaging content and removing the burden of trimming one’s follow list, and also aids in serving ads. (Both by making them easier to sneak in and in the same engine that surfaces engaging organic content being useful for serving engaging ads.)

An experience that is super shitty for the user isn't going to result in any users.

If you are trying to take users away from twitter, you're going to focus on some 'nice for the user' things (or, at least, 'nicer than twitter for the user').

Like most things in life, this isn't a binary choice (user or advertiser). They're going to try to optimize for both, striking a balance.

Yes. However, an experience that’s okay for the user but also super addictve will result in a lot of users.

Marketshare comes first, then revenue optimization comes later.

This is basically right, but if there's a takeaway from Twitter/X's decline it's that users will only tolerate so much and that platform inertia has its limits.

The pattern can be useful for multiple parties, for different reasons, some nefarious. Some users are definitely interested in higher "signal" content, especially when you follow enough accounts that consuming even a small fraction of the content isn't feasible.

It does default to chronological, though?

A problem is that your sources may have substantially different flowrates. One source can fill up the feed by posting a lot, which is a problem with RSS if you use it to subscribe to any high volume blog.

Aside from the usual "because everyone has different preferences and more people prefer it this way," a lot of what happens on social media is ephemeral, and to many people there is little value to go back and see things that happened a while ago versus something happening right now with higher engagement. It's the difference of seeing what happened versus wanting to be part of it.

But “chronological” feeds are typically newest-first, so “people don't want to go back to what happened a while ago” isn’t really an argument against them.

Well good news, there’s Mastodon for that and there’s increasing interoperability with threads and Bluesky via bridges.

What is meant by chronological here? Do you mean you follow some people and your Home page just arranges all the posts by those you've followed chronologically? Because that is what Mastodon does. And while I personally prefer it to be this way, this won't work for the user who just wants to see the type of posts they like, not necessarily the people they like. The recent exodus of American and Brazilian people from X is thus divided into those who chose Mastodon and those who chose Bluesky, with the latter having a much larger number. Make of what you will.

Best would still be RSS feeds and everyone having their own blog. Just saying.

I think blue sky has a default chronological following feed too? Twitter pushing for you instead of following is kinda notably distinct.

Twitter. Facebook, TikTok, all push a For You; Threads doesn't even have a pure following feed,...

I think Bluesky/Mastodon are the outliers here, not Twitter.

Because then your feed is flooded with news channels or posters that tweet every other minute.

showing you posts that maximize your use of the service is considered "growth hacking"

So that it's different when you open the app every 15 minutes.

This is, simultaneously, the reason why social networks want to use non-chronological timelines, and exactly the reason to use chronological timelines: so that it discourages perpetual usage.

On Fediverse, I can open the page, read the things that are new since the last time, and close it.

If you follow a decent number of active accounts, a chronological feed is different, too, especially if it is like Twitter/Bluesky (and unlike Facebook) where responses are the same kind of item as top-level posts.