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Comment by cabaalis | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood Twitter's "anti-spam" effort. The only "spam" I've ever seen on twitter is when someone I am following likes another tweet, or it tells me I should follow someone because someone I'm following follows them. I'm not interested in either of those suggestions. I'm only interested in what the exact account I'm following tweets or retweets, because I decided to follow it.

It seems to me that if the system worked as intended, I would see none of this mess because I'm not interested in following the bots. They can tweet away all they want, hundreds of thousand of them, to crickets.

I would venture to say that the "spam" is less of a problem for what users really want and more of a problem for their efforts that try to increase user retention/engagement and therefore ad rev.

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Here's a tip: If you make a list of users and look at that, the list will contain only tweets and retweets of the members, in chronological order. (I.e., like how the main timeline used to work, before twitter messed it up.)

Lots of people use the Search functionality, and lots of people follow hashtags and trending topics.

For a long time if I posted something that the general public would be interested in (say, containing "iPhone") I'd get @ mentioned by a spam account for a related scam ("free iPhone!") or an unrelated spam for a "dating" site by an account with an NSFW profile pic.

I just recently learned you can hide retweets from your timeline for an individual user. I don't think you can turn off the likes, but that would be a good addition.

I believe the "don't show retweets for x user" feature is limited to the web interface and is not available in the mobile/desktop apps, which is basically the only way I consume Twitter. Which is disappointing. I may be wrong here (I hope).

You are wrong, it is available in the apps as well.

Yep, me as well, I wish I could activate that globally for all people I follow at the same time. Retweets are the worse in terms of useless signaling. They also added a filter filtering tweets containing words. What I would like is the opposite, for user U, filter all tweets that do not contain word X,Y,Z so people stay on topic. I'd also like to see a record of the tweet that made me follow user U.

There is quite A LOT of that these platforms can do if really want to make the experience better and stop the flow of information that is completely irrelevant to the user.

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