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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Simpler: stop showing tweets just because other people liked them. That's not a reshare, so it shouldn't be treated that way.

More generally, discourage large conversations and encourage fragmentation.

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That's why someone bought this domain [0] which redirects to a search excluding tweets [1] not authored by the people you follow. It's way sparser for me (I follow roughly 200 people) than the regular twitter feed so I also waste way less time whether procrastinating or looking for tweets by people I actually follow. I deleted "twitter.com" from my browser history and always start at realtwitter.com now.

[0] http://realtwitter.com

[1] https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=filter%3Afollows -filter%3Areplies&src=typd

Wow I just actually enjoyed using twitter for the first time ever. I'll keep that link in mind.

I always found this so weird. They themselves provide a literal "retweet" option, but then treat likes almost the same as retweets. What's the point of having both then??

because publishing business behave like an AI that fixed the goal of increasing revenue as optimizing for engagement... instead of paperclip production.

I stopped liking tweets because I don't want to reshare them to my followers from other random walks of life.

It's not just that. Timelines are generally unavoidably toxic. It's not going to stop people from retweeting things and then shouting about it, or writing condescending, smug threads starting with "We need to talk about ...".

We need to talk about people who think the phrase 'we need to talk about...' is a fruitful way to start a conversation when "In my opinion" is probably more welcoming and conducive opening to a discussion that doesn't turn into ideological jousting right from the start.

> stop showing tweets just because other people liked them

There's already a way to do this: use any third-party client. You even get the added bonus of a reverse-chronological timeline!

That works for individuals, but the social interactions won't change unless a lot of people do it.

I think this is a very important point. Even when an individual user can opt-out via settings, the societal-level impact is almost entirely determined by the defaults.

If you have a relatively-short, curated list of people you want to see posts from, I suggest adding them to a list and viewing your "feed" that way. I've been using lists over the home page/feed for a few months and my experience w/ Twitter has been much better. Only posts from the people you've explicitly chosen to get posts from, which also means zero ads (at least on desktop).

I used to follow a couple hundred journalists/researchers etc. "real people" and eventually moved to curating each segment through different accounts and allowing each account to assimilate into the communities instead of a clusterfuck of interests in one timeline (yes i know lists exist but like fb groups it doesnt really serve the purpose of exploring content, not as easily at least)

its been relaxing, carefully curating people that complain/add negativity to my feed out and adding more interesting accounts as time goes on

whatever makes the experience tolerable and worthwhile

I never (no longer, that is) see tweets that other people like. I think there is a setting to disable them from appearing now. At the very least, whenever one appears you can click the little arrow next to it and select "see less often" (or equivalent).

Yup, selecting "see less often" once seemed to make them disappear entirely for me.

Funny, I don't see any liked tweets. Either the handful of people I'm following don't like anything, or there's a switch somewhere that I've flipped without paying attention, because now I can't find it.

I actually like the feature that shows likes from people I follow. I also like the non-chronological timeline.

To me, both these features reduce the frustration inherent in Twitter's over-abundant timeline where you know you're missing out on 95% of stuff because there's no time to scroll through the whole thing. I know I'm still missing out on 95%, but it feels more prioritized.

> where you know you're missing out on 95% of stuff because there's no time to scroll through the whole thing.

Sounds like Facebook.

> More generally, discourage large conversations and encourage fragmentation.

Doesn't that encourage bubbles?

I started using Tweetdeck specifically because of how annoying this was.

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