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Comment by atmosx | Hacker News Reader

My problem with twitter is that it feels like a desert land more and more. I get more and more bot 'followers' and more ads in my timeline. The signal / noise ratio has decreased incredibly and continuous decreasing, unfortunately.

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Another thing on the "desert island" effect is that, from the perspective of a artistist or creator, it seems oddly difficult to get discovered on Twitter. Maybe it's something about the interface or recommendation system?

Twitter itself does not encourage creators who want to share content that much. I don't know if this is a problem with media integration (as mentioned in the article) or with the types of people who use Twitter, but as a creator of anything artistic it's not that nice of a platform. I've found tumblr to be much better, both in terms of community (lots of artists, game developers, musicians, etc hang out there) and in how the system itself works. People are much more liberal with notes and reblogs, which means it's easier to gain a following and it's also easier to get some data on how much something you created resonates with people.

I have a very high signal/noise ratio but that's because I did the work to follow interesting people. But its also true that the noise is encroaching and we as users have to do work to find more signal.

So one of the core problems of twitter is that you are required to do that; it's work. That's fixable.

Certainly the front page for a new visitor should be rich with content.

You can improve the signal/noise ratio by using lists to follow groups of people with common interests. This is even more work, but in some cases, you can follow other people's lists instead.

You can get an even better signal/noise ratio by using Nuzzel, which extracts the most popular stories. Again, you can use it to read other people's lists.

http://nuzzel.com/

The signal/noise ratio bothers me too... exacerbated by promoted tweets, unconvincingly implemented 'while you were away' boxes, and similar, diluting the signal even further.

I'm still stupidly holding out hope that one day Twitter will offer to take money to get rid of that stuff.

It is incredibly easy to set up a bot in twitter. (Slightly hard since the API v1.1, but still easy.) If an account is attached to a bot, there should be a small icon in all it's tweet to indicate that.

How would you enforce that? Genuine question. Is there a reliable-enough-to-be-useful way to distinguish between types of API client?

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