Samuel
@samuel.fm
old following feed sucked, it needed to be done. it’s cool that people who miss the weird way it worked still have the option to keep using the same feed
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Bossett
idk that 'sucked' is fair - I wonder about the feel of the app after the change, like is discovery/engagement better/worse/indifferent but I do know that Elon picked a fight with Brazil specifically to make any experiment impossible to run
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Samuel
nah I maintain it sucked, I never enjoyed that method of using the app at all. anyway you’re kinda right wrt experimental conditions lol 😬
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str4d
I realised last night that part of the issue is the conflation of "Following" being "a feed of your follows", vs "Following" being the "homepage" view that everyone from other networks expects to be _the_ feed (being unused to algorithmic choice). I think that creates tension and UX confusion.
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Gio
Can you bring the old For You feed instead? I feel like I was seeing more posts that I cared about vs Discover.
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str4d
Within the "feed of your follows" view there's separately deciding what it displays between two possible extremes: 1️⃣ Only posts from people you are following. 2️⃣ Every post from people you are following (with needed context). Old Following was closer to (but not) 2️⃣; new is closer to (but not) 1️⃣.
str4d@str4d.xyz· 30 Aug 2024
Both positive and negative interactions occured through the same mechanism: using "observed interactions of Follows" for graph traversal. I wonder if negative graph traversal happened on much shorter timescales than positive traversal? Feeds can't (easily?) differentiate on rate of observation.
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Bossett
this doesn't hit the mark for me - I think 'Following' has a pretty natural feel as 'these are the people I want in control of content I see' One of the things bsky did differently is express that broadly, and it contributed a lot to site feel. The change makes it feel more like other networks.
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str4d
That feel is completely consistent with my post. The feed has two inputs (user's declared Follows, and the posts by those Follows), and returns a view of those posts somewhere between 1️⃣ and 2️⃣. The position between 1️⃣ and 2️⃣ changes how much the user's input vs their Follows input affects the view.
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str4d
Or rather (char limit) how much the user's Follows' input affects the view on top of the user's input (which is a baseline). I think the change feels bad to some users b/c they were unconsciously following a much larger crowd than they had clicked Follow on. Their user input was split across both.
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Bossett
I think one of the problems with the change is community bounds become 'tighter' - you used to have 'people you follow' and 'people you don't follow that regularly show up' - and that second group were brought to you 'naturally'. I wouldn't call that relationship 'following', but it is 'community'.
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austin
I do kinda wonder if the problem is actually from the opposite direction; before, people who didn’t follow you would see your posts in their feeds because you both had a mutual. This change means that it’s less likely that you each see each others posts?
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1 more reply
str4d
That's a great way to phrase it. Slightly different spin on the "graph traversal for discovery" view from the thread I linked earlier, de-emphasising "discovery" (you already know these people). And this gets back to the tension I mentioned up-thread about what the Following feed actually is.
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Meny
Yeah, I feel like following a few people who are remotely active just clogged the following feed with replies before. I switched to the onlyposts feed a while back because of that
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Samuel
yeah I feel like there’s a great opportunity to make a really great following++ feed that puts hyperactive posters on slow-mode so they don’t clog your feed, and stuff like that. and reduces reposts
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Kuba Suder 🇵🇱🇺🇦
But people use this app in very different ways, and some people enjoyed using it this way, and previously Bluesky was all about giving people options and control over how they want their experience to look like
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stellz
it was way better actually the new one is a ghost town. but like you said that's fine
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