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Comment by token_throwaway | Hacker News Reader

"But I follow thousands of people"

I was wondering why someone would feel this way until I got to that line! Why would you follow thousands of people if "noise" bothers you? I think most people like their social media a bit more curated than that to start with, could be wrong though.

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I follow a couple thousand people on Twitter. It's a mix of infosec folks, developers, startup friends, comic book artists, news people, comedians, a variety.

It's less I'm trying to follow individual people and more that I'm trying to find interesting thoughts or articles or art that they're creating or sharing.

Even so, there is still "noise" in that you'll see the same article surface multiple times or the same news story be bandied about (for the last 24 hours it's been pretty Sam Nunberg).

> Nunberg

and now even HN is :p

> Even so, there is still "noise" in that you'll see the same article surface multiple times

For a while that was my benchmark for what was worth reading if I saw an article surface more than once it was possible of interest to multiple circles of interests rather than one, and likely worth the time to read. Of course, that was the time before sites like Buzzfeed/Upworthy and the general expansion of a culture of writing articles specifically for reshare virality.

> For a while that was my benchmark for what was worth reading if I saw an article surface more than once it was possible of interest to multiple circles of interests rather than one, and likely worth the time to read.

There was a clever RSS reader that worked on this principle. Sadly, it is no longer being developed.

https://feedafever.com

How is it humanly possible to ingest the daily feeds from a couple of thousand of people?

I follow about a hundred or so and I get 300-400 items per day. I use lists for different topics but following one of the lists takes too much time.

In addition to this, nobody stays on topic. The political climate is so intense that the reactions to it permeate everything.

The signal to noise ratio is becoming unacceptable and I’m not aware of any tools to improve it.

You don't have to look at every post. Muting words also helps if there's something you don't want to see, "nunberg" for instance.

I've personally never felt the need to mute words or people on Twitter or any other social network. I follow 540 accounts on Twitter right now and disagree with most of the political perspectives espoused therein. Yet I don't mind seeing any of this sort of thing on my social media timelines for a couple reasons.

For one, if I were to mute opinions that I disagreed with, I feel like I would be in effect turning a blind eye to the fact that people have these opinions. I don't see any value in this; people all over the world have all sorts of different opinions, and deluding myself into believing that people who disagree with me effectively don't exist seems... wrong, morally, at least to me. I specifically follow individuals (both public figures and not) whose opinions (political and otherwise) don't align with my own. I _want_ to see thoughts that aren't just identical to the ones already floating around in my head!

Also, I personally believe that associating emotions with words and phrases in the minds of the populace so strongly as to cause one to either react with outrage or reach for a digital mute/hide button, is one of the strongest weapons of social destruction today. This is a means of socially engineering people's reactions to specific ideas, conditioning them on a mass scale to be unable to use logic and reason as their emotions short-circuit any such thinking. Since mid-2016 I have gone to great lengths to refrain from becoming "outraged" by outrage-bait news and social media posts, and I've found that it's increased my personal happiness and outlook on life considerably, especially as the mass and social media ramp up their production of nigh-constant outrage fuel, and everyone seems to want to make _everything_ political.

Who said anything about disagreements, much less outrage, though? The context was cutting out noise, and muting is a more effective version of skipping your eyes past it. Some topics just get spent and become boring.

The article was basically about this ("So I began to take note each time I experienced a little hit of outrage or condescension or envy during a Twitter session. What I found was that nearly every time I felt one of these negative emotions, it was triggered by a retweet."), and in my experience this is largely how the "mute" functionality is used: literally to protect yourself from experiencing the learned emotional trigger associated with seeing specific keywords or phrases.

Fair enough, but this subthread had diverged to a discussion of the logistics of reading a large number of feeds, and the mute functionality was suggested in that context.

I follow about 8,000+ people, because I follow just about anyone who has a relatively active account and who may be affiliated in my professional and academic networks. Partly I do this as passive networking, much easier to reach out to people on a cold call when we follow each other. And partly because I like reading tweets from people who I've never met or really known.

