Hacker News Reader

Comment by intoverflow2 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone still actually having a good time on this service?

Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers.

I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" checkbox in settings and an algorithm to filter it all out. I'd rather get my news and politics from elsewhere.

Twitter isn't even good for news because most of the time you enter half way into the conversation and have to dig to figure out what people are upset or gloating over today. Filtered words was a good first step but a lot of politics talk doesn't actually mention the words exactly.

Edit - Mass replying to the careful follow question: I already choose who to follow carefully (Current count is 1000) and unfollow if it's really tiresome. No one I follow is a pure internet personality or journo, they're all people who actually do things outside of comment online.

To me it's a case of I want to read my followers at their best (Posting interesting and creative work), but can't handle them at their worst (Political hot takes).

View on HN

I'm @mxschumacher on the platform and it took me three years to "get Twitter", but now I love it.

Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I would not want to miss.

Selection criteria I use: - don't pay too much attention to profile, better to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science people who talk about their kids, sports and politics all day - sane tweet frequency: If they've tweeted 20k times, there's a good chance it is just noise/spam - select people who follow few people, anything above 2k is suspicious ("I'll follow you so you follow me")

Here's the list of people I follow - the further down you go, the longer they have survived my aggressive filtering process (another design flaw: it takes minutes of scrolling to get to the good stuff):

https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following

Do you use lists?

I would love to, e.g. "software engineers", "authors", "investors" etc, but imo the feature is completely unusable as there is no batch editing. Definitely has a lot of potential, especially when combined with filters: "Give me Silicon Valley people minus politics and hyperlocal info"

I get that. Twitter has a lot of usability imperfections. Lists is one, but I still use them. Anywhere from 0 - 200 people, depending on how much they post, is about the maximum I can handle in any one stream. So I segregate into lists. I see you have about 400 people you follow, which would overwhelm me if they were all in my main feed.

Most of those people are have a low tweet frequency though.(it would be great if Twitter provided better statistical insight into these matters)

if people start spamming or their signal/noise ratio goes down I unfollow them quite quickly.

>it would be great if Twitter provided better statistical insight into these matters

Yeah, that's my greatest wish too - something like average tweets per hour/peak tweets per hour/average tweets per day/peak tweets per day stats.

I didn't know about lists(not a hardcore Twitter user) until this thread then I went to check it out.

First thought was, great feature, but I had the same issue with batch editing, then I tried using lists through Tweetdeck and it is much easier to create lists, remove & add profiles to each list, Twitter might actually become useful for me with this.

Nice list! Thanks for the gift to the community, Max. I bet this took a lot of work to curate.

I'm following you. Better yet, I'm following who you follow.

Twitter should fix lists, and make them collaborative.

It did take a lot of time, because there's hardly any automation. I largely built it from piggy backing: the following lists of the intellectual Twitter elite: e.g. @balajis @naval @cdixon @juliagalef are fertile hunting grounds!

That is an absolutely fabulous list! I took the time to follow each one manually. I was surprised to recognize at least 25% of the names from off Twitter.

Fav from that list is FermatsLibrary, always love their visualizations.

glad you like it :)

I think more people would like Twitter if they didn't have to spend 30h+ curating content until it becomes valuable

Annoyingly, Twitter doesn't let you view that list without logging in. It's possible to browse tweets by individuals without logging in, or even many individuals given a collection of names, but viewing the list? Not in my garden, pal.

Great list, really heavy overlap with mine although mine is even smaller (https://twitter.com/udayrsingh/following). I try to do the same thing, I aggressively unfollow people and try to keep the number around the Dunbar number.

I just started using Twitter about a month ago after having an account since 2009 and I'm really enjoying it (despite seeing a number of tweets about Twitter being broken). I've almost entirely stopped using Facebook (outside of events/messaging) and strictly used Twitter. It's a fun place to share programming thoughts and discuss things with people.

For the most part I've been able to share links and chime into discussions with people whom's work I'm interested in and keep the discussion around economics, mathematics, statistics, and computer science. I follow roughly the same rule as you - I look at the tweet frequency and then dig into actual tweets. I've actually made a couple friends in the Elixir community through Twitter which is actually fun.

The last thing I would recommend is to use lists. @patrickc's reading list is probably one of the best things I follow, as well as @pmarca's press list. You can actually check out the lists I follow as well.

https://twitter.com/udayrsingh/lists

I think for the most part, like you Max, if you try to keep it small - it works great.

