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Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

You know, the author of this blog post echoes my thoughts almost verbatim. I am feeling like I am swept away in filthy, roiling, floodwater every time I switch to my Twitter tab. It has become exhausting, and a detriment to my actual work, so I am going to take a sabbatical.

Facebook to a lesser extent - that platform is still a useful means to communicate with family who are scattered wide.

By far, I am really enjoying Instagram at the moment - it is SO much more peaceful and non-confrontational. I only have a tiny couple of hundred followers, and am following about the same number of friends, musicians, guitar makers, tea manufacturers and such. It is just nice to sit back and scroll through my feed and see uplifting images with NO arguments or one upmanship or sniping going on...

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> I am feeling like I am swept away in filthy, roiling, floodwater every time I switch to my Twitter tab.

Surely the answer there is "follow better people"?

Generally, I do, including other developers and business people etc. But of late, the tensions and general angst at the US political situation etc. has meant that normally calm, rational people have been getting frayed around the edges and retweeting or getting involved in online arguments, so my feed is corrupted by that.

I am no innocent, as I have contributed a bit myself of late - it is hard to suppress that welling of indignation, anger and frustration sometimes.

My Twitter feed is very carefully curated, but the signal-to-noise ratio has plummeted over the past few weeks. Between Trump and Brexit, it seems like everyone's buttons have been firmly pushed.

The signal-to-noise on my feed has been on a downward spiral since before the election, it's honestly just gotten progressively worse, with no sign of improvement on the horizon.

Same here. I quitted newspapers, tv, and fb. But twitter (like HN) is a good source of tech news for me. Current situation has corrupted my feed too.

Is there any nlp tool to filter out tweets by topic?

I think maybe twitter is bias toward promoting tensions, because people love to have the emotional outlet to complain and be heard. It's just instinct. Spouses often go home and vent to each other about their drama/stress. Using your audience on twitter is no different. Just a basic need to be heard and validated. The top posts on reddit's "ask reddit" forum are usually "what do you hate about ___".

Perhaps instagram is immune to that because it's harder to articulate the "I'm angry" emotion with a camera ?

I'm in the same boat. The signal to noise ratio is way off too. I quit FB and Twitter 2 weeks ago. Been sleeping better, more productive, less aggravated. I have been enjoying instagram as my sole social media outlet.

I was in the same boat, and I understand the frustrations. But then I used third party plugins which can filter out the fluff from twitter & facebook.

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