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Comment by ilikehurdles | Hacker News Reader

I don't use twitter and I don't really know what this is, but it's at the top of the hn. I mean, I obviously know what twitter is and have read tweets, but otherwise this is kind of foreign. Can someone explain what these are used for?

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As Twitter grows, they stray further and further from just showing you tweets from people you follow, and start showing all sorts of other crap you didn't ask for in your feed, such as "person X liked this tweet" or "here's a tweet from someone you may like", and so on.

There is no "official" way to disable these annoying entries in your feed, but over time people have found secret "tags" that if you put in your mute list, will achieve what you want.

This here is a list of all those available tags. There's no real description of what "kinds" of tweets each block other than the vague name though.

The official way is to switch from Home to Latest Tweets. It works quite well, actually.

It automatically reverts to home every few days (at least using the official Android app).

Same for web and iOS. To my amazement, not only is this something that Twitter did on purpose (3 times, once for each client), but their designers have defended it vigorously. Because metrics obviously are more important than users saying what they want.

This is one of the reasons I jailbreak my iPhone =p https://repo.packix.com/package/com.alwayslatesttimelinetwit...

Wow! That is cool, and I had no idea that people were making tweaks for existing apps. Very neat!

Or use https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

All the mentioned things still show up in the latest feed.

The most egregious example of this that I have seen was this tweet, just the other day https://twitter.com/BernieeSanderrs/status/12197474935308328...

I'm not following this account. Nobody I follow is, and nobody I followed interacted with this tweet in any way. Twitter's "reason" for showing it to me was "Bernie Sanders (Parody) received a reply", which is a bizarre justification for adding it to my feed.

For a moment I 100% thought this was a real tweet because I usually look at the user's handle rather than their display name. Anyway, this encounter has made me decide to take a break from Twitter this election season.

Same story, but wasn't this just a trending post? Like it popped up for you long before it had 200k+ likes? I remember seeing it and nobody I know follow it but I don't recall thinking anything of it (I also thought it was Bernies account).

I barely know how to use twitter in all honesty. I'm worried I'm liking too many things and shoving stuff in peoples faces. That's a big turn off on me using social apps.

Yeah, it popped up for me as it was rising (I couldn't tell you how many likes it had). I thought "wow, I didn't expect Bernie to address this issue in that way." Then I saw the username, felt a little duped but hey, this is the web, I'm used to it. Then I felt very duped when I realized that nobody I followed had followed the account, let alone liked or retweeted it. It wasn't Promoted. It ended up on my feed because it was popular and related to my interests, I guess? What made me feel uneasy was that I follow the real Bernie Sanders, and a website showed me something that I legitimately thought he had said for a moment, and I didn't even set myself up to be in that position.

That is by design. Serves somebody's interests, just not yours.

These are used to block various categories of “fake tweets” that tend to appear in your Twitter timeline. They are mostly growth features / edge stories such as “account you follow liked this tweet from an account you don’t follow”.

Twitter (unintentionally, I'm sure) built an adblocker into their app

I don't think this will block adds, based on the keywords.

I would love to block all twitter commercial adverts. Presently I block them on sight and now get only adverts from small companies.

Use https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

Had no idea about this. Is it well known?

Can't decide if you are being sarcastic or not. But I'll reply assuming its a serious question.

Tweetdeck was created by a third-party developer in 2008. It was and is so popular that Twitter acquired it in 2011 for £25 million.

And then Twitter started slowly shutting down its apps, all the mobile versions of Tweetdeck (Desktop, iOS and Android) were suspended and removed from respective app stores. Only keeping the web version alive altered and modified by Twitter. Tweetdeck also had Facebook, LinkedIn and some other social networking service integration, those were removed too. Tweetdeck is pretty much the best Twitter app for advanced users. Now its alive but we never know what Twitter plans to do with it.

Was a genuine question. Interesting, didn't know that, thanks for the background.

No, I don't think it is.

BTW, there's a browser add-on called "Better TweetDeck" that adds some more options to it.

https://better.tw/

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