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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

The key to cleaning up my Twitter feed was to unfollow people who were too good at Twitter. That is: People who are working to maximize engagement, follower count, retweets, and likes.

In my feed, the highest signal to noise ratio comes from people who aren't commenting on any and every trending topic. Instead, they're busy doing real work, away from Twitter, only occasionally checking in to share something. Likewise, that's how I try to structure my own engagement.

When people have 50 Tweets per day or more, it's unlikely that they're taking time to really think and engage. It's more about rapid fire comments designed to get the most engagement.

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I have no idea how to do Twitter well. I have a serious medical condition and other issues and I spend most of my time basically trying to distract myself from the misery of my life and I sometimes spend all day on Twitter and sometimes don't look at it for weeks at a time.

Thank you for this observation.

I have heard of folks on twitter with huge follower-counts who use the medium as a form of one-way communication: they don't look at replies or mentions and have DMs turned off. That seems to be the best way to use it in my opinion.

So you're saying we need a platform with both characters/post and post/day limits?!

I mean... that's beautiful, because I created a second twitter account just so I can follow a select few people for the pretty much the same reason you gave without having to worry they're getting lost to the noise.

If the guiding rule from GP was "the best people to follow on Twitter are the people who don't use Twitter much" or "who only use Twitter to share what happens elsewhere", I don't think a rate limit would really help to satisfy that.

If you build those limits into the system then you lose some of your ability to filter for people who would naturally post below those limits.

You don't have to do it so simply as X posts/day. You can give some kind of 'influence points' per account or whatever that get automatically spread between posts. Tune it so at X/day each post is neutral, while more frequent become penalized and less frequent get a boost. There are probably better ways to do it, but this should get the idea across.

The social network I honestly want is something akin to the tradition of Christmas cards: a rare update (at most once a quarter) about how life is going with the option of attaching a few photos.

No comments section, but instead a "I'd like to get in touch and chat sometime" button which helps schedule a video chat.

No retweets, shares, engagement metrics.

Man, sign me up. I would love to have a Facebook again if you removed the news feed, likes, alarm red notifications, and long comment threads about politics or whatever. Just a casual "hey let's catch up" and "here's how my last month / quarter went," oh yeah, I'm in.

The ideal social network in my opinion is instant messaging. Its the only major platform which hasn't been infested with algorithms, marketing, "influencers" and all the other crap. Its just you and close contacts. The downside is you won't see random updates from people you don't interact with regularly but honestly its not the biggest loss.

I like the idea, but how is that different from a personal website/blog with private access?

The ability to have people on it who don't have the time or background to read tutorials on Digital Ocean?

Because the average joe won't know how to set up a private personal website / blog & many of us have friends outside to tech.

If only you had read the sibling comment and my answer there...

Do you mean the indieweb comment? I can't see any more.

Indieweb is a good idea but again, difficult set up for the average person.

No, I mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269124

Automattic made its fortune by developing and hosting Wordpress for people who are not tech savvy and wanted to have its place to write.

Apologies, I literally can't see that comment - it shows as [Dead].

I agree, there's a market for something that plugs the gap. But if it's not as easy as social media, it won't get the adoption these days.

Dead, really? Maybe it was the lmgtfy link that tripped the modbot.

> if it's not as easy as social media, it won't get the adoption these days.

I think that is backwards. Starting a blog is as easy as starting a Facebook account. The problem is that a blog does not give you the "engagement" of a social network and therefore can not compete for your attention against the very fine-tuned engagement machines of Facebook et al.

At the end of the day, content production in social networks follow a Pareto distribution. A small percentage produces the majority of the content and the rest is just there to share or produce noise. If you remove the tools that produce noise, you remove any reason for the majority to join. If you remove the strings that pull the noisy majority, you don't have a "social network". This is why my feeling is that "a social network with no engagement" is an oxymoron.

Yes you're right, the engagement is the most important part.

It's not the ease of creating the site, it's the ease of directing people to view / subscribe / communicate through & return to it & that is a very difficult problem to solve if you do not simply approach as a standard social network.

I guess to me there's a niche for smaller scale networks, which would suit those with lesser engagement needs. Most people want to comment & subscribe, I'd say that you could cut almost all other social network features and it would work to a degree.

> view / subscribe / communicate

You can still comment and subscribe on a blog, can't you? RSS is dead is only a figure of speech.

You can still have a blogroll on your site, can't you? Remember FOAF? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology)

My point is that we don't need to wish for a "Social network with less features". We just need to embrace technology that already exists and that has been ignored by big tech because they don't have much to gain by adopting it.

Totally agree, just think that we're talking about the same thing.

The technology exists, but it's making it super easy to sign up for completely tech illiterate users that's the problem.

I actually think tech-literacy on a wider scale is probably worse than it was 10 years ago because people stopped using the wide web and starting logging onto facebook and nothing else.

I really don't think it is a problem of "being difficult for non-techies".

I think that techies gave up on it. Even techies want to chase metrics, taking whatever shortcuts they can to build an audience, "growth hacking" and that includes playing the game by the rules of Big Tech.

As an example: I am working a lot with the blockchain/web3 community the past years and every company/project uses medium for writing their articles, have a strong Twitter presence and rely on Reddit for forum announcements. Nowadays it's getting worse that a lot of projects are adopting Discord for group chat. If even the uber-techies and supposedly defenders of decentralized are giving up on fundamentals of the web, why would the non-techies?

So Facebook before "shares", with a "poke" button? F.B. Purity can help restore some sanity to Facebook by killing all the shares, but since people stopped doing their own updates and photo albums to do vapid blog reshares instead, it will probably be a hollow experience.

In lieu of browsing Twitter directly, I've been using this service lately: https://fraidyc.at/

It's great because I can just see what people I care about post, and you can arrange it so that the people who post infrequently but that you really care about will be in your face when they do post. I find it soothing, and I can't wait for a proper mobile release.

Huh, for a while I've been wanting almost exactly this. I simulate it on Twitter by using a lot of (private) lists and sometimes navigating to single users, but that's clunky.

This is a really nice concept. I shall be signing up.

I quit Twitter recently due to the massive adverse impact it was having on my mental health. It essentially ended up personalizing every major bad thing happening in the world. I feel like I live on a significantly more peaceful planet since I stopped.

But I do miss the tech side, I used to follow a load of interesting people that I no longer see. I will add them on this!

That looks useful, thanks for the heads up.

It doesn't even matter if they're good at it. Anyone who is even trying to "win" at twitter is just going to actively make your feed worse. It's not just that they spam you with low-value tweets, but also that following them helps ensure that you land in that awful filter bubble of people who see twitter as a competition.

> The key to cleaning up my Twitter feed was to unfollow people who were too good at Twitter. That is: People who are working to maximize engagement, follower count, retweets, and likes.

Interesting. Do you have some specific heuristic for identifying those people?

One heuristic: does this person (or their org) make more money if they get more engagement on Twitter? You can unfollow most such people.

I dislike twitter. But do like digital painting artworks. My solution is an RