Twitter is at its best when verified accounts can’t tweet | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is at its best when verified accounts can’t tweet

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560 pointsMindGods287 comments

It wasn't better because verified accounts were locked out; it was better because accounts with large amounts of social capital were locked out. It temporarily reset a social network to a more egalitarian state, before the winner-take-all feedback loops take hold. But left to its own devices, even if those accounts (and their owners) were locked out entirely, the same dynamics would re-assert themselves and new dominating accounts would emerge, absent some ongoing active effort to break the feedback loops that create them.

this is why i think visible voting (likes, hearts, etc) ruined the internet. It creates teams, draws lines in the sand. Then teams with the most votes thinks that means it's in the right.

Otherwise, you have to actually read each comment and think about whether you agree with it instead of lazily appealing to votes.

Unfortunately I think intentionally or not the mental stimulus of "winning" - getting lots of likes and retweets, is baked into how these companies have very profitable business models. People feel like they are playing a game for social status, maybe one of the most primal human instincts and they tap into that to drive profit.

It's also keeping people from rebelling against the companies (elites) gaining all the profits (I say this as a business owner).

It's like not collaborating with another skateboarder or ecologist because they don't share the same political team as me. "Internet teams" is a complete mental construct, taking advantage of xenophobic, tribal tendencies we have innately to protect us in the physical world.

I tend to lean towards low-tech anarchist and I have a lot in common with socialists, fascists, and jeffersonian-democrats (anti-federal govt, pro-working man), and even muslims where I'm against central banking or charging interest. But nobody could ever talk about it because "teams".

I agree, the ranking algorithms should be based off genuine engagement in a discussion, not opaque votes or likes. I'm working on a new discussion site https://sqwok.im, with the intent to foster open, frictionless, and accessible conversations with anyone, where the relevance is determined by other signals including activity. There are different issues to work around with that model but it more closely resembles how we interact irl (real world "vote" is usually just walking away).

I'm interested. When you mention activity do you mean something like "total active engagement on a post" or "how active is one particular user relative to others". Also is it your intention to maintain fully anonymous participation with or without moderation? Also one thing I think could be a cool feature would be a reddit style "subreddits" but created by users who then collectively decide what it's going to be about by their participation. Good work.

Hey, thank you!

By activity I mean chat activity in a given post. Right now the ranking algo for "hot" is based on how many people are chatting + decay time function. It's somewhat simplistic for now (still mvp), but I have ideas for other signals that could be used to determine how relevant a particular conversation is. It's certainly vulnerable to being gamed, but I think there are ways we could try to limit that, and filter out noise etc.

One of my goals is to focus as much as possible on the conversation and build features around that. For instance instead of a "like" button, it could require a user to _write_ something relevant (just idea). I think the key is that we try new things, hopefully learn from ideas that have been tried elsewhere, and build a place for high-quality realtime conversations.

The site does follow the twitter/IG/twitch model where it's a flat user(nest) hierarchy, but I have considered later enhancing it to allow multiple users to manage a single nest which would allow both community-led or single-entity led. Right now the goal is just to get mvp features and start getting feedback! So thank you :)

Interesting. I wonder if you could factor in “views” for measuring activity, like how many people have visited a thread and for how long. It’s my understanding that most big websites are extremely interested in minutia like where someone spends most of their time on the page, where their cursor is etc. that may be a useful metric for determining engagement.

yes! I think there are a few potentially interesting data points along this thread, such as time spent viewing, conversion from viewer -> active participant, and more. I like measuring the view bounce rate because I envision someone listening to others speak, and then either walk away or step closer to engage further. Cursor position could be interesting, maybe to see if they scrolled and read the content description?

Why companies?

When the net was young, it was programmers who put counters in front of content - the urge and obviousness to do so, is so banal and basic that the lack of a counter is comment worthy, not its presence.

Imagine a pristine social network without any counter - how many seconds before one of us posts "I made a small change to the site, which looks like this".

Metrics are such a basic extension of the programming mindset that without a corporations will being imposed to remove them, I cant imagine a site without a like counter of some sort. (Not that firms will remove them, but their absence can only be achieved by a force from above imposing its will on normal human nature.)

Since you mention the early internet, some of the earliest websites I remember would have a 'number of visitors' counter usually in the footer. Which in and of itself is an early form of that validation you speak of. When you found a site with lots of visitors, it validated the site, made it seem more legitimate. And lots of early web site owners would react the same way to a new visitor to their page as a user reacts to a like today.

Validation culture has always been in some ways a part of the internet. Even before the things I spoke of. But I agree though, today it's taken over too much of culture in general. Whereas back in the day, someone may be happy or excited, chances were it didn't affect their life much. Now people's entire lives and fortunes exist because of those validating likes.

I think it even encourages reading the content. “Six hundred other morons ‘liked’ this comment so I might enjoy reading it.” Without that social proof, how do I figure out which comments are worthwhile and which are kooky bullshit?

I’m being only partly sarcastic here, the social proof is real. But I find it interesting because on Reddit I’ll deliberately read downvoted comments, on YouTube I will not bother with anything below the top 10 presented to me, here I’ll read almost everything (obviously if the thread interests me).

Well, there's always 4chan, which is exactly what you just said. Not exactly a poster-boy for quality internet discussion.

Also, I recommend https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/ to remove metrics from twitter.

4chan prioritizes active threads, which means a huge boost to trolling and content dumps.

That's the thing about trying eliminate voting. If comments essentially serve as votes, you actually get the worse kind of filter - the way the filth rises to the top on Youtube comments for example (Youtube sorts by most commented even though it allows voting - so hateful stuff remains even when downvoted).

The best solution I've seen for this is to have a separate subforum for highly contentious discussions, and anything with more than a threshold number of comments per hour gets automatically moved there and flagged for moderator review. Then the moderator can move it back, delete it entirely or just leave it in the separate subforum so that interested parties can flame each other in the fire pit instead of out where everybody else hangs out.

While you're right, I really do like 4chan. It doing away with any voting really creates a wholly different culture. It requires a completely different approach to reading it. Now, the people there are outcasts in one form or another, in real life or digitally. That can get you mixed results and tainted content, but the principle of how that 'forum' is set up I like a lot.

It requires a reader to think for themselves and actually analyze content.

Not for those who like their information spoon-fed.

i chuckled that this comment was grayed out. I was analyzing my feelings and voting indicators really do make an impact. I can feel the emotional charge from all the people who downvote as I'm reading.

emotional context truly is the 6th sense.

4chan somehow has this reputation for being savants despite being just as vulnerable as Twitter in getting swept up into a mob with lazily research facts being dressed up as genuine when someone uses complete sentences. * chans only work largely because of moderation (That doesn't mean the moderation has to operate in a way you like). Likewise the for HN.

IMO, no single feature ruins online social platforms more than size. The best subreddits are the small ones, the best * chans are the small ones, the best forums are the small ones. "Features" don't ruin platforms, users do.

it is precisely because 4chan one of the last popular "free" sites that it is more extreme. if the entire internet were more like it, there would be more mild sites with more PC discussion that you could join.

A site could still allow accounts and banning and have guidelines around discussion topics, it doesn't have to be completely anonymous like 4chan.

I'd argue that the anonymous nature of it is actually what allows it to maintain it's status as "free". By disconnecting everyone from any sort of permanent identity, it totally eliminates the possibility of a user or group of users collecting enough social capital to change things.

I don't think people understand how important this is.

FWIW 4chan has accounts, banning and guidelines. It's not totally lawless and anonymous. It just has the option of anonymity.

Probably the best, deepest LGBT+ issues discussions I've ever had have been on their /lgbt/ board. They were filled with people yelling obscenities too, but that doesn't bother me. I guess it's the culture I grew up with, it's natural to engage in discussion while people are yelling around me.

I'm really glad there's still a place out there that believes in free speech as a foundational principle not to be infringed upon except as an absolute last resort. I'm glad not everywhere is 4chan, but 4chan is a gem of discourse in today's world if you ignore like 90% of it. I'm increasingly convinced that that 90% is the inevitable cost of the wonderful 10% that represents the sharing of intelligent thought without fear of reprisal.

> I'm increasingly convinced that that 90% is the inevitable cost of the wonderful 10% that represents the sharing of intelligent thought without fear of reprisal.

high IQ post. that seems to be a pattern in many facets of life. (raising children, starting companies, dieting, traveling)

> FWIW 4chan has accounts

The Wikipedia page[1] claims that “Registration is not possible”. Is it wrong, or am I misunderstanding?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan

Using a tripcode would be the closest thing 4chan has to an "account" that I'm aware of, but it doesn't require registration, it just adds a (theoretically) unique identifier to posts.

