Has anyone here done a poll recently on how many people scroll up their timelines vs. down? i.e. how many start from oldest first, and vice-versa? I'm a top down guy myself, apparently.
@briankrebs Never understood the newest-first/reverse-chronological fetish. I come from Usenet and BBSs, where failing to read previous traffic was a grave sin punishable by scorn…
But seriously, I caught a completist bug with social media >30ya and haven’t been able to shake it. There only way to feel like I’’e skimmed through “everything” is to save my place and work forward.
@briankrebs bottom up. I want to start where I left off and see things in order. The trick is to find a client that doesn't lose your place. Would love to use Wooly, but it is iOS only. Tusky works well on Android.
@briankrebs Bottom up! I follow only a limited number of accounts and I don't miss any, so I go bottom up front the last read too to ensure I got them all!
@briankrebs depends on the platform. If I'm very deliberate about curating the list of who I follow (like here) then from where I was up to the current (so chronological by time of posting). Otherwise from most recent until I've had my fix.
@briankrebs bottom up. The timeline state & syncing feature was the primary one that drove me to using a 3rd party twitter app originally, and I wouldn’t consider a mastodon app without it now.
@briankrebs Bottom up for notifications, top down for timelines in Tusky.
Bottom up in the timeline means the "Load More" button pushes the last toot you read down, so you either have to scroll down to resume bottom up reading or scroll back up after reading the newly displayed toots.
I would kill for a Mastodon client that works like an email client, so I can clearly see what I've read and where I am in a thread, and also resume exactly where I left off.
@briankrebs I've said for a long time that it's incumbent on any social media platform to present content in two ways, selectable by the user, and obeyed by the platform:
Top down - newest unread, to oldest unread, to newest read, to oldest read, for those people who feel it makes sense to read the most recent thing first (not my thing, but obviously some people like it)
Middle out - Oldest unread scrolling up to most recent unread, or down through newest read to oldest read. For people who like to read in continuity, following the discussions as they happen, reading jokes and stories without skipping to the punchline or the denouement right from the beginning.
And, if you absolutely must:
"The algorithm" - shove what the social media wants me to see right now immediately in front of my face, and make me go searching for things that I might want to read.
I feel like items 1 and 2 are "table stakes", and they go with corollary requirements that whenever the feed takes you sideways (e.g. to read comments in a thread), when you come back, you should come back to where you left off, not "the top".
I do both depending upon how busy it is. Usually oldest first, but if that is too deep, then I tend to jump to newest and work down. I miss posts every day this way, but there is only so much time to read.
@briankrebs If there were an easy way to go directly to your last read and go forward from there, I'd do oldest-to-newest. But that's not an option on the web app, and e.g. mobile apps that supposedly offer that feature in my experience have been very flaky. So I'm reluctantly newest-to-oldest most of the time.
@briankrebs oh wow. Until now it never occurred to me to scroll bottom up to read a timeline in time order.
I've always mindlessly refreshed then top down.
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