Dropping Facebook usage is a big gain to my mental well-being, a Chrome extension that has worked wonders for me is "Kill Newsfeed". https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-news-feed/hjo... I've uninstalled the Newsfeed app from my phone.

My usage is similar but I follow about twice the number of people. To keep things manageable i.e. consume twitter in about 30 minutes/day, I wrote a small chrome extension to rearrange my feed (sort by likes/retweets, give different weights to users and sort the feed/list).

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackybird/ddlhmpom...

Best knowledge-exchange platform for tech-people I've seen so far. With some careful selection of who to follow it even has an ok signal-to-noise ratio. Every single feature Twitter has implemented in the past few years made it worse for this type of audience though.

what types of features do you think would make it more useful for this use case?

Better threading for sure. The current interface is pretty good, but it makes it hard to keep track of multiple back-and-forths and oftentimes drops tweets from threads.

Indeed, navigating any discussion on Twitter feels like a complete mess. Imho some quirks it has in a browser are really annoying, like closing the conversation you are looking at when you click somewhere outside of it.

Happened to me plenty of times that I misclicked and closed a discussion which I had been very deep in, so I had to open it again and scroll&click my way back to where it originally closed, way too much wasted time over a simple wrong click.

- going back to a 'reproducible timeline', I want to see each tweet by each person I'm following, in the right order

- I don't want to see tweets by persons I'm not following, unless they are retweeded or part of a thread

- navigating the time line is a mess, sometimes the timeline scrolls to the top, and it's generally very hard to continue where you left

- better thread visualization

- clear distinction between tweets I've already seen vs 'unread tweets'

- some sort of bookmarking or 'read later' for tweets

- let me add tags to tweets and persons (I mainly want to add company or topic tags to people, for instance 'this is the WebGL guy at Apple')

[edit: formatting]

Agreed with this. There are too many individual sites to keep up with things, twitter makes that easier.

how is it the best knowledge exchange platform when most statements or arguments quickly end with "twitter isn't the best place for this convo"

IMO it's a chicken and the egg thing, they probably got some quality early users(similar to what Quora did) and those brought in more quality content users, soon enough more people were getting in just because that's where the knowledge exchange for tech people is, even if it's not the best tool for the job itself.

For me it's basically an RSS feed with comments. Very valuable for learning about and keeping up to date with narrow industry news/trends.

Also a good way to connect with people professionally, but less formally than LinkedIn.

The major downside is that is that a tight group or individual can get put on blast to the whole of twitter, and then just get ignorant vitriol thrown at them and that kind of ruins the whole experience. Happened to me not long ago. Not that big of a deal in the end. Just take a week off and come back and the hive will have found something else to attack. The Twitter universe has a pretty short attention span - even if it has a long memory.

You just need to be brutal about pruning. Someone retweets politics twice in a row? Mute retweets from them. Someone posts more politics than things you want to read? Unfollow.

My timeline is maybe 5% US politics. That's still 5% too much, but no more than in any other media. That's 117 people followed, and is about the maximum message volume I want to deal with in any case.

I haven't been able to use Twitter since the election.

I was using it daily up until then. It seems like people have stopped treating politics as something you only talk about with restraint. And I mean smart urban people, not your crazy hippie Aunt on Facebook.

People have been sold the idea that they need to be "doing something" by complaining about everything into an echo chamber of people who agree with them. And everyone thinks they are a mini-Jon Stewart in the process. It just stopped being fun because I don't want to spend hours filtering through this hoise building up a new list of 100 people I like to follow...again.

I left Facebook under similar circumstances. Basically when all of it became baby photos and FW:FW:FW: email list quality news articles, instead of my friends having fun.

I think the big problem is users trying to shoehorn increasingly long-form conversations and complex ideas into a platform designed for explicitly short top-of-mind contextless posts and link aggregation. That's why they named the service after the sound a bird makes.

I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be void of quality.)

There are excellent conversations carried out by Twitter. They can also act as comments to the linked content. Sometimes you get more from a 20 word comment than from a full article.

That's true, but I feel Twitter isn't really structured to handle the flow of conversations well. I've seen good conversations on Youtube, as well, but like Twitter that seems to happen in spite of the restrictions of the platform, not because of it.