Yeah sorry, I was thinking of tripcodes and 4chan pass as representing most of what an "account" is. It's not the same thing though.

4chan technically does have accounts in the form of '4chan pass', but it's not linked to your posts at all[1] and just removes the ads, and lets you bypass the captcha and some kinds of subnet level posting bans.

There is also the concept of a tripcode, which is basically an HMAC with a key that the server has a user provided code that is shown next to your post. You can use this to prove knowledge of the code. Usage depends a lot on which board you're on, but is generally frowned upon.

Some boards (such as the infamous /pol/) also have IDs on posts (IIRC derived from your IP address and the thread id), so that posts by the same user in the same thread can be correlated.

Other than that, everything is anonymous.

[1] minor exception is the "since4pass" option which just adds a little icon to your post indicating how long you've had your pass. This is basically never used (perhaps because even 4chan posters don't want to advertise that they're paying for 4chan)

> Well, there's always 4chan, which is exactly what you just said.

I disagree. 4chan isn’t Twitter without visible voting, it also has anonymity baked in, you can’t register an account, and old threads are automatically deleted.

A more apt example of (my understanding of) the argument you’re replying to is HN: you can see your own points on a discussion, but not anyone else’s. Posts are given more prominence due to their score, but due to their invisibility you only get a rough idea of how popular they are inside their own discussion, not how much more popular they are in relation to other posts.

hn still has internet points in the form of karma, though.

> hn still has internet points

I spent over half my post discussing them. The point is that they are not visible.

I guess my point is that they ARE visible (karma). Click on a username of someone. Yours is at, "888". Popularity contests are alive and well on hn.

Does anybody actually look at other users points on a regular basis? I think it’s rare which is why it’s not really relevant.

Besides, it’s not even a measure of popularity but more of a lifetime scoreboard. If HN reported something like average points per post or per day, that would be closer to a popularity metric (eg more inline with “number of followers”)

It's magic internet points, no matter how you slice it. Having more or less changes what you can/cannot do on the site.

> Having more or less changes what you can/cannot do on the site.

That’s unrelated to the discussion, which is about how visible internet points affect how users engage with each other’s comments.

Site permissions are a different matter altogether, and not applicable to most social networks.

i disagree there. sure you have to wade thru a lot of garbage, but the amount of truly insightful posts still make it worth going to for me. on some of the less popular, more focused boards, the general discussion quality is pretty high.

Voting certainly has its problems, but the alternative is given trolls and spammers free reign.

Not having any kind of selection mechanism may have worked in the past when the Internet was much smaller, and when the majority of people still cared about making quality posts. But those days are long gone. Even in its current state, I find Twitter borderline unusable, because > 95% of posts are worthless noise.

You can have voting mechanisms without their results being visible. It isn't very transparent but social media is still curated and moderated by platforms regardless of "voting".

I don't think the problem is with trolls and spammers necessarily, I think the problem is with scaling the community out. 4chan is the best example of this: the less populated, hobby-based boards are wonderfully useful resources and generally of much higher quality than similar communities on Reddit. Reddit is just too big and the clout-chasing inevitably infects smaller subs.

The larger 4chan communities like /b/ and /pol/, on the other hand, are irredeemable cesspits compared to Reddit's default subs.

I second this, I frequent the /lit/ (literature) board on 4chan and its really good. It's still quite irreverent but its good when studying philosophy, where it was always rebellious (e.g. Nietzsche's "God is Dead").

It didn't work in the past. Usenet groups were like that and they got eaten by spammers and trolls.

IMHO, that was more a result of the very high barrier to entry to get access to the internet, than its size. I still fantasize about creating a community with such a high barrier to entry today, but where it is done better than just making it depend on your technical chops and internet connections in the mid-nineteens.

> Voting certainly has its problems, but the alternative is [giving] trolls and spammers free reign.

I would replace "voting" with "moderation." Voting mechanisms on conversational sites are a form of moderation; so are actual moderators. And, of they're not mutually exclusive.

> Even in its current state, I find Twitter borderline unusable, because > 95% of posts are worthless noise.

I think Twitter tried to replace moderation with curation -- in theory, you're only going to see posts from people you follow, giving you direct control (and responsibility) over the amount of noise on your timeline. In practice, of course, Twitter goes back on that implicit promise in the name of engagement. Twitter itself injects things you don't have direct control of onto your timeline -- not just promoted tweets, but "people you follow liked this" and "someone you follow replied to this tweet" and other such dubious nonsense -- and also lets people you follow inject things onto your timeline through retweets and quote tweets. But, I think the original idea of "give you the tools to curate what you see" was relatively sound, although it should have implemented LiveJournal-esque "only allow replies from people I follow and/or who follow me" type filters very early.

Even semi-visible voting such as HN has creates bad incentives.

The retweets/likes culture of twitter is orders of magnitude worse, though. People start chasing the likes, tailoring them to what people want to hear rather than genuine expression of thought.

It seems that the most harm is done when the voting system is used to accumulate clout/fame/social capital both on and off platform.

Democratized voting systems on pseudonymous platforms can have a content curation effect while limiting this accumulation of social capital, as seen on Hacker News and Reddit. You don't see quite the same level of brands and people building their clout on say Reddit the way they do on Twitter. Conventional cultural leaders like politicians and celebrities don't dominate discourse on these platforms to the degree they do on Facebook and Twitter.

no, but reddit has the same problem (but amplified IMO) where you self-censor out of fear of saying something unpopular and getting downvoted. It's even more conformist than twitter.

Twitter doesn't have downvotes so its a little better in that regard.

The common "EDIT: <<apology or excuse here>>" I saw on reddit screamed of insecurity instead of people standing their ground. That mentality is bad for young minds.

I do agree that downvoting sometimes has a chilling effect on Reddit, but that doesn't seem relevant to the discussion on social capital accumulation and the domination of a platform by these traditionally socially powerful users, at least in the same way that other platforms are.

The point was to discuss how Reddit, Hacker News, and other message boards utilizing pseudonymous voting are not monopolized by brands, celebrities, and businesses in the same way that Twitter and Facebook are. The discourse is still more egalitarian than the alternatives, and it isn't these traditional cultural leaders that dominate discussion on Reddit.

This isn't to speak on issues of astroturfing, echo chambering, or misinformation, but these aren't relevant to the discussion, and aren't unique issues to Reddit.

I think its relevant. a consolidation of opinion (via self-censorship) also leads to a consolidation of products and choice, since alternative product and companies die due to unpopularity.

For example I think reddit played a MASSIVE role in the rise of PC gaming in the last 5 years. It's more indirect, admittedly.

> The point was to discuss how Reddit, Hacker News, and other message boards utilizing pseudonymous voting are not monopolized by brands, celebrities, and businesses in the same way that Twitter and Facebook are.

How much of that is simply due to the nature of the product?

Reddit would very much like to have the brands, celebrities, and businesses, and influenced their change to allow users to post to their own profile pages.

I also think it helps users to craft more genuine responses as opposed to those that get rewarded with votes.

A bit of irony with you mentioning this as this link received more than 400 points.

I wouldn't call it irony. It proving my point, that we only interact with the popular posts.

> I wouldn't call it irony.

Correct. It's coincidental.

Exactly. Inconvenient facts or even just minority views get downvotes. Especially here on hn. If you are going to say something that disagrees with the general hn monoculture, you have to dress it up in the inimitable pseudo-intellectual rational style favored here. Only then do you stand a chance of making yourself heard.

Visible voting might have had some bad effects but I'd say you are basically wrong about it being any kind of fundamental problem.

The early Internet had plenty of poison ("flame wars" of that era were the precursor to what we have now). The Internet hadn't solved it's how-to-get-along problem and it just expanded that situation as it became dominant and the "craziness from the Internet" managed to have more real world consequences.

As other have mentioned, sorting by active thread turns comments into votes and make the least liked and most disagreeable comment stay visible. So the division between voted and not-voted systems isn't as great as one might imagine.

The thing is; then and now, actual moderation is the situation that can solve this. Leadership in humans is sort of divided between attention-focusing behavior and rules-membership-enforcing behavior, both are fine as parts of society. We can see both things at play in online activity but most online forum create a unbalanced in favor of attention-focusing behavior and a certain ideology can this imbalance is great. It's not, it's a part of a rather sick society that America has wound up with, we wind-up literally on the verge of catastrophe from this.

We do have visible voting and accolades in real life - I wonder if the issue here is that visible voting and accolades along with a history of conduct perform aberrantly when coupled with (seemingly) anonymous identities. In real life people may be reluctant to try and gain fame by taking extreme viewpoints due to their concern over impacting their day-to-day well being - leaving only those fervent believers to tote the flag. Compare that to the internet where you can roll up a new handle and give something a go - maybe getting a lot of encouragement and accolades in a mostly risk-free manner.

Whether what I stated above is an indication of a problem of the internet or a problem with the suppression of opinion in the real world is probably open to debate. But I do wonder if that's the reason we see such a rift in the tenor of discussion on the internet.

What happened to instagrams experiment with removing visible likes? I guess it went negatively in some way because i still have likes heh

Twitter is the worst with this as it ONLY has a heart. Even if you disagree, you click the heart to save it. There is no way to show another emotion and it desperately needs something like this, similar to Facebook.

And Facebook needs one more too - DISAGREE. "Like" basically means I agree, but "mad" doesn't always mean I disagree.

I can disagree with something and not have it make me "mad". I'm not sure what this emoji is, maybe it's just a thumbs down, but I think it's necessary.

I think this reveals that Facebook don't care if you love it, hate it, or just find it interesting - all they care about is engagement.

> Even if you disagree, you click the heart to save it.

There is actually a "bookmark" function that save tweet into a private list (as opposed to public list of likes).

> And Facebook needs one more too - DISAGREE

There are downvotes on HN. Do they really make this community better?

HN: I think yes.

I maybe check HN a couple times a day, have never added a new item, but have posted comments.

Due to this after however many years (Edit: almost 8 years) I don't have enough points to down vote.

Like SO was at the beginning I think graduated access like this can definitely help a community.

However, like any other gated community it's easy for the ones with high rep to form a bubble.

I think what's prevented HN from turning into SO, Twitter, etcetera is that

a) there are no real profile pages. The reason for coming here is to see what tech news has been shared. Sort of like subreddits, the driving content is a shared interest, not a personality.

b) there's no profit motives at work. We're not customers (or data to sell), we're people with a shared interest. This is a sort of hobby project, with the 'benevolent dictator' coming by as needed, fixing titles and links, and letting us know about technical issues with the platform.

c) anyone can upvote and see buried comments. I have the option enabled to see people who have been downvoted to gray text. Rarely do I think it's undeserved. If for some reason someone is getting buried for a legit comment usually there's a comment reply questioning the votes, by someone else, and clarifications are worked out.

d) (I assume) a lot of lurkers who can't downvote, but can, and do, upvote.

And there's probably other reasons. Which I guess means it's a combination of things, one of which is how downvoted are handled.

> There are downvotes on HN. Do they really make this community better?

I guess I am not alone in thinking yes. Sometimes I find it badly abused but mostly I think it is good, even when I'm the target.

> There are downvotes on HN. Do they really make this community better?

For others, maybe not, but for the downvote-ees, I think that they can. There's a tendency to bridle at a downvote, but I know that, especially in my early days here, downvotes were very helpful for figuring out what posts were appropriate and welcome in this community. The downvotes were an unobtrusive way for me to get the message without a huge thread in which many people individually would have been forced to make exactly the same point.

(I do notice that, in contentious discussions, downvotes are often used to express disagreement, rather than the idea that a post is not a valuable contribution, and I think that's a shame.)

I think you're looking at this wrong.

The like button isn't for saving things. It's for liking them. If you want to save a tweet, Twitter has both Bookmarks and Stories you can use to file it away. If you're liking tweets to save them for later, you're just using Twitter incorrectly.

And a "Disagree" button is just a terrible idea. It immediately invites conflict into every post. Imagine writing a post about your experiences with sexual assault or something and you start getting Disagrees from people...

If social media feels like it's limiting your social expression, you might want to step away from social media.

Social media has become a whole lot better for me thanks to Ben Grosser's demetricator extensions. They even work on Firefox mobile. I use the Twitter and Facebook extensions. With the you can see that something has been liked/retweeted/shared, but no longer by how many people.

https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/

Vote-piling is so obvious on Reddit but it's more than that.

On a personal level, even when the numbers are hidden from the public like on HN, it has a weird effect on me. It's nice to post something and get a bunch of upvotes, but (even though it doesn't really matter) just getting that single point drop to zero hurts so much more. I don't know if it's loss aversion or the idea that some random internet person dislikes me. I don't dwell on it, I'm notice it and move on, but I still get that little sinking feeling for some reason.

Over time, just like a dog being trained we'll learn to conform to the consensus.

Yeah I don’t really understand downvoting on HN. If I see a grey post that looks well written and making reasonable arguments, I like to upvote. If people want to disagree they should reply rather than downvote.

Edit: I don’t mean all down voting is bad - It’s good when people start making personal attacks - but just as often it seems to be used to suppress an unpopular viewpoint.

It's pretty funny that I will a huge number of votes for a trivial factual correction and get no votes for what I'd consider insightful points. Not showing votes makes it easy for everyone to upvote these trivial factual corrections.

I think one reason for a vote is when someone was going to say something, but someone else already did so it's redundant to say it again - vote instead to show approval to the poster, or add weight to it where votes are public. It makes sense that simple corrections would so often fall into this category.

This project, subreply, was posted here recently. It's very much like Twitter without voting. I greatly enjoy it.

https://subreply.com/about

Which raises a related issue of whether the number of likes/hearts can even be trusted. Given the positive feedback loop they create (posts with many likes are more likely to receive further likes), manipulation of these numbers can be used for influencing opinion and drawing the battle lines. I am highly suspicious of both Twitter and Reddit in this regard.

Maybe web 2.0 mechanics should be reset every season.

Be right back, buying my Twitter battle-pass for this season.

It wasnt better because verified accounts couldnt tweet, it was "good" because everyone was just memeing and making jokes bout verified accounts being locked out.

big Nozick guy huh?

Does anyone know of or have ideas on how to restrain winner-take-all feedback loops? I'm rather tired of the lack of fat tailed distribution in the tech world

Yes. Remove the incentive to grow social capital by making users anonymous and posts temporary. It exists and it’s called 4chan. It turns out that when you remove the incentive to grow social capital, the vast majority of people aren’t interested in participating.

According to their ad page, 4chan has 22 million monthly visitors, which is not as large as Twitter’s 300 million, but I would argue is also not insignificant: https://4chan.org/advertise

But is 4chan an inevitable product of its structure, or of its originating culture? Back when it was the next big thing, I worked with a social bookmarking startup. Weirdly, our site was colonized by a sizable group of Harry Potter fan fiction writers, and they became the dominant group on the site. If 4chan had started out with a different seed group of contributors, it might well be a very, very different place.

> If 4chan had started out with a different seed group of contributors, it might well be a very, very different place.

Hoping that's the case as I'm working on a new chat-based discussion site with no voting and goal of open, rigorous, reverent discussions (sqwok.im). I think there's merit in using signals like activity and others to determine relevance, and agree that part of the problem with 4chan is simply the ethos set in the beginning.

Don't have the web be four sites full of screenshots of each other. I.e. go back to the blog and forums era. Outlaw social media with more than X users. Make content recommendation algorithms illegal. Personalised advertising should be punishable by public flogging for first offenders and death for repeat offenders or particularly large-scale operations.

This is obviously unreasonable - capital punishment should only apply in cases that are both large scale and repeat offences.

I have in mind a post reddit social site (in the save way reddit is post digg), and one of the key issues that I see is that that site has to have distinct karma for each community.

Basically a social network based more upon Slate Star Codex concept of Archipelagoes (communities next to communities) than a traditional communities within communities. I think one of the key original sins of reddit is that it had site wide karma, rather than distinct karma within each community.

If you ever create this, I would be interested in joining.

That’s a very interesting idea. Is that how the stackexchange/stackoverflow/etc sites operate? They seem siloed but I don’t have much experience with them.

I also saw an interesting point here recently that the reason Instagram seems to be better than FB/Twitter is that there’s no built in way to signal boost with shares or retweets. And really, you can’t even have hyperlinks. Would that be a consideration?

You get 200 basic karma when you go to a new stackoverflow community with an existing account (or you did the last time I did) but other than that you start over from scratch.

However Stackoverflow is also not really a community, so I don't think what they do necessarily applies.

I don't use Instagram much (don't need more addictive stuff in my life), but I seem to remember that you could still like stuff. No hyperlinks would ruin a community in opinion, since it means you can't back a point with facts.

I think it would be interesting to use a market based mechanism for voting, where placing an upvote costs a small fee. The fee price increases as more upvotes are placed, and you can always un-place your upvote to get a refund at the current market price.

This means accounts that identify popular content before others do can make a profit by buying upvotes at a low price, and selling them high.

This doesn’t stop content from popular accounts from being upvoted a lot, but it does encourage people to search for otherwise overlooked high quality content - to your point, the fat tail.

https://ethresear.ch/t/better-curation-via-inversely-coupled...

Quadratic voting!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting

Very similar! The difference is that Quadratic Voting scales the expense independently for each user, while this system scales it for everyone (and you can subsequently sell your vote)

Would this fee be based on money or "karma"? I feel like if one had to earn upvotes to spend on Reddit, regular users will engage in more karma-farming reposts. At least now it's only the weirdos and people looking to sell accounts.

Has anyone tried a logarithmic or similar scale for voting? Show the 'tier' they are at (A B C D or some rating number) and it gets progressively harder to go up or down a level as you deviate from the starting point.

I'd imagine that fee would be literal money, as this nullifies concerns about people creating fake accounts to get more Karma, and means people are fully incentivised to place votes carefully. It does introduce a "pay to influence" aspect that I don't love, but one would hope that at sufficient scale the Efficient Market Hypothesis would kick in, and trying to pay to influence would just result in you burning your money.

> Has anyone tried a logarithmic or similar scale for voting?

Hmmm good question. I don't think this would make a huge difference, as visibility is generally a function of a post's current rank rather than its actual score, so any monotonic transform isn't going to have a large effect.

maybe making each like or dislike solve a small problem to remove the incentive unless you have a strong like/dislike eg a really annoying capture

I could go for some random ostracism on all social networks.

This is fascinating.

I just threw together some absolutely atrocious javascript to make this "verified accounts can't tweet" a feature.

Fire up the console, and run:

```

javascript

var verified = document.querySelectorAll('[aria-label="Verified account"]');

for (var i = 0; i < verified.length; i++) {

verified[i].parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.

parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.innerHTML = ""

}

```

At least for me, this deletes the DOM nodes for all tweets from verified users in my timeline.

I don't want to permanently unfollow all verified users, but having an option to hide all activity associated with those accounts in my timeline? That'd be nice.

If anyone who actually knows what they're doing wants to suggest a smarter solution, or make a chrome plugin that does just this, I'd be forever grateful!

Nice. Thinking about it, also deleting the whole right column (trending, who to follow) would really make Twitter a happier place.

This is why I use StyleBot! I don't customize every page I visit, but it makes a huge difference for sites I view regularly.

Here's my custom Hacker News style: https://i.imgur.com/KbP5VAX.png

And Craigslist: https://i.imgur.com/uTyST6P.png

What is your configuration

I use a similar solution, I like to modify the CSS of pages I visit, so I can avoid absurd design choices.

Anyway the HN design is almost the pinnacle of perfection to me.

(I like HN's design as well, except when I am using a touchscreen.)

Yeah Stylebot! I use it to fix UI annoyances on my daily favorite websites. I spend all day using browser developer tools, why not use my skills to improve my favorite websites?

For a while, I could use uBlock to delete all those unwanted columns. It was effortless and permanent. I wrote up the instructions here:

https://josh.works/take-back-your-attention

But a year ago or so, Twitter redesigned the front-end. Now the class names constantly change, and my CSS Selector knowledge isn't good enough to write flexible-enough rules to keep these unwanted elements blocked.

I'd pay someone to pair with me on writing good uBlock rules that make these deletions permanent.

I'd also like to remove all re-tweets and all instances of "so-and-so liked this tweet". uBlock consistently removes all advertisements from the timeline, so... small win.

If you read this and wanna be involved, shoot me an email: joshthompson@hey.com

I'd of course publish what we come up with so others could use it!

  twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Relevant people"]

I use those rules on uBlock origin. let me know if it helps!

Whoa! Game changing! I never thought to search for aria-labels.

I immediately and joyfully added your rules to uBlock, and it works like a charm!

I ended up expanding on the concept:

  twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Relevant people"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Search and explore"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Footer"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Who to follow"]

great!

Paradoxically, I do need to start using twitter to market my game, but I dread spending time on that site.

I'll probably try to only go there once a week. Social media is weird.

About a year ago I tried getting into Twitter because it seemed like there were a few people I might want to follow, so I dutifully read a few people I knew about and added people they retweeted that seemed interesting.

About a week or two in I tried engaging on a topic in a HN style way where I tried to ask questions and probe for something deeper (my first mistake), and on something where I sort of questioned the party line on a trending topic (my second mistake). I was actually wrong in some of my assumptions I was using at that time, but everyone was so busy assuming I was acting bad faith and trying to troll (and responding how they thought appropriate) that not one person could actually engage with me enough to even figure that out even though I tried to keep it entirely civil, I had to learn it myself a few hours later (and I did go back with a mea culpa). I only lasted about another week reading items on the platform regularly as it became obvious that this is just the expectation of how discourse happens on Twitter.

I mean, I don't expect it to be like HN, but I also don't expect people to assume racist troll is the obvious and most likely option when I open my mouth, and that's how it feels on Twitter. What's worse, I'm not sure that's not a rational approach on the platform given how people on it act, which is why I don't want to be there.

Twitter's like a giant set of improv performances where everyone is performing for their friends and private audiences in an effort to be the most extreme version of themselves, but all those performances are banging into each other and feeding off each other. Interesting and weird at first, until you realize it's all so terribly draining.

Well, bet you the next version of Twitter will say "Fuck you, blind people" for all aria-labels.

If I get a chance to look closer I will, but want to lazily suggest it'd be ideal, if possible, to use some identifier that's not a11y-related -- in case this takes off and Twitter's incentivized to remove the labels (at the expense of those who depend on the aria-labels to access the site's content).

Not likely. Accessibility is required by law, no way twitter’s legal would be down with arguing “yes well you see we had to make it inaccessible because people were using accessibility labels to block the sidebar with trending topics from showing up on their page”

>a11y

I understand a16z is a name but writing other words in this style is very difficult to understand. It would be great for people to use the full term 'accessibility'.

One might even say it makes the conversation less “accessible”

I hear you, but in this case (A) there was a ton of relevant context about aria-label, and (B) HN (HackerNews) is a technical community, and on the web, "a11y" has been in very widespread, even mainstream usage for many years, to refer to "accessibility". Notice how "a11y" looks like lowercase "ALLY", as in ally or friend, of the differently-abled.

... and (C) I was commenting from my phone.

Huhm, I don't know a16z, but I do know a11y and i18n...

I know of them, but I can never remember them, and I wouldn't know how to search for them. I'm not sure what they were thinking when they came up with inaccessible accessibility terms.

Neat fact: I learned the other week that this exact format(first, last, number of characters in between) is how old Forths compressed the word encoding. It has a very low collision rate.

That comment is a perfect example of what I love about HN; a polite tangential discussion about abbreviations unearthing a wholly unexpected connection to a clever technical hack. Thank you for sharing! :)

"I wouldn't know how to search for them"

I don't believe you are incapable of typing "a11y" into your browser's location bar.

For me, you can target the sidebar with the rule: div[data-testid="sidebarColumn"] .r-1u4rsef

and promoted tweets (in light mode): .css-1dbjc4n.r-my5ep6.r-qklmqi.r-1adg3ll div[data-testid="placementTracking"]:not(.r-u8s1d)

Obviously very fragile, but has been working fo the last month or so

It's those auto-generated class names that kill me. :( They change all the time.

An earlier suggestion just worked for me, and I suspect it'll be durable:

  twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Relevant people"]

I ended up adding more labels:

  twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Relevant people"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Search and explore"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Footer"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Who to follow"]
  twitter.com##[aria-label="Search Twitter"]

Now my twitter looks like this:

https://share.getcloudapp.com/v1ue8EZY

Here's a pastebin of all my twitter-related rules. You can see I've tried to manually delete a _lot_ of nodes.

https://pastebin.com/Q6X8PrGu

I love this thread. Personally I use Twitter to follow people who write interesting tweets about programming, but the trending sidebar tries very hard to make anybody anxious.

This problem might already be solved!

The creator of https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter dropped by and brought this tool to my attention.

It's everything I wanted, works perfectly, has plugins for Chrome and Firefox.

Check it out! Might be exactly what you need.

fwiw, node.closest(selector) lets you query up the tree for the first parent that matches.

    for (const node of document.querySelectorAll('[aria-label="Verified account"]')) {
      node.closest('[role="article"]').remove()
    }

Doesn't get the most top-level wrapper, but it also works well with retweets. Doesn't work with verified replies though (removes the verified tweet reply but not the other person's tweet), too lazy to look.

I converted your code into a uBlock Origin filter. For replies, it also only removes the verified reply. I tried to get it to work, but I think that might be impossible with just CSS selectors.

  twitter.com##[role="article"]:has([aria-label="Verified account"])

uBlock Origin supports XPath

    ##:xpath(//*[@role="article"][descendant::*[@aria-label="Verified account"]])

Unfortunately no document.queryXPathAll but is easy to shim [2]. It is great technology, sadly not known.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:has

[2] http://sergeykish.com/web-api-element-prototype-queryxpathal...

Permanently unfollowing all verified users wouldn't even remove all the verified tweets from your timeline, since non-verified users might retweet verified users.

Turns out something that does this already exists!

The creator of https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter dropped by and brought this tool to my attention.

It's everything I wanted, works perfectly, plugins for Chrome and Firefox.

Check it out! Might be exactly what you need.

I've just added this as a "Verified accounts" feature you can toggle on in the options of my Tweak New Twitter extension (v1.23 - Chrome Web Store always takes a while to update):

https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter

If you just want to check how much of your timeline is driven by verified accounts, you can also have them highlighted instead of hidden:

https://imgur.com/gallery/lcqq5bq

Oh hey, thanks for this extension, I swear this extension is the only reason I find Twitter nearly tolerable anymore. (Of course extensions can't fix the toxicity of Twitter itself, but hey.)

Wow! This extension is amazing!

I'm the OP that shared the crazy JS script to temporarily delete/hide tweets from verified users.

I just installed this extension for Firefox, and it's a breath of fresh air.

Thank you!

I tried to update my original comment to say

> https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter does everything I'm suggesting here and better, permanently, etc, go install it

but it's too old of a comment to edit.

What stands out to me is how empty Twitter is without all those widgets that exist only to juice engagement. The new much older Twitter-inspired default Mastodon layout is how I wish Twitter still was with sidebar widgets serving function instead of investors.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/mastodon-2.9/

I don't want a whole column devoted to pushing the latest horrors of the world on me and a bunch of people I don't know or have any interest in following. And that's with ads blocked.

Just wanted to let you know this extension is fantastic, awesome work

I use this extension everyday. One request is to make center content take full width (since I hide the sidebar and other widgets).

Thanks for the extension!

I created an issue for this with a snippet you can use in your browser console to try it out - what do you think of the resulting size of media tweets?

https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter/issues/25

Yeah, I've actually got a custom Chrome Extension I've been working on to do stuff like this, though more around deleting Promoted tweets, tweets from people I don't follow ("buddy liked [stupid tweet I don't want to see]")... I had it working perfectly until the recent redesign. Even re-filtered as I scrolled, by hooking into the same lazy-load events they used... One day I'll get it working again! Thing is, posting it on the Extensions directory requires paying $5 and I also imagine Twitter might take action against my account if I posted a browser extension that blocks their Promoted tweets...

Turns out this tool already exists! The creator of https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter dropped by and brought this tool to my attention.

It's everything I wanted, works perfectly, plugins for Chrome and Firefox.

Check it out! Might be exactly what you need.

Ah nice that's amazing, I'll check it out. Thanks!! :D

> a smarter solution,

Add the following to your hosts file

  127.0.0.1 twitter.com

This saves you from even loading those DOM elements in the first place

This is the real answer right here.

Forgive me while I try to fix the formatting on this comment (it was breaking the page layout). HN's markdown to HTML translator is choking here...

Edit: ok, a line break has been visited upon the ninth generation. I think that's the minimal fix.

The problem is that very long lines of code that the browser interprets as a single word end up blowing HN's table layout. We're working on a fix.

> ...parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement...

I feel like there's got to be a more concise way to do that.

My twitter feed was pretty slow without the Blue Checks. The dialogue was way more in the middle. There was suddenly little conversation about today's meme (cake? idk.) The whole thing felt pretty civilized.

It made me realize how much content these twitter blue checks are creating. It's crazy.

not only that but how partisan blue checks are.

i felt the same: a lot of middle ground conversation, but nobody was calling out each other with quoted RTs.

That's how you get to be a Twitter celebrity: be either divisive or entertainingly obnoxious. Be a clown or lead a lynch mob.

It also overlaps to some extent with how you get to be a real celebrity, but social media makes the effect more extreme.

It's almost as if the media was taking advantage of our psychological shortcomings and invading our personal lives for profit, at the expense of our well-being, eh?

The Internet used to be a refuge from the corporate public sphere; now it's its home.

I was reading a book this morning about mushroom foraging and suddenly realized that I hadn't seen an advert in quite some time because it was a book and not my phone. Then I thought about getting rid of my phone and only reading books from now on. Now I'm posting this on my phone. It's quite annoying how terrible the internet is now. I used to feel comfortable having a conversation in a forum without thinking it was all generated from some AstroTurfing nonsense or would be used to send me highly personalized ads.

Some eReaders (avoiding naming names to avoid advertising at you :P) also enable easy book-like reading (i.e. e-ink, no backlight/glare) without ads. I like them because I can have a whole library in the size of one book. And also I admit to a certain degree of anxiety about bending book binding, particularly in paperbacks.

I bought an e-reader when I went off to do an internship one summer and wouldn't have access to the university library.

Internship ended up being a dud (they paid me for 40 hours a week but only had work for me to do about 5-10 hours a week). I read over 50 books that summer, mostly classics that I got free from Project Gutenberg. Definitely got my money's worth.

I used to have an ereader but I guess I missed turning pages. I never felt like I completed a book or had some physical sense of where I was in a book.

I highly recommend setting up a pi-hole on AWS somewhere, with custom DNS ports and using a vpn client that can redirect all DNS requests from the device there. On android NetGuard works well.

I hardly ever see an ad on the phone now. Astroturfing is a whole other question though.

I actually have been thinking very hard about the problem of astroturfing and how to combat it. Not really sure how I would go about it currently but one idea I tossed around is IP address physical location, it might work on HN...at least during working hours. Mixed with a bit of submission and comment history processing, it's almost viable as a concept.

Install uBlock Origin and enable all filters. Enjoy the web and don't feel guilty about it. Nobody is entitled to views, ad clicks or even our attention.

Yes I did this on my laptop and it's always shocking when I look at my phone.

The model I use for making sense of Twitter is that most of the blue check dialogue is just bringing the people-fighting-on-cable-news dynamic to the internet. Personalities on both sides of every debate have a symbiotic relationship where they have inane arguments because that's what gets boosted and gives them more visibility.

Which is fine, if you treat it as entertainment, but people think they're following the news and instead they're watching a wrestling match.

The painful realization about social media and most forms of media is that, at the end of the day, even the people you like, the people you agree with, have very little in common with you and far more in common with those they vocally disagree with, generally.

I'm generally politically very left and I listen to a show which I won't name here but is also relatively left. At some point, I realized the income the hosts make puts them squarely in the same economic bracket as many of the people that they are often calling greedy or unprincipled. From that realization stemmed the next, that these people, even if they started with perfect intention and perfect action, necessarily must be subverted towards entertainers over informers by the design of the platforms they use to spread their message.

This post feels 100% like it's about Chapo.

Yes. Surely it's about Chapo. I'd certainly not call them as 'greedy' or 'unprincipled' as the people they criticise. However I'll not waste this opportunity to call them bland, effete and ignorant.

Please stop downvoting comments just because you disapprove. This is probably the worst practice on HN of late.

This post is entirely independent of the subject being discussed. I have no opinion on these particular podcasters.

I don't even have the rep to downvote comments.

Late reply. It was your comment that had been downvoted into the negative when I came across it. So I was engaging in a kind of off-topic defense of your comment. ;-)

If only there was an unfollow button!

Doesn't help you'll still see the retweets eventually through the algorithm or from followers you actually like, only way is to mute or block every one.

Very well put. Though there is still some refuge in smaller online communities, if you know where to look. If you limit your exposure to specific places and avoid the rampant toxicity elsewhere, it's not that bad. :)

This is why I'm only on HN.

Uh....you’re the one following them. Take some freaking responsibility for yourself.

No. You see a lot of stuff that's retweeted or replied to from people you don't follow. Seems odd to have an irate opinion of someone's use of a social media platform that you are not familiar with.

Me? Hahaha. I don't "follow" anyone. I don't have any social media account. Haven't had one in five years, and I encourage everyone to do the same. I don't even use WhatsApp, for Christ's sake, and virtually everyone in my country uses it hourly! I'm responsible alright. Can you make the same claim?

