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Comment by rrradical | Hacker News Reader

I actually thought about youtube as a contrasting example. Youtube has their recommendations on their homepage— that makes sense to me. I haven't chosen any content yet, so they want to help me.

But in this case on Twitter I've already chosen a specific profile to view, and now they're obscuring that with recommendations.

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But then where do you go once you're done viewing that one specific profile? You probably close the tab because you finished catching up on their tweets, and/or go to some other webpage that they linked to in one of their tweets.

The suggestions implore you to continue browsing on Twitter, instead of leaving Twitter altogether. The cynical take is that the purpose is to drive engagement and revenue, while the UX design take is that this helps users find more conversations that they're interested in, that they wouldn't otherwise find ("you follow Foo, people who follow Foo also follow Bar, so you might like Bar").

Well if it were designed as an earnest feature, it would go on the side right? I can't imagine any UX pro saying 'let's plop this right in the middle of their requested content'. So I see it as pretty cynical. Any time software says 'I know what the user wants more than they do' I tend to think that's a mistake. But I think the consequences of this sort of thing plays out over a long period of a time. Maybe past when some executive leaves for a new job.

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