The trick is that I don't treat Twitter as a newscast but as a stream of interesting thoughts to sample from when I have free time. I do keep a secret list of people who use Twitter to put out original work that I'll check from time to time but mostly I find that my general timeline has most of the interesting tweets in it anyway, because of how Twitter curates the top of it -- with the What-You-Might-Have-Missed, even if you have your timeline in chrono order.

How is it humanly possible to ingest the daily feeds from a couple of thousand of people?

I know a few hundred people in real life but I don't feel a need to call them all up every single day. Ditto for Twitter. I can follow a wide range of people and dip in and out of it, enjoy the variety, and move on. I'd want to read everyone's every tweet as little as I'd want to know every one of my acquaintance's thoughts every day..

but... but you get choose who you call, so you only make one call. But you can't unread tweets to find the one you want to read. So are these just snapshots of a moment in time you look at? Which is nothing like calling someone on the phone.

I mean, you get 300-400 items a day? Do you read it all? I think the best method is just to not read it all. Just scan for a few minutes until you're bored then stop.

Do you read every HN post? Much less should you feel the need to read every tweet.

I’m able to scan the titles of every HN post and see what interests me.

> When they disappeared, my feed had less punch-the-button outrage. Fewer mean screenshots of somebody saying precisely the wrong thing. Less repetition of big, big news. Fewer memes I’d already seen a hundred times.

I follow ~500 people, but I'm very selective by only following people who know better than to re/tweet wrong, irrelevant, or obvious stuff. This way, Twitter works great for me as first-hand news, rather than the usual spin cyclone.

(I also use Twitter for Mac, so no promoted tweets, random order, etc).

I follow ~30 people, but have still turned off showing retweets for some. Some people just seem to treat it as a bigger like button.

I wonder if this is a key part of the problem, or whether it's a separate problem of its own making. I know sometimes I struggle with the decision of whether to 'like' or 'retweet'. I wonder what it would be like if there was only a 'like' button, but individuals can choose to broadcast their likes or not, and followers can choose whether to display (notifications of) likes or not.

I'm guilty of 90% retweets or so, but have a general low output rate including them. So I made a policy of retweet only things, that people who follow me wouldn't see anyway. Like 10+ people overlap. For me it's distinctively different from a like button. The most annoying thing is having other peoples liked pushed into the timeline and the same 3 ads all over again.

> Some people just seem to treat it as a bigger like button.

But isn't that exactly what it is? The line between retweet and like is pretty blurry with the algorithmic timeline. I often see tweets that were merely liked by someone I follow.

I think they're just trying to apply the wrong tool for the job.

What they're probably interested in is getting news/thoughts about a handful of topics, which would be akin to following a few subreddits or forums.

But the way Twitter and Facebook are set-up is that you follow people, not topics. And people tend to talk about all sorts of topics on a given day, thus the "noise."

Technorati and Twingly used to provide such services but Technorati seems to have been bought and decommissioned and Twingly has pivoted into something else.

I wrote a script to split up the people I follow into lists according to a few different categories (based on keywords in their names/handles/bios sprinkled with a touch of manual massaging). It really helps to sort through the noise.

I ended up with the following lists that I can now browse separately for several disparate interests of mine:

    Founders / CEOs
    Game Dev
    Apple
    AR / VR
    Iowa (local people I follow from where I'm from)

This is one functionality I wish Twitter included! I’d love for it to use some machine learning or whatnot to naturally group all the people I follow into several distinct lists.

This is the main thing I love(d) in Google+ (yeah, yeah...)

Whenever I'd add someone, I picked which group or groups they fell into. I could create as many or as few groups as I wanted and then I could view posts and threads based on which "circle" they were in.

I'd be more inclined to use Twitter or any service that made this kind of sorting this flexible and useful.

I could not imagine following that many people.

I follow my local (city) government, the NWS for weather, and Raymond Hettinger.

I follow only couple hundred accounts and the same problem exists for me with retweets.

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