Open Thinkering

3 ways to gain control of your Twitter feed

Posted on May 11, 2021May 11, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

Illustration showing someone looking at a screen with the light shining on their face

Aral’s post Hell site reminded me that, while I’ve talked about deactivating and reactivating my Twitter account several times, I haven’t mentioned ways in which I’ve found to battle the algorithmic timeline.

What is an algorithmic timeline? Let me try and explain.
What you think happens when you tweet: “I have 44,000 people following me. When I write something, 44,000 people will see it.”
What actually happens when you tweet: Your tweet might reach zero, fifteen, a few hundred, or a few thousand people.
Based on what?
Fuck knows.
(Or, more precisely, only Twitter, Inc., knows.)
So an algorithmic timeline is a black box that filters reality and decides who gets to see what and when based on an entirely arbitrary set of criteria determined by the corporate entity it belongs to.
Aral Balkan

Just to say in passing that it makes entire sense from the software-with-shareholders’ point of view to have an algorithmic timeline. It allows them more control over what people see, and ensures both that people with few followers still see plenty of stuff, and people with lots of followers don’t get overwhelmed.

It’s now almost seven years since I published Curate or Be Curated at the time when Twitter was about to introduce their algorithmic feed:

There has been a lot of discussion (and anger) over Twitter’s proposals to turn what is currently a “raw” feed into an algorithmically-curated feed. In other words, they’re taking Facebook’s approach of showing only updates in which they decide you’re likely to be interested. For advertising-funded services with shareholders, attention conservation is an important thing. If they want to mix in advertising to make it seem more “natural” and “organic” they have to ensure that you don’t miss it as you follow and friend more and more people. The same goes with email, which is one of the reasons Google segmented the inboxes of users of its Gmail service last year. They’ve recently started selling advertising space in the ‘Promotions’ tab. Twitter has promoted tweets. Facebook holds updates at the top of your stream longer if they mention keywords being paid for by their advertisers.
Doug Belshaw

Thankfully, at the time of writing, there are at least three things you can do about this. You can reject algorithmic feeds by doing one or more of the following things.

1. Turn on latest tweets

Thankfully, Twitter actually still allows you to switch from the default algorithmic timeline to show ‘latest tweets’. Of course, they’ll sneakily switch it back when you’re not looking, but at least the option is there.

Animated gif showing how to switch to latest tweets.

2. Use TweetDeck with lists

TweetDeck is an independent, third-party client that Twitter acquired. It’s a powerful view, although it can all get a little bit overwhelming when the ‘following’ column moves quickly, but you can solve this by using Twitter Lists. As you can see in the screenshot below, I have a list (that I really need to update) called ‘Core’.

3. Turn on notifications for individual accounts

While not a scaleable solution, if there are certain accounts from which you want to see every tweet, you can choose to be notified in your Notifications feed.

Example of how to turn on notifications per Twitter account

So there we are! It’s sad that we have to find ways to defeat the algorithms, but either we do the curating, or machines do it for us. And I know what I prefer…

Header image by visuals

Weeknote 18/2021

Posted on May 7, 2021May 8, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

Lines on the side of a building at Seahouses, probably something to do with sailing

I’m composing this on my trusty ThinkPad X220 sitting in the car while my daughter plays football. It’s just started pouring down with rain and it’s forecast to hail, as it did earlier this week. As a result, there’s fewer girls here for the session. Living as we do in the North East of England, avoiding sport when there’s inclement weather would basically mean avoiding sport for nine months of the year.

This week has been a shorter one, work-wise, with a Bank Holiday on Monday. There’s another one at the end of the month within half-term, and only a couple of weeks after England is scheduled to lift many coronavirus-related restrictions. Consequently, prices are through the roof to stay pretty much anywhere that’s self-contained. After all, it’s not like we can easily go abroad.

We deliberated about what to do and, in the end, decided to book three nights away just over the border into Scotland. It’ll be nice just to get away, do some walking in the hills, and spend some time within four walls which aren’t the same as those we’ve been staring at for over a year.

I finally got around to choosing and purchasing a new smartwatch: a Garmin Venu 2S. My rambling blog post coupled with a handy spreadsheet of what I can only describe as ‘functional specifications’ showed that it was the one to get. I haven’t been disappointed. As you can see from this detailed review, the number of options and bells/whistles is quite staggering. I’m still discovering features!

Coupled with a decent family Bank Holiday walk and returning to the gym, I’m starting to get back to the pre-pandemic levels of physical activity. The great thing is now that I can geek out on the data relating to what I’m doing! Happily, my ‘fitness age’ is 38.5 which is lower than my chronological age of about 40.3.

As with last week, I’ve been working on the Greenpeace project that cannot be named, wrapping up the Catalyst UC project, preparing for the next Participate ‘Keep Badges Weird’ session, and doing some business management and development. I finally got around to updating the co-op’s privacy policy as well as responding to a disclosure from a white hat security researcher about not having a DMARC record set for Dynamic Skillset (or WAO, for that matter).

One of the highlights this week, other than working with Laura, which is always a pleasure, was talking to the founders of Gradual. They tested out their new idea/platform at the (virtual) Mozilla Festival this year, as well as with a storytelling community. Essentially, the idea is to facilitate social and community learning through a ‘map-match-meet’ approach. Tom Salmon connected us, and I think it’s a promising idea that will probably take a bit of funding to reach true product-market fit, but they’re definitely onto something.

The sun is now shining through my windscreen, and I can see blue sky replacing the clouds that loomed previously. Next week, I’m solo parenting again, as my wife (who’s currently not very well herself) helping a relative who needs her assistance. So I’ll just keep on keepin’ on in this strange world in which we reside.

Image: lines on the side of a building at Seahouses, probably something to do with sailing, taken during our walk on Monday.

Weeknote 17/2021

Posted on May 1, 2021May 1, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

The Hand That Will Rule the World (Solidarity, June 30, 1917) — (I’m not sure I subscribe to the ‘One Big Union’ idea, but I’m definitely in favour of solidarity)

Today is International Workers’ Day, and the fifth birthday of We Are Open Co-op, the organisation I formed with Bryan, Laura, and John, with an increasing amount of assistance over the years from my wonderful wife, Hannah. We wrote about the rollercoaster ride it’s been in this blog post that we published today.

Most of my work these days is the through the co-op, which is a wonderful thing to be able to say. There was a time when we explicitly said it was something that “wasn’t going to pay our mortgage” and was something we did on the side. Now, for half of us at least, it does indeed pay the monthly bills!

This week, I’ve had meetings for the Catalyst-funded project, Sector Challenge 9: Claiming Universal Credit remotely. I wrote a blog post about the way we’ve been experimenting on combining two of the prototypes, and we met with both charity partners and the DWP. I also attended a learning/reflection session for digital partners, which was eye-opening.

Other than that, it’s been Greenpeace work on the project that may not be named, and kicking off some work with Participate. The latter are always a joy to collaborate with, and I’m looking forward to the project we’re setting up (our codename: “Keep Badges Weird”).

Other than that, I spent the rest of my time on business development and collaborating with other co-op members on getting our new website ready. My wife chided me for casually using the word ‘snazzy’ in an email earlier this week but, dammit, I’m going to use it for our website. If this doesn’t look snazzy, then I don’t know what does:

To be fair, 90% of the work has been Bryan’s and Laura’s, after some initial designs by Hannah. As ever, my role has mainly been poking holes, messing about with WordPress, and asking “why?” a lot. Play to your strengths, etc

I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time this week researching, thinking about, and messing about with, smartwatches. This is incredibly ironic, given that the whole reason for doing so, as I pointed out in an appropriately-titled blog post, is for me to spend less time looking at pointless stuff on screens. Sigh. You know it’s serious when I break out a spreadsheet and start getting into functional specifications…

On the other hand, I’ve discovered a new running route recently which, I have to say, is an utter delight. Running through nature, avoiding tree routes and ending up in the river keeps it interesting, and ensuring I listen to Got To Keep On by The Chemical Brothers at about three-quarters of the way through almost guarantees me a rush of endorphins. That beat drop after the repetition “And the rain / comes down / like tears” is incredible.

I’m going to the gym for the first time in over a year tomorrow. I remember going in before the first lockdown to tell them that I wanted to pause my membership “because I didn’t want to die”. They looked at me as if I was mad. This time when I went in, they were behind plexiglass screens. But hey, sessions have to be booked now, both my wife and I have had our first jab, and my muscle mass is almost embarrassing. I can’t wait to do some proper pull-ups.

Next week is, gloriously, a four-day week due to the May Bank Holiday. We’ve got some Greenpeace work to do, more Participate work, and potentially kicking off some stuff with a client. We’ll also be rounding off a lot of the Catalyst UC work, unless it gets extended.

Oh, I forgot to mention that last weekend I redesigned my personal website to be under 1KB in size. Yes, you read that correctly. It was a challenge related to 1024b.club, which can be filed under “a bit of fun on the internet”. However, I actually quite like the result and am seriously considering using it in production!