1 - unfollow the most polarizing blue check accounts

2- select "Latest tweets" instead of "Top tweets" in the timeline config (the "starts" icon on the top right middle corner)

It will improve the quality of the timeline

The problem isn't that Blue Check marks are polarizing. The problem is that there are lots of communities on twitter - gamers, scientists, tech, conservative, bernie. The problem is that accounts with a large number of followers will necessarily have followers who come from lots of different communities. It's when these communities come into contact with each other that fights happen. That's the mechanism for the creation of drama on twitter, it's two groups that come from fundamentally different bubbles intersecting.

Latest definitely is the only true way to use Twitter. Does anyone really need to see what other people you follow have liked or replied to? If they wanted me to see they would have retweeted.

One thing I've noticed is that the app periodically switches my preference from "Latest tweets" back to "Top tweets". I'm not sure if it's just a bug, but I wouldn't be surprised if that behavior was intentional.

It happens on a lot of social media where there's a sort by "top" vs "newest". It's a dark pattern and I'm convinced it's both intentional and cargo-culted. I recall having the issue with Facebook about a decade ago when they first rolled out "top" posts in favor of newest.

I believe this is intentional.

It is intentional and if you look on the app when you're switching between the two it even says "We'll switch you back to top tweets after a little while" or something along those lines. True jerk design.

one way i found to make sure my timeline is always on "latest" mode is by creating a private list and adding all my follows to it.

no ads, always latest.

Or even better, use Lists.

I wonder if we could have Twitter pause or blue-out the mobberatti when things get too hot.

PG&E style automated trips when things reach a certain pitch when it comes from the blue-checks (at least the ones historically looking for reaction)

How about when things should get a little hot? SOPA would have passed [1] without frantic outrage.

Where do you want to be when a major hurricane hits? New York or New Orleans? How about Puerto Rico? Having a voice matters.

[1] https://youtu.be/RJ194S7KjRg

So is Twitter a right guaranteed by the constitution or is it a private company free to censor whomever it deems to have crossed a fuzzy line it cannot define in plain terms?

Who was we in, "I wonder if we could have Twitter ..."?

If other citizens are making decisions for Twitter, some government rule about being a neutral carrier sounds less radical than a government rule about maintaining decorum.

Honestly, I don't even read Twitter or have an account, I'm just wary of calls to control conversations in order to seek harmony.

My goodness. It is almost as if creating class distinctions leads to tribal behavior. Who would have guessed?

I'm not a huge twitter user, but I went into this article skeptical. I always saw the problem as too many bots - fake profile pictures and regurgitated statements that amplify pundits, harass people for having an opinion, scam people out of money, and altogether make the most of internet anonymity. I imagine a "grey checkmark" that would require some form of human-to-human authentication (although obviously such an institution would introduce corruption).

After this experiment, I'm realizing it's more complicated than that. Twitter is a reverse-shit sandwich. Crap in the lowliest dredges (the bot level), crap at the top (the pundit level), and a few pleasant people talking about cakes, music, and urban planning in the middle.

That's the thing - Twitter creates a situation where to dominate the medium, you need to be loud and abusive. Lots of people will use the medium without the need to dominate but those who need to be on top of the social hierarchy will do what it takes to get to the top of this hierarchy (or be replaced by those who do).

I mean, I'm pretty critical of social hierarchies (for a long time I considered myself an anarchist but no longer). But particular kinds of social hierarchies are part of this society and while improving this society is one thing, imagining we can eliminate social hierarchies without changing other stuff is another and problematic thing in my opinion. A lot of the problematic evolution of this society over the last fifty years has involved the change from authorized, rules-setting authority to bullying-authority and that's produced some actual abuse but has moreover, reduced our ability to act against visible problems, a situation that's past the verge of crisis.

I didn't see any links to these in the replies so I thought I'd share: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

Twitter users are extremely unrepresentative of the US population.

>The analysis indicates that the 22% of American adults who use Twitter are representative of the broader population in certain ways, but not others. >Most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets from adult U.S. users

so 2.2% of Americans make 80% of the tweets lol

This doesn't really seem to have anything to Twitter's account verification feature. Surely the verified accounts just tend to be more popular and you were just seeing what your feed looks like with less popular accounts.

> The dialogue was way more in the middle. [] The whole thing felt pretty civilized.

> It made me realize how much content these twitter blue checks are creating.

Ironically, content that includes yelling at the unwashed masses for making twitter toxic. Bastards.

My recipe for using twitter in psychologically sustainable way:

1) Follow only people you have met in person, or otherwise directly corresponded with. I make very few exceptions to this.

2) Disable all retweets. Twitter doesn't make this easy, but there are tools that do it in bulk.

3) Make sure you're looking at 'latest tweets' mode, so that you only see the content you chose with (1) and (2). Twitter very frustratingly will put you back in 'top tweets' mode periodically, so you'll have to keep an eye on this. It feels like this happens about every 2 weeks but I haven't measured.

With this setup, nearly all of the viral BS drops away. I only see tweets in which a person I have some relationship with has taken the time to actually type something. 'quote tweets' are still problematic, but it's not nearly as bad.

The Tweak New Twitter extension has an option to permanently keep you in latest tweets mode.

I have a shorter algorithm.

1) Don't.

O(1), I like it.

Well there isn’t any argument for why Twitter was at ”its best” during that hour. It is just a blogspot surfing the wave of the meme that Twitter without verified accounts is better. It is a joke that reflects an insatisfaction with social media (and maybe the world), only that.

By this time, the trick is getting old: get a topic that is trending on Twitter, write a few paragraphs giving some context using some humorous language and then print a selection of the funniest/cleverest tweets on topic. That’s it.

Why HN crowd give it the front page? I believe because HN crowd shares this zeitgeist that distrusts so called “experts”. It is a vote that we dislike a culture that is steered by influencers and people trying to earn more audience (the currency of this time).

I agree with the sentiment, but the article is pretty empty about it, just a meme retweet basically.

Completely agree. The term "experts" in that context frustrates me -- and I think you're highlighting this with "so called" -- because I want experts who actually fulfill that role responsibly. The only expertise which Twitter surfaces is "Twitter Expertise" and the other talents are incidental.

We don't want to be steered around by this, so how do we create mass-media that gives us the right properties, and what are those right properties in the first place?

The 'mass' in mass media is not one of the properties. The only mass media you need is a couple newspapers.

Not sure where I heard it, but someone said: twitter is a mirror pretending to be a window. It's easy to get this experience every day by just not following verified accounts.

I would agree, except that Twitter pushes so much content from people you don't follow while attempting to keep you engaged. I'm talking about the likes, retweets, comments, etc. If twitter did only display content from people you followed, it would actually be quite pleasant to read.

I created a Chrome extension to do this, but the recent redesign broke it and I haven't figured out how to get it to work again. The new css/class system is rather opaque.

I wrote an extension which does that; it keeps you on the Latest Tweets timeline and moves retweets to their own fake timeline, so by default you only see original tweets and quote tweets from people you follow:

https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter

I've been using Twitter this way for years and consequently find the unmodified version completely unusable, so it was either learn how to do it on New Twitter or quit using it at all.

That seems redundant. You can already turn off seeing retweets from accounts you follow, and the "latest tweets" timeline is already pretty sticky. I've never had it revert to the default "home" timeline across any computer or phone app install.

My experience has been about once a month the iOS app (phone & tablet) will revert from Latest to Top. It will show an easy-to-miss toast message saying "You're now seeing top tweets first."

Once a month sounds nice. Mine likes to revert within a week :) (for the times I actually use twitter more than a couple times a month)

This is great, thank you! Installed!

I use separate private lists and only visit them instead of home page. No content pushing from Twitter, so far.

I use alternative applications. Tweetdeck on desktop and Flamingo for android. Among other things, they can view my follows in chronological order with no algorithm nonsense.

I agree. Got sick of the pushing.

Switched to going to the source, skipping social media which is just “Mechanical Turk for dumb shit”.

Discord/Slack groups for projects that have them.

Email is working great for connecting to academics and open source communities that don’t give a shit about Slack.

Twitter and Facebook seem anachronistic and archaic to me. If I wanted to know what the average American thinks about daily life right now, I’ll write in my journal or ask my neighbor.

> from people you don't follow

To try to recover the metaphor: A television pretending to be a window. Which... isn't a new problem.

Not following is not sufficient; all of the people you follow must also avoid verified accounts or at least not like or retweet them.

You can mute the verified accounts you don't like.

I cannot easily mute them all, and simply not following them won't work because I cannot be assured that my peers won't retweet or like them.

twitter is not mirror, it is another stage controlled by political actors who use it in a circular means to support stories pushed through other media, especially the news.

