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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

I've been very active on Twitter in the past 2 years and not due to Trump or other controversies.

A lot of developers I want to follow are active on Twitter.

So it might be due to Trump, don't know, but I'm glad it's going well for them.

I didn't join twitter due to Trump, but I kept going there to see if his ludicrous tweets were real, when one day I decided on a whim to create an account since I liked the design compared to Reddit and Facebook. I found a lot of good people and pages to follow, and now I login everyday, and it's probably a more useful use of time than my usage of Reddit/YouTube/Facebook.

I started using Twitter daily a year ago and now I follow about 600 deep learning researchers. It is more lively than /r/machinelearning. I quite enjoy occasionally being able to chat with top guys in the field, especially that they are so busy.

Pro tip: when a Trump article comes, select "I don't like this tweet" from the side menu, and after a few such actions applied here and there, your feed is going to feel clean.

Can you please list some of these deep learning accounts, should be very interesting. Thanks!

You can see who a person is following on Twitter. Assuming the same username on Twitter as here:

https://twitter.com/visarga/following

Same, I follow other programmers and chess players/chess organisations and for that its very good, I carefully curate the people I do follow to maximise the signal/minimise the noise and for that I haven't found anything better.

It's sorta like a poor mans RSS.

Yep, this is how I use twitter and it does nicely. The trick is to aggressively unfollow anyone whose signal/noise ratio isn't great. That way almost everything in the feed is interesting.

I had a strict rule of following a max of 50 accounts, operating a 1 in 1 out, I've lifted that to 80 (for Chess stuff) but still 1 in 1 out, so I have to decide whether following this one is worth unfollowing something else.

Except for a programmer friend who died (I just can't bring myself to unfollow him) everyone is expendable.

Twitter has become so bloated with advertisements and "artificial" trending topics that its nearly useless.

Corollary: Twitter is so useful that it seems to be thriving despite being bloated with advertisements and "artificial" trending topics

Things can thrive without being very useful.

The "Today's Moments" section is... let's just say it's far from universal in its appeal and curation.

Try an alternative client or maybe TweetDeck and make some lists and get into the habit of checking them more than the timeline and you'll be able to see much less of the ads/bloat/meaningless trends and more of actual posts from accounts you're interested in

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