Also, the quality of Twitter comments doesn't seem to translate to HN, so much as the quality of the posts. Which, when those posts are emotive and lack sufficient context, tends to lead to poor threads here. And most of the rest of what's posted from Twitter seems to be HR and press releases, which are kind of uninteresting.

I hear this complaint often and still don't understand it. Twitter has had threaded conversations for a while now and they flow just as easily as HN comments.

Counterpoint: I can easily understand the treading on HN. Whenever I see a threaded conversation on twitter, I cannot tell what is a response to what. I'm not sure if threaded is even the right word, but you used it first.

For instance: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/49800848655150694...

There are a ton of replies to things, but I can't tell where anything fits logically.

Basically you're looking at a flattened tree. Anytime you see the lines, those are part of the same conversation sequentially. Once the lines stop, that's a new conversation.

http://i.imgur.com/02mm3YW.png

And an ASCII version:

    Tweet
    -----
    1.0 Reply to tweet
    |
    1.1 Reply to 1.0
    |
    1.2 Reply to 1.1
    ----
    2.0 Reply to tweet
    |
    2.1 Reply to 2.0
    |
    2.2 Reply to 2.1
    ---
    3.0 Reply to tweet

So where does a reply to 1.1 go?

Right where 1.2 is. If you wanted to see the direct responses to that, you'd click on that tweet, and then be looking at a new subthread. It's all predicated on whose message the reply-er clicked the reply button on.

    First Tweet
      Reply 1
      Reply 2 <-- click


    Reply 1
      Reply 1.1
      Reply 1.2

You only see the first two levels of the main tweet you're looking at. The first tweet, its replies, and the immediate children of those replies. Some indenting would make this a lot more intuitive.

That is basically my complaint then. I have 1920 horizontal pixels available, but for some reason twitter is intent on only using a small fraction of that.

For an outsider Twitter looks like a UI hell. I can't figure it out in any 5 minute long attempt when I happen to open a twit. And I don't see a real incentive to spend more time digging through that messy UI, when there is a FB, RSS aggregators, HN, etc. Tons of distraction feeds in use already and forums too. Frankly it is a mystery for me how Twitter is still popular.

> I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be void of quality.)

Much like how 140 characters usually isn't enough to capture ideas properly, I think there are a lot of exceptions to this that you haven't considered:

- discussion topics, a la #DevDiscuss

- real-time news, e.g. when AWS goes down

- off-hand thoughts/responses, e.g. when @antirez asks for Redis dev ideas

- announcements that don't get press releases, e.g. when Chris Lattner left Tesla

Fair enough. I feel like we don't need a new thread whenever AWS, Github or whatever goes down, though.

I think you have to pick who you follow better to get at the good content on Twitter. Whether it's Weird Twitter or just following a bunch of artists (SFW or even NSFW) there's plenty of content out there on Twitter.

I think the problem Twitter has is two fold. It wants people to come and stay on Twitter but it also wants those same people not fight with each other. The solution the developers picked was shadow banning. This banning where the user isn't aware that their tweets aren't visible to others who don't follow you and those who do follow you won't be notified of your tweets either (they only see them on their time line). The most common way this happens right now is someone uses of well known curse words. Right now, I'm shadow banned for whatever reason despite not tweeting at verified accounts often enough to run afoul their automated system. So this is the climate that new users experience where Twitter promises to help them engage with other users (especially verified users of notably celebrities and the like) but if you do anything vaguely hostile in their view then you lose the freedom to interact with anyone even those who follow you mutually. All I can say is that's probably a major contributing factor in the decline of Twitter at present. They just refuse to hire moderators to do proper moderation and to make the rules for banning or shadow banning clear and objective. Basically, it's what happens when you let technophiles try to solve a non-technological problem.

Yes, #mtbos - The Math Twitter Blogosphere

Tremendous community of math educators from pre-k through professors. Education has horrible silos, especially up and down the stack. Twitter gave this community an opportunity to break those silos down and connect across vast geographies. The community is doing so well it's even hosting it's second annual IRL conference this week: Twitter Math Camp #tmc17

While the #mtbos connects through Twitter, it seems a world away from the use case you described, which does not seem like a good time.

You should start muting people who talk politics and Twitter also allows you to block tweets containing keywords/phrases[0]. Honestly, I've started to enjoy Twitter so much more now that my feed is void of politics and sexism/sjw arguments.

[0]: https://twitter.com/ajlkn/status/878717797588762624

Why are you blocking "react?"

