For the last time, please just make our timelines chronological

News feeds should be chronological, not just a hidden option

From my basic understanding of physics as well as everything I have ever seen in my life, I have always thought that time moved in one direction: forward. No matter what I do, time moves in a forward direction, and everything I experience in life happens in a single chronological order. If I wake up and then drink some coffee, there is no way for me to change the order to the coffee drinking occurring first.

So why can't social media realize this?

At one point in my life, companies such as MySpace and FaceBook understood that life occurs in a chronological order. Because of this, when I looked through my feed, I would see things shown in the order in which they were posted. However, in the endless push to make their platforms more appealing by showing what they think is most important, it seems that every social media platform has forgotten how time moves.

While looking through Instagram yesterday, I had to rethink how my brain worked in terms of how life occurs. The top photo of my feed was from 45 minutes ago, then the next from 5 hours ago, and then the third from 50 minutes ago. I mean...what? In what world does that even make sense?

Trust me, I understand that FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. are trying to get you to spend more time on their apps, and to do that, they need to tailor to each person's needs. However, the trick to do that is not to give people what you think they want to see in an order you think they want to see it; the trick is to better the experience. It does not require changing time, but modifying the interface and interactions.

While I love the idea that companies want to improve an experience, don't insult intelligence or confuse people. The secret is to make time well spent; it is not to try to figure out what that means for everyone. Just do the right thing FaceBook: give us information in the order it was created.