Comment by mitchty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mitchty | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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