That's not me. But likely because he doesn't enjoy the constant "do you use React?" and "why not React?", since I believe Pieter doesn't use frameworks. Honestly, sometimes the questions on his tweets are annoying so I bet he gets fed up with the constant questions from people who want to emulate him thinking it will make them successful.

Follow people that only tweet about stuff that interests you. Don't hesitate to unfollow or mute people. You can tweak your follows and end up with a pretty low signal to noise ratio.

I have no problem controlling noise but Twitter seems incapable of delivering the signal. It seems impossible to have it show all the content from people I follow; instead it delivers some seemingly random subset.

As I was digging I found that Twitter started an algorithmic feed a while ago, and they optimize some metrics for interaction in order to show you the posts which are more relevant to you. IMHO, any form of feed filtering is prone to do unwanted things unless it can be explicitly controlled (Google+ was a good example of giving users control over their feed, but it didn't take off). The metrics optimized to decide which post to show or not show can never be completely correlated with user interest, that is one of the dangers of optimization.

Luckily for you, the people at Twitter have added a way to opt-out of the algorithmic timeline. Go in your options and uncheck the "Show best tweets first".

I did that when that particular change was announced; it still doesn't show everything and still often differs between loads. There should be a simple per-account selection of tweets, retweets, replies, and likes.

I'm @codemonkeyism on Twitter https://twitter.com/codemonkeyism

and still love it.

I think it's key to always prune and trim the people you are following and keep the number low and relevant. If someone tweets several times about things I'm not interested in, I unfollow.

I unfollowed some high profile tech people because of their stream being full of politics.

"(Current count is 1000)"

This seems much too high, I follow 500 and this already looks too high for me (some trimming needed).

I use it professionally in the U.K. education sector and don’t see any U.S. commentary at all. Chose who and what you follow.

Curious, what part of education? I've found a few UK people I enjoy following (once I learned the UK education lingo).

It's awful

Twitter used to feel like a good party, with a great range of people with stories and opinions and hopes to talk about. That's definitely over now.

I'm really enjoying mastodon.social though, it feels like how the internet used to

Twitter now has the ability to hide tweets containing certain words. All you need to do is add a few major politicos and buzzwords and you'll see a lot less noise :)

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032

I still think it's a great platform and does what it does extremely well.

Interesting point about Politics though, I've been using it as my #1 source of that for now. But if you don't follow people that share such content do you still see it?

I've followed people because they're influential in tech and discovered they're Antifa members that openly advocate for political violence towards anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders.

wow! seriously? so in a way you learned things about them that are probably relevant to following them :)

> Anyone still actually having a good time on this service?

Not good time but there are some communities and social graphs active there that you cannot avoid if you work in specific fields. For example, computer security.

I have a simpler tactic I don't follow anyone I search for hashtags, so my experience is not person driven is subject driven. I also have a couple of lists that I sometines look at tweets.

If Twitter's looking for a business model, I'll be the first to raise my hand to pay for filtering out tweets that have certain names in them.

>I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader.

RSS still exists even though Reader doesn't. I use Feedly although I admit that I don't carefully curate a large number of feeds any longer because, outside of a relative handful of people/sites I want to follow, I figure news will find me through Twitter and other sources.

Basic word filtering was added recently https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords

I'm hoping one day there is something smarter.

I know RSS still exists but it feels like Google Readers death killed a lot of the blogs I followed off too. The new posts just got less and less and eventually stopped.

Didn't know about the mute words feature. Thanks! Apparently I'm not the only one who had that thought.

I'm not sure Reader and the death of various blogs is necessarily cause and effect. My impression is that, to some degree, personal blog content has just shifted to Medium, podcasts, Facebook, etc.--or just gone away after it became less of a "thing" to do.

I have this habit of checking Twitter in the morning. Lately it's become a kind of Russian Roulette: is my timeline going to be 90% people screaming about whatever horrible thing Trump did today? Sometimes I join in that screaming, too.

I keep on trying to shift over to Mastodon. It's not quite at critical mass of enough of my friends being there, but it's slowly growing.

Mastodon has a system of 'content warnings'; a user can mark their toots to be hidden, and give any arbitrary reason. 'Politics' is very much considered to be one of the reasons you should put a content warning on a toot, along with other reasons like 'NSFW', 'moping', 'spoilers for the latest episode of Gamey Throney', or 'raw unadulterated shoe-lust'.

