Some social media users and lawmakers say chronological feeds are healthier. A new study found that Facebook and Instagram users who were forced to see time-ranked posts turned to TikTok instead.

Meta conducted an experiment where thousands of users were shown chronological feeds on Facebook and Instagram for three months. Users of the chronological feeds engaged less with the platforms and were more likely to use competitors like YouTube and TikTok. This suggests that users prefer algorithmically ranked feeds that show them more relevant content, even though some argue chronological feeds provide more transparency. While the experiment found that chronological feeds exposed users to more political and untrustworthy content, it did not significantly impact their political views or behaviors. The researchers note that a permanent switch to chronological feeds could produce different results, but this study provides only a glimpse into the issue.


I think this is bullshit. I exclusively scroll Lemmy in new mode. I scroll I see a post I already have seen. Then I leave. That doesn’t mean I hate it, I’m just done!

EnglishMobster
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1Y

Yep! The Reddit version, at least. Dunno if the Lemmy/Kbin sorts are the same or not.

Before that, it was sorted by top. I think subreddits were top/day, and comments were top/all time. Frontpage was top/day for all the subreddits you were subscribed to (or top/day for a selection of “default” subreddits if you didn’t have an account).

Do you have a source for this? That’s interesting but I can’t find the origin of this story.

dudeami0
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21Y

Best I could find is here, which is an article by Randall Munroe (the xkcd artist), and states:

davean (the xkcd sysadmin) wrote the patch

This blog post links to another wayback machine page (thank you archive.org!) here, which explains the sorting algorithm and states it’s original author:

Fortunately, the math for this was worked out in 1927 by Edwin B. Wilson.

I would also like a source for this, thats really cool.

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