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Comment by abcampbell | Hacker News Reader

Am not an expert, but think Twitter is struggling because the signal to noise ratio has deteriorated significantly.

Solving this isn't just a matter of some UX tweaks, it literally speaks to the heart of a very hard problem...how to you structure relatively unstructured information in a way that enables machines to help humans navigate it

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Exactly. I got on twitter to follow certain people. Most of the time its great but honestly what sucks is there is so much noise I just ignore everything.

And I'm a technical person willing to put up with a lot of BS. But I can't be arsed to prune my list because while say someone I follow posts GREAT things relating to libc internals, they also post things that are very much not what I care about.

I can't tell twitter to: don't show me stuff like this from this person, or better say show me more of stuff like this, hide the rest unless i ask to see it from this user.

That is a hard problem to solve. I don't envy twitter but honestly their "platform" hasn't moved for years. This whole mess is entirely of their own lack of doing.

I always thought the "Planet" sites did a decent job of aggregating posts by topic. planet.gnome.org, planet.kernel.org, planetkde.org etc.

THIS, the most important thing for me.

If I follow a guy who tweets about Databases, I don't need to know or read his thoughts about politics, his new born daughter, his outrage about X or Y or all that bullshit. I want to hear only about Databases, DB management and not the rest. I need to be able to follow @userX with #topicY exclusively.

You get that problem no matter what mode you follow them, unless its by way of paid for articles in the trade press. Be it blogs, Tiwtter, or some other unedited outlet, you are going to get that person raw and unfiltered.

With a blog, one would normally follow the RSS feed of a specific tag, not the entire blog.

That depends on how well tagged things are.

Exactly. Why can't the database guy add categories to his account (databases, politics, personal) and assign a category from his list each time he tweets? His followers could choose which categories to follow.

That would avoid alienating his followers, but still allow him to tweet on any topic he likes, knowing that only people who are interested in that topic would see those particular tweets.

This would be better for all parties.

Crazy thing is that Twitter have a way to deal with that noise right in their system, lists.

They first came to be via Tweetdeck, as a client side sorting of the timeline.

Then Twitter implemented official support for them in their API, and later bought Tweetdeck.

But since then the lists have largely withered on the wine.

To access them in the official client you have to jump thought a menu and list just to see a single one, when the power of lists in Tweetdeck was that you got them as columns you could see side by side.

Various third party clients have this, but most of them run into the hard cap Twitter have on free API access.

Frankly watching Twitter on Android tablets devolve into a wide phone UI, when i can fire up a third party app and have 3+ columns of topic sorted tweets is deeply worrying. This because it indicates something about where the focus of the company is.

> lists have largely withered on the wine.

Should be "vine". "wine" would make it, I don't know, some sort of malapropism (looking for the right word here), or grammatically incorrect pun? Entertaining, nonetheless :)

Update: Looked up malapropism, seems my use of it is correct:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism

or at least close (which would be another malapropism :)

yes yes yes. My brain do that more often than i like. Sometimes i end up typing whole different words than i formulated, simply because the finger movements are so similar (or i type the incorrect word more often).

You are not alone. Seen it happen here and there, including me too. One guess I have is that it is related to information overload that is prevalent these days.

I have around 40 small lists 5 to 30 members, and search based on hashtags that's the secret of not going mad scrolling Twitter feed.

I think one of the core aspects that attracts people to social media is feeling like they are in the loop. Twitter is very good at creating that feeling by encouraging its users to send lots of short messages containing real time information. But the problem is exactly this: There is way too much noise. The users receive all of these messages that make it seem like they are wired in, but in reality they are bombarded with lots of vacuous nonsense. It's similar to reading celebrity news: It may seem like you are getting important information, but in reality none of it actually matters.

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