It's also got a 500 character limit, a distributed architecture, a tendency for people running servers to crack down on jerkwaddery, and is pretty much supported entirely by Patreon right now rather than pouring venture capital down a hole while trying to chase advertising dollars.

I think you're probably following too many people. 1k is workable but it requires a lot of investment to make sure you're consistently only following quality posters. Also, as you suggest, even many high-quality posters also tend to sometimes churn out bursts of low-quality content. With 1k accounts subscribed to, that's a lot of opportunity for low-quality bursts.

It seems like a lot of people are trying to solve your problem, but I'll just answer the direct question as a data point. Yes, I am still having a good time on Twitter, and I have been since shortly after it launched. It has definitely changed in many ways, good and bad, but overall I still use it a lot and enjoy it. That doesn't mean you have to :)

I have to agree with you, but I don't think I've ever had a "good time" on twitter. It's not optimized for conversation, and it doesn't even optimize for thoughtful condensation of ideas; it just optimizes for the quickest brain diarrhea you can squeeze out in 140 characters). Sure, I get its use as a broadcast platform, but it's not even flattening the world all that much in that regard. The lions share of attention still goes to those who probably need that kind of reach the least (granted, what social sphere is there where that's not really the case?)

Maybe it's just my innate crotchety-ness, but I feel like a lot of people think about Twitter like owning a boat: fun in theory but a big PITA that probably won't be missed except once or twice a year.

Of course, this is all imbued with my own personal gripes and prejudices with social media, so take it as a commiserating vent :)

It's really good for sub-communities.

Following the NBA on twitter is actually an awesome experience.

I wish they would stop comparing twitter to other social media networks + focus on what is good about it (live, sports, entertainment) and double down on that & figure out how to make money by offering more services in that space.

On any platform which allows curating feeds: Block fuckwits.

If someone isn't doing it for you, unfollow.

1,000 is almost certainly too many.

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm...

I think I just realized how everyone who uses twitter regularly actually uses it[1]. I had no idea this existed (maybe others did...) but it's honestly 1000 times better than the official website and you get the old timeline back and following conversations is much easier, stays on one page.

[1] tweetdeck.twitter.com

I do feel like I get value from politics Twitter, but sometimes I'm just not in the mood, and really wish I could filter it down to scicomm twitter easily.

Politics is kind of ruining it. As is the fallout from politics - harassment. You can never be sure whether saying something and getting visibility is going to result in being quote-retweeted by a hostile party sending their followers to have a go at you. Some of whom seem to be bots, or multi-purpose Trump/Brexit promotion accounts.

Donald trump seems to be having the best time on Twitter. If he stops using the service the stock will plummet 10-20%

Add 'Trump' to your blocked words. That removes most political bullshit. Then take every account that can't handle responsible retweeting and remove retweets from that account (which is now possible while still following the account).

I did this and twitter is now useful again. I

I moved to https://feedbin.com/ after Google killed Reader and stopped supporting me as a customer. Feedbin supported the use case I had which was nicely aggregating my RSS feeds. YMMV.

Twitter is great as a site I exclusively use by following links. I check tweets when a source I like points me to one, or I need to check outage notifications for work.

Twitter is great for that, but it's of course the way Twitter desperately doesn't want to be used.

I do enjoy twitter, but I sort the people I follow into lists. E.g. "Actual friends", "People who post cool art", "People who just post random things", etc. Then use Tweetdeck to view all lists at the same time.

I have the same kind of system. Otherwise it's just impossible to follow everything after you start to follow more people.

> Twitter isn't even good for news because most of the time you enter half way into the conversation

I also don't like it for news because a single piece of news will appear a thousand times in my feed.

Yeah, in getting annoyed with all the (US centric) politics on my feed.

Similar thing is happening with Pocket. It's great at curating articles. It's just that at some point, it got hijacked by politics.

Try Mastodon.

It's sooooo annoying to hear people trying to get you into an alternate platform. app.net, gab.ai, identi.ca, etc. Seriously just stop. You're just annoying.

Yes I am having a good time. But I am not American, don't live in the US and the few Americans I do follow mostly keep out of the long rambling kind of politics.

The key is don't follow accounts that tweet about politics. I filtered mine down a few years ago and have loved it ever since.

yes, me... please refrain yourself from starting your replies like that...

Use "Muted words" - you'll find it under Settings. Add Trump, Republican, etc. :)

1k is an absurd number of people. Try <100.

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