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Comment by jeffreyrogers | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

"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.

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

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