People bemoan corporate influence over the internet but completely ignore the fact the political parties exercise even far more influence because unlike a business they have sycophants within many organizations and it all is directed as a whole. the anger in today's society is nearly all generated by these groups which control so much of the media and social sites that you cannot avoid it. they poison every conversation so when they go missing it can be deafening

"Just only follow the accounts that interest you" is the lie we were all fed when we were forced off RSS and onto Twitter.

It's just not true, politics and verified accounts creep through the woodwork like a silverfish infestation sooner or later no matter who you follow. Either by algorithm or by someone you followed for a different reason turning their account into a politics account.

Twitter could have a global switch to turn all this stuff off but chooses not to because the power to show you this stuff is more desirable than providing you a stress free space.

I noticed that without the verified accounts, there weren’t a lot of focal points for rage and partisanship to collect. I suspect that’s part of why twitter felt so different during the blue-out.

"Professionally outraged" is the best term I've heard for most of the blue check accounts.

Twitter doesn't need to be (and at one time was not) as toxic as it is. People just learnt to be that way to get traffic to their book or whatever.

Experiment: A social network that kicks people off after X,000 followers

In a way, you could "cancel" someone by following them, but if enough people don't also follow them. Then you just see their tweets.

This is actually kind of an interesting idea. What kind of social dynamics would play? On one hand, you want to see someones tweets, but if you follow them, you may cancel them.

I think the "canceling" is too extreme, but the idea of limiting the number of people can follow / be followed by seems interesting, especially in the context of Dunbar's number [0] where a person could only really maintain ~150 connections.

Users would then need to decide who's more important to their feed, their best friend's sister or Justin Bieber. It may lead to interesting social dynamics in the same way that Twitters 140-character restriction created new discourse dynamics.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

People would just create multiple accounts.

No matter how high you build the wall, someone will always bring a taller ladder.

Maybe make it cost money to start an account, and you can only follow x00 people whereas it takes x000 to get.. "dissipated"

Bots could instantly destroy whatever account they want, and people would feel guilty about following someone/something popular and just not do it, which eliminates the point of a follow system except for for personal friends/family. So basically it would make it more like Facebook and anyone with a bit of time/money could almost definitely delete anyone's account they wanted to.

>A social network that kicks people off after X,000 followers

and names a dog park after them.

Slight tweak - rather than X,000 followers, kick the top x-percentile. Allows people to come back on, and enhances that delicious "cancel them at the risk of making them more listened to" game theory that you have identified.

There should be an annual twitter holiday where they shut off all blue checkmarks to celebrate the hapless masses that constitute the bulk of the social capital behind the checkmark itself.

The fact that it happened suddenly is why it worked. If it was predetermined, all the tweets will be about how verified users couldn't tweet (at already started getting there after a few hours this time as well).

Good point. Set it up to ask /dev/random to pick one day per year.

Everyone would just make an alternate account and not apply for the checkmark on it, although I suppose that might still align with your goals.

It'd be a neat feature to allow blocking all messages from verified accounts.

I took a list at who on my follow list is checkmarked and besides a few friends, it's mostly reporters. So here's a related but separate point:

Something I often do, when I want to retweet a news article in my feed, is find the reporter who broke it and retweet their account rather than the person I was following. I think it's good to incentivize original reporting and therefore good if those folks are given a larger platform. I'd hate for those folks to lose out.

That said, I'd also be very curious about impact beyond that.

Note: I don't apply this retweet-rule to news that would have been public had the reporter done nothing. For example, on SCOTUS decision days, while I LOVE the work SCOTUSBlog does, I don't particularly care who I retweet for non-analysis breaking news.

I expect the impact would be that it would be less about news and products and more about what your friends ate for lunch.

Sounds like a great opportunity for a browser extension.

I only read twitter through garbage news sites. Yesterday was almost interesting. Mostly because I remember getting chain mail "from bill gates" claiming that he'd enrich me for passing it on, back in the late 90s. Didn't fall for it then; had to educate grandma. But bitcoin users are that un-savvy today? Time to make popcorn.

Honestly, if you would have invested in Microsoft stock then he would've definitely enriched you.

>bitcoin users are that un-savvy today

It's unlikely: the crypto world is savage enough that fools and their money are quickly parted. Most of the transfers to the address could easily be the scammers sending themselves money to make it look more legit.

pretty much confirming my hunch that it's not an Eternal September problem with Twitter, but that it started being shit after Oprah and all the other celebrities started using it and it being popular as a source of news.

It's not an influx of newbies at all. Social media can be full of literal clueless newcomers - it just needs to be social and not corporate.

It's why reddit is dying too - everyone suspects it and the actual effect is less opaque that it's also jumped the shark and is no longer democratically social but corporate / PR influenced.

It's a feedback loop though, whatever comes next will draw the crowds, which will draw loud voices, which will draw capitalists to form a structure (and career) out of it. There was a great essay on this topic that shows up here from time to time, using slightly different words: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths.

How does any sane, professional person even use Twitter?

Do people have jobs?

We get quite a ton of email/messages for work, then you maybe have some browsing interest, then personal family messages - how on earth does anyone have time for Twitter, unless they are in the press?

I gave it up forever ago. There is absolutely nothing to miss but the tiny dose of dopamine or however it goes.

There's nothing there.

Nobodies 'Zen Soudbyte' matters, at all.

Tech Support. A lot of companies will keep you in phone hell, but complain at them on Twitter gets a response (well, except Apple - they don't give a damn about anything, looking at you Apple Maps).

I recently closed my Twitter account though. For the last 3 years I'd exclusively used it to complain about companies without adequate support systems elsewhere, but anyone googling me would have come off with a bad impression as the last 2 pages of tweets were complaints and it ranked highly for my name

Delete the tweets after the issue is resolved. No real need to leave those type of things on Twitter. Also, search is time limited on Twitter, but I cannot remember the exact limit.

I'm always a little surprised by these sorts of views of Twitter. In my areas, nearly everyone is there. Twitter is full of Academics, and often the most successful ones are the heaviest users.

the question is though, do you get anything out of it by reading all that stuff. And I mean actually getting something out of it other than just the feeling you've read something useful?

It's not like anyone actually becomes an academic by following academic conversation on twitter, or as if one learns science or maths by reading "mathy" threads on twitter.

I think like news even "high-brow" twitter conversations are essentially just infotainment. You can read news for four hours a day and you feel informed, but often you can just drop 90% of it and you don't lose any actual in-depth knowledge.

Sure I do - I get to see what people in various fields are writing and thinking about at a broad level, which I find interesting. I see the work of the many artists and creators I follow. I get to see what people think of my own work, which is the whole point of producing it in the first place.

I don't use Twitter to get in-depth information, and I'm not sure why you'd think that was the purpose (although people might link to where you can get that information, obviously).

I'd prefer it if it was an open platform, but it is what it is.

Fair enough - but what do they put in 200 characters that is important, and how often?

I mean, when they release a paper? How often is that?

What % of their tweets are of interest, and what % are them being 'forced' to play the social media game to improve their 'stature' among funders, peers etc.? I often wonder how much they might loathe it themselves.

As someone 'social media adjacent' - having been forced to think of a few things to Tweet once for a company, it was probably one of the more ridiculous things I've ever done as a professional. Invent something out of total thin air, to stir the pot, for no reason other than to stir the pot to garner attention.

I understand the dynamic people are pressed into - and I don't blame a soul for it ... however I get this funny feeling that a lot of people Tweeting hate it just as much (ie making up stuff) and resent the fact they feel compelled to do it, and another group who derive way too much sense of false identity out of it.

The term "social media" kinda puts Twitter on equal footing with Facebook, but it's really not. FB is over 2.5 billion active users worldwide, while Twitter has around 300 million. Twitter can be good for finding original sources around newsworthy events, but it's not that good for connecting socially because the majority of people aren't on Twitter.

I mostly follow people who work in/around my specific engineering niche and it's amazing for that and really the only way that I stay in contact with them. It's a lot like reddit, you can stick with the terrible default subreddits or unfollow them and branch off on your own journey. That could be a positive one, news-flush, or maybe you go for the redpill. But you do control who you follow.

It also leads to me getting breaking news before it's even put out, whether that's political news, or an OSS project launching something new, etc.

I've learned a LOT following lawyers/professors/historians/scientists/engineers over the last year. But now I need to go in and clear out the accounts that aren't really bringing anything positive into my life.

I basically treat Twitter as the millennials Linkedin and I stay far as possible from Linkedin now.

> How does any sane, professional person even use Twitter?

Follow people in your chosen field who tweet mostly/exclusively about a domain you want to stay up to date on. Lists are also good for this.

