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Comment by jonny_eh | Hacker News Reader

If I'm forced to use the official Twitter app, I think I'll just top using the service. I have no need for all those ads, and the hard to follow out of sequence ordering of tweets.

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This trick is to add them to a list like "People I Follow" instead of just following them like usual. Lists are always sequential and not loaded with a billion ads, "Stuff you missed", and all that algorithmic garbage

I love how people have to use a hack to view Twitter the way it was actually intended to be viewed.

A hack invented by the users is a cultural phenomenon: The hashtag.

This should just be a setting switch on the app rather than twitter changing how the app has worked since it's inception.

The one that kills me is "In case you missed it". I read my twitter chronologically, and removing tweets from that order in order to show them closer to the top (and therefore later) is the exact opposite of what I want.

I love that there's a "See this less often" action that you can click on that content, which appears to do nothing.

I've clicked that action every single time I've seen it for at least the past year and it still continues to show the very thing I want to see less often. It's absolutely infuriating.

Hmmph, well another data point is that I love the ICYMI feature and use it every day. My feed is too big to ever read every tweet and get to the bottom, so it works for me.

I am glad that it is useful for you. It bugs me though that Twitter is trying to force everyone to use their service the same way. I want to use Twitter more like an RSS reader to catch interesting news stories and blog posts. The fact that they are actively discouraging using their platform like this is infuriating.

Have you tried Tweetdeck? I feel like the way it does columns and being able to clear might be useful for your workflow.

Especially when one or more of the "in case you missed it" tweets has a like, reply, or retweet from me already. Clearly I didn't miss it. Why are you showing it to me?

This is pretty much me as well. I'll likely start using RSS a bit more as that's mostly how I use twitter in any case.

I'd be ok with limited ads, but re-ordering the tweets and adding tweets from people I don't follow is just not worth dealing with.

Reddit.com/r/friends/comments is pretty good. I have a good little group of consistently insightful people I follow, and while the posts are mostly replies to other people (and not really "microblog content"), it's probably my most visited URL.

I find the use of muted words to slightly better the issue of receiving tweets from people I don’t follow. At least the topics their tweets are about will not be a topic I don’t want to read about.

Being forced to use the official Twitter app would be bad enough -- but there isn't any official app at all on macOS. They killed theirs off in February.

Just use your browser. On desktop/laptop, the official app is just a browser engine with a custom icon to appear in your dock/task bar.

The official app on macOS was never browser-based. It was based on the third-party client "Tweetie", which Twitter acquired in 2010.

> I have no need for all those ads

I'm sure they'll miss you too.

I pay for a good third-party client app. Twitter could get a cut of that money. Or they could just offer a paid subscription option, that would be fine too.

They could do those things, but like every other company in this space they have concluded that advertising is the most profitable option for them.

The investors might considering their long term outlook is pretty poor

Are you saying that some other clients allow to see the timeline in chronological order? I'm a Twitter noob but started to use it more recently - still using the web client.

Yes. Give Tweetbot a try (if you’re on an a Apple platform). It’s great.

And if you're on Android, I'm a big fan of Flamingo.

Flamingo is fantastic, but just got discontinued due to hitting the infamous token limit. It's infuriating.

https://www.androidcentral.com/flamingo-one-best-twitter-cli...

Can one not input an own API token?

No, the way they did it the tokens are granted to the app makers on behalf of the users. And each company was limited to a certain number of tokens based on how many users they had at the time the policy came out.

This means that apps that had already been out and had a ton of users like Tweetbot it hasn’t been as much of an issue, but anyone wanting to start a new Twitter app today is basically doomed to a low ceiling of users.

In the days of old all tweets were chronical. The official Twitter app orders your stream of tweets based on popularity and some other metrics that it thinks will appeal to you. It also slides ads in amongst them.

yes, but do other clients (twiterrific, etc) order the tweets chronologically?

Tweetbot does this, yes.

Twitterrific does as well.

Have they figured out any other viable business model? It seems like twitter is still struggling to find profit.

I’m in the same boat. I don’t understand if it’s just all the smart people at Twitter don’t know how power users use Twitter or they just choose to ignore all this.

On the Mac, there isn't even an official app. It's been discontinued.

This.

I'd use the official twitter app, but they make it impossible to read in chronological order.

Another comment I just read noted you can add the handles you follow to a list like "people I follow" and simply read that instead of the default view. this preserves chronology and helps reduce much of the junk they otherwise introduce.

I find this technique good for seaparating out people who tweet lots, say 5-10+ times per day, vs those that are more irregular.

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