Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonathansizz | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Twitter never implemented some sort of categorization feature. There are many individuals that I'd follow if I could just get a subset of their tweets in my feed.

For example, I might want to follow scientists' tweets on science, but not their political or favourite sport team tweets. Right now it's either all or nothing, but why can't people categorize their tweets so only people interested in them see them? This would be better for both parties.

View on HN

This is why I can't bear to open the Twitter app. I signed up, and followed a few of the emergency agencies in SF, hoping to catch tweets about fires, accidents, etc. But these numbskulls keep blabbing away about awards, charity events, dinners, promotions, etc. etc. that it's basically useless. So I uninstalled the app a few days later.

This is why I left Twitter after whole 3 days AFAIR. I followed several tech people, and the amount of content produced was just too much, particularly since 2/3 of it was random noise.

I'm missing out on some interesting discussions for sure, but I'd have to be on Twitter half a day each day to scroll through all this stuff.

Same goes for Facebook. They surely have the ability to discern political posts from non-political ones, but the only control over what appears on our news feeds is follow/unfollow.

Facebook feed does that for you.

Yes. You must have faith in the algorithm. Do not question its results.

"Hide all from ..." is the single best Facebook feature. I use it a lot, I think I have most political sites hidden now.

This is possible (in reverse) with lists. I don't follow anyone on Twitter, but I have a dozen or so lists for friends, news, etc.

I think that's one of those ideas that sounds nice, but is just too complex for most tweet authors to use reliably.

Allow users to tag a set of hashtags as a category. Make hashtags user-taggable and suddenly sorting and categorizing is easy.

Undoubtedly this just sounds like a good idea to the "few orthogonal abstractions" hacker brain, but with the right UI it could work.

You would still need people to use these hashtags reliably. I don't think I would do it, and I suspect few people would.

Hah, we are doing this as a final project in a data science course I'm enrolled at. Not sure if we'll reach this goal, since there are a lot of interesting pieces before and time for it is really short.

I think twitter has made it a point to paint themselves into the corner:-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com