I wanted a FAANG job so I followed on Twitter every engineer I could find from the company I wanted to work at. Reading them every day gave me the impression that I too had to be popular on Twitter to get a job there.

I got the job and soon realised that no one I work with is a Twitter personality. I'm not aware of anyone I work with having a social media presence at all. These are some of the world's best engineers, they do hugely influential work and outside of their colleagues no one has ever heard of them.

When you're on Twitter you get the impression that the whole world is there and anyone who isn't there is not relevant.

There are thousands of engineers where I work, why did I think that you had to be a Twitter personality just based on a few dozen people I could find on Twitter?

Brent Simmons noted this on his blog after joining Audible:

> "I haven’t noticed that the people I work with have a lot of public social media presence. (Maybe I just haven’t gotten clued-in yet?)"

The majority of people don't use Twitter at all. Of those who do, the majority aren't Twitter "personalities".

I deleted my Twitter account and haven't looked back.

I don't understand the question. People have time for Twitter the same way you have time for HN and Netflix.

In a similar vein: The social media (in particular Reddit and 4chan) is a different beast on national US holidays, when all the professional opinion steering forces are at rest.

I mean, is 4chan ever really any good?

It's one of the last places you can make a post without having people trawl though your posting history if they dislike something you said. It's an interesting feature.

Also, no downvoting. Just discussions. On Reddit they use downvotes as a way to disagree

Sometimes better than Reddit

Try it. But don't go to /b/. Watch pol, but only observe for a while. Don't get offended, enjoy the liberty and range of ideas - there are goldmines there regularly. Also you'll read things there first, and a lot of things that will never be on the news. If you ignore the slide and shill threads, it's one of the best places on the net right still.

yes

It's how I found out about https://promiseskept.com/ and http://www.magapill.com/ - lists of things Trump has actually accomplished, without the "Trump is bad" rhetoric. And despite the name of the latter, it's not just a Trump fansite - it's based entirely on links to external sources. Unfortunately, the first one doesn't seem to have sources even though it's organized much better.

(And yes, per sibling comment - it was /pol/)

keep in mind that jeffery epstein's death news was first broken on 4chan before MSM picked it up.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/4chan-jeffrey-epstein-...

4chan is not just an image board, but an intelligence service too.

>4chan is not just an image board, but an intelligence service too.

Let's not go too far, Pizzagate and QAnon started on 4chan as well. Calling it an "intelligence service" implies a degree of agency or purpose that 4chan doesn't have, or even care about.

All this drama made me realize that I'm using Twitter just as much as Facebook: not at all.

Same here.

I've heard about how much I'm missing out by not using Twitter, yet I've never felt held back by not having a Twitter account.

Read any online newspaper and it's basically just the highlights from twitter anyways.

Having quit social media years ago, I’ve accomplished the same exact thing but on a permanent basis. I highly recommend it. Silence truly is golden.

I don't fuck around with scrolling-based social media after leaving Facebook.

I will regularly do a bit of Hacker News and a bit of Reddit but that's it for me.

I've been off Twitter and Facebook for years, but I'm still stuck on HN and Reddit. I'm weening myself off of both of these, but god damn is it hard. Social media really clogs up my brain.

I'm planning on deleting the contents of my profiles across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and Instagram and suspending future posts on August 1st. (I tend to pin things to dates like that.)

The Twitter fiasco has me thinking I should move that date up, honestly. My DMs aren't TMZ fodder but I'd still be embarrassed if they were leaked and ended up on some dark web dump somewhere, and that is now a nonzero possibility.

Staying on social media these days is becoming a liability, even if you lock down your profile completely and stay private. For me, it's no longer worth it.

I've been on twitter almost as long as its been around. I remember when I first got a blue checkmark after I tied my phone number to my account. At some point a few years back, that checkmark was removed. There was some rumors that accounts following certain controversial people had their checkmark removed.

Someone should write a browser extension to disappear (or at least collapse) all tweets from and relating to blue-checked accounts. They're pretty much all either corporate or run by social media managers anyway, not the actual person they're claiming to be.

Yes, and they should call it Verifhide.

EDIT: Also, that's not always the case. The author of the piece herself is Verified and she clearly runs her own account: https://twitter.com/WaterSlicer

Could anyone recommend an easy/good way to quickly mass unfollow a ton of accounts based on the sort of things they post? Is there anything I can use that will just unfollow all the political accounts, or checkmarks or anything like that?

A bit DIY, but muting words could help for stuff like avoiding politics (unless you want to avoid those people even when not tweeting about politics).

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-m...

I use https://tokimeki-unfollow.glitch.me/. You have to unfollow one-by-one, but I think you could get a pretty decent pace going if you really tried.

I think the hardest thing here is that you mention "political accounts", and "political" means something different to everyone. So I think this will inevitably be a manual process.

Is anyone else unable to Tweet? It says something like "this message looks like it might be automated, it's been blocked to protect our users".

I mainly just tweet about tech topics and my account hasn't been compromised.

I don't have a blue check mark but I've had an account for years and have it linked to a phone number. This is the first time I've seen such a message but I can't tweet anything.

I opened a support ticket but the ticket auto-response said something along the lines of "thanks for the feedback, unfortunately we can't individually reply to every ticket, but be assured your feedback will help Twitter!".

If you want to take the trouble to sort people into lists, I reccomend https://github.com/KrauseFx/twitter-unfollow It unfollows everybody you're currently following but moves them onto a list called "Old Follows". You can then move them onto specific lists.

The nice thing is that you can look at a list and it will be in chronological order. No "Top view".

I also paid for Tweetbot because it has one killer feature: you can filter retweets. That cuts down on the echo chamber.

You can turn retweets off per account with vanilla Twitter now, it's such a useful feature.

If it was really that great, one would think the article would be able to point out some great things that came out of it. Instead it just points to a bunch of people saying how great it was.

I can't help but feel that twitter uses are kind of a self-hating bunch. Its a totally optional site where you can follow whomever you want, and the best thing to happen is for it to break for popular people? I don't understand why people use twitter if they don't want twitter to work. Nobody is forcing you; just quit if you don't like it.

I wonder how much of this was covered by "journalists temporarily can't tweet". I doubt anyone's Twitter experience is made much worse by, eg, Mindy Kaling's tweets.

Personally, I'm the opposite.

The primary reason I use Twitter is to read blue check marks (and other well known people). Why would I want to know what a random person thinks about an issue when I could hear from people who have built years of clout on a subject? I feel the same way in reverse -- why would anyone care what I think about something when I have no experience or track record on the issue?

I read the president's tweets as my daily amusement, and the fake Elon Musk's tweets are present in so many of them. This also happens on YT and comment sections on other websites. I've always reported them on twitter, but the reporting categories are so limited that I am sure my report get's lost among a bunch of nonsense.

Since the blue tick accounts are essentially broadcasters rather than users on Twitter, I support an occasional reset to zero.

I use https://tweetdeck.twitter.com to view twitter. I don't follow verified accounts and I filter out retweets so twitter feels pretty nice to me most days. I didn't even notice the great blue checkmark blackout.

I never knew this was such a big deal. I don't understand Twitter and the people that really live their lives by it, for it.

These people are all my age, and I've never felt so glad to be so disconnected. To not understand the memes or be involved in this Twitter conversation is fantastic.

I just use Tweetbot. The “authentic” Twitter is a mess.

Also very few accounts I follow are verified so I don’t know what this “cake” thing is all about.

They should make Twitter cost $1 per month (non prepaid card) and have the default setting to block all verified users.

Of course, the author of this unironical post has a verified account

It was the Twitter equivalent of 'million-short'.

> In 1998, folk

Geez can we get to the point ?

I liked the analogy. The reason Jewel's moronic book existed was not because she had an exceptional cultural contribution to make, but merely because there existed a machine that could put books on the rack at Barnes & Noble, and she was in the machine. The blue checks are the same way: they have the followers because they have the blue check, not because anything they tweet was worth reading.

I'm absolutely convinced that the world would be a better, smarter, more civil place if Twitter simply didn't exist at all. The tragedy for me is that whoever hacked Twitter wasted the opportunity to do something that permanently maimed the platform.

It would actually be cool if this was a regular thing -- the 15th of the month is officially the Twitter Sabbath, where the blue checks are muted, and only the voices of the masses are heard.

Verified accounts would just create a secondary accounts and ask people to follow them too.

I posted this to some friends:

PSA: Twitter has been very badly hacked. Apparently their internal systems were compromised allowing posts as all kinds of accounts. So... if your favorite celebrity, business leader, intellectual, or politician says something stupid... hmm... actually never mind. I don't see any difference between hacked Twitter and normal Twitter. Carry on.

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