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Comment by cycrutchfield | Hacker News Reader

I guarantee Twitter’s data scientists are using more than just “amount the user is clicking” to decide whether a UI or ranking change is beneficial.

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it's hilarious that your main defense of twitter's design decisions is an appeal to twitter's own authority.

"twitter is doing these things for a reason and surely these reasons are good, otherwise they wouldn't be doing them!"

case closed my circular dude

It's hilarious that you think Twitter has not tested chronologically-ordered UIs.

You could apply this reasoning to literally anything, because every organisation / nation state / what have you has at some point and in some form considered the consequences of their actions. History shows that internal evaluation is an imperfect science. I suspect you know this and only reserve this extremely circular reasoning for cases which you already agree with. It would be easier to admit you've already formed an opinion and don't care to change it under any circumstance, rather than weakly appeal to Twitter's own authority to justify their actions.

It is not just an appeal to Twitter’s authority. It’s an informed opinion based off working in a similar field and conversing with others in this field. So unless you can come up with some concrete data supporting your points, instead of just attacking mine, you are unlikely to change my opinion.

I think something like this circular logic is actually useful, and in some sense true. It might better phrased as "companies which usually make bad financial decisions die, so the decisions of a company which hasn't died are probably financially beneficial." Further qualifiers could be added to account for longevity of a company (we might put more faith in a company which has spent longer not dying), earning reports, and the fact that a good decision isn't necessarily beneficial (just probabilistically so given available knowledge), but the basic reasoning seems valid.

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