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Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

- create a private list

- instead of following people, add people to the list

Bam. No ads, no suggestions, no "x liked this", reverse chronological order with no missing posts.

Every time Twitter comes up on HN people complain about missing reverse chronological order and hating on the liked by tweets feature. The old classic mode is one click away. Or am I in a weird long running A/B testing group still having access to this feature? I know the default mode is not what most people here like but is it really that hard to switch the display mode?

It's not hard at all, it's just not permanent. After about 3-4 days twitter "helpfully" sets one back to the order they want you to see.

It's at least a few weeks before it reverts for me.

Twitter regularly switches you back to garbage mode without telling you, and you have to mute all the words in this submission to make classic mode work. muting all these words does nothing if you are in garbage mode.

On my intentionally not updated install of iOS twitter, it doesn’t have the garbage mode (still has some inserted garbage, but is otherwise chronological)

> Twitter regularly switches you back to garbage mode

Right. The other problem is that garbage mode is two-way.

I don't want to see other people's likes etc, and I don't want to have my own garbage jammed into anyone else's feed either. Short of going private there's no fix for this.

It seems adaptive, my impression is that I have to toggle it back less and less.

Actually it's 2 clicks away.

As someone launches twitter 20 times a day I don't wanna click around every day for no reason.

Except the list doesn't show more than 200 tweets (unless there's some trick to avoid this). If there's a sudden spike of activity, or you check it only once a week, it's easy to miss something important.

Sounds like a feature. If it is important you shouldn't rely on twitter to find about it anyway.

I dunno, it's a tool, you can use it how you'd like to use it.

Twitter is kinda weird in that there are some blindly obvious UX improvements everyone is aware of that Twitter refrains from because the poor UX is subsidizing their business model.

If you are scrolling more than 200 texts you need to break the list into two. Or examine who you are following. If you miss something is it that important?

and it doesn't update automatically, and it doesn't update when you click the header, and it's just basically a static list of the tweets from the last time you refreshed.

That hasn’t been my experience with lists. They refresh just like the home feed (except without the ads and posts are in chronological order).

You just click "show more tweets" when it gets to the end of the new tweet feed and it loads the next chunk.

Lists are a pain to access IMHO on purpose although they've improved it slightly.

Open App

Press on avatar

Press Lists

Press desired list.

vs.

Open app

Now on desktop, using bookmarks, or a client like TweetDeck this is a valid solution.

Yeah, I would love to be able to have a list shortcut on my phone's homescreen.

That sounds like something you could build in Apple’s Shortcuts app (assuming you’re on iOS).

I'm on Android but I see where you're getting at here, thanks for the idea.

This has improved quite a bit on recent versions of the official mobile clients. If you go to your lists, you can "pin" a list, which has the effect of making it an alternate timeline from the app's home screen.

It's a little subtle, but on home you'll now have "Home" and your list's name at the top of the screen, with the active one getting a blue underline. Swipe left or right to select one or the other.

You can't do it on Android version even today, almost 1 year after they added this feature on iOS version.

I think they couldn't care less about lists. They are super annoying to access and ever since the last update which brought the mobile layout to desktop you can't even create a new list from the "add to list" screen anymore.

Sadly the entire update still feels half-baked and not thought-through and given that it's been months I don't feel too optimistic. There's so many small things that worked fine before and are just missing completely or broken now. It's a shame because I've been using Twitter for a decade but it's hardly useable now.

I think you can also get around this same stuff by just creating a tweetdeck and creating a column for people you follow.

Is there any fast way to populate a list with everyone you are already following?

I wrote an open source script for this a while ago, it's annoying to run due to Twitter API limits https://github.com/KrauseFx/twitter-unfollow

Thank you for writing that and mentioning it. I used it 3x without regenerating credentials the last two times. When Twitter stopped processing, I just waited 15 minutes and ran it again.

Now you're my one follow. :-)

I believe you can batch add the people you follow to a list using this Chrome extension

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icotile-twitter-fr...

In particular, there is a "select all" button. It may break if you have too many people, though.

I just did that. When it came to choosing accounts for the list, Twitter presented those I follow and I could choose them with one click each.

I don't know if it works with many follow-ees(?), I have only a few.

Unfortunately, you cannot turn off retweets in lists, at least on the Twitter website or iOS app. I disable retweets for most of the people I follow. Fortunately, in Tweetdeck you can filter retweets for each list individually.

Similar to what I do (lists are public, not private). One recent change has annoyed me, though - won’t let me view my public lists unless I am logged in.

Interesting - i think i read that @Naval does the same thing.

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