Toot

Written by Dan Fixes Coin-Ops on 2025-01-22 at 16:00

You scroll through today's posts and get to the Pam Chunk

The Pam Chunk is your phone's way of dealing with the Pam Problem; some folk post more than others. Jim only posts a couple times a week, and Pam posts twenty bloody times a day. So unless you follow a lot of folk who post about the same amount, your phone becomes The Pam Show.

The default behaviour of every app (that anybody actually uses) is of course "Show your friends' posts in the order in which they're made, no exceptions, no messing around," but the majority of apps also have some kind of Pam Compensation Mechanism.

The most common of these is to only retrieve the six most recent posts from any given friend's phone in any given day; hence, the Pam Chunk that jumps out at you around noon. Most days Pam remembers that anything beyond her sixth post today means that folk probably won't see her "Good morning," but some days you get Pam Chunk. Sometimes she posts "Please put your fetch limit up!" but most people don't know how to do that. It's in the settings somewhere, but nobody looks at settings.

The second Pam Compensation Mechanism is the more civilized option, but it totally messes up your timeline. It's called Take Turns, it goes and gets everybody's most recent post and shows them in order. Then it goes and gets everyone's second-most-recent post, and shows those in order. Then everybody's third-most-recent post, and so on. Everybody takes turns to speak, kinda thing.

It means that if you scroll far down enough you'll see a Jim post from last month on top of a Pam post from an hour ago. The further back you scroll, the more messed up the times get, but it means you see Everything that your friends posted. So yeah, it's an "Algorithm" you guess, but at least you know how it works and it's not hiding anything you want to see, so it can stay, so long as it behaves. You've got your eye on it.

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