One of the things that's made it easy to find communities whose discussion I want to see is the linear feed. This is a stark contrast to new social apps I've tried, e.g., Clubhouse, where my feed is dominated by high engagement stuff I don't want.
I understand why companies push that stuff; looking at Twitter's experiments, you get more growth/$ when you switch users who've chosen linear timeline back to ranked timeline.
Fundamentally, this is why most apps don't even offer linear timeline.
At a meta level, something I find mildly interesting is how many people are writing stuff on Mastodon about how it's impossible for Mastodon to scale up without using an ad supported model (b/c server costs), it's better to have ranked feeds because most people want them, etc.
The thing I think is interesting is that the people writing this stuff, implicitly, seemingly cannot conceive of a model where the organization is not growth and profit maximizing.
@danluu If it is true that "most people want [something]", that's a legitimate feature request which cannot be disregarded on the ground that the model is "not growth"
I want ranked feed because topical recommendation on Twitter is in my experience a faster and more accurate way to find new accounts to follow, and the top tweets are a faster way to catch up with what happened in the recent 24 hrs. Importantly, they don't need much tinkering to work. Topic recommendation may depend on how niche a topic is, and I have noticed top tweets burying lower engagement stuff from accounts I follow, but I can change to linear when my mood and purpose change.
Sure, those properties are driven also by their usefulness for engagement, growth, and ads. But I don't run the site, I don't care about those, and I guess most users don't. Being engaging has benefits independent from ads. I wish more important stuff be more engaging as well, so more people are aware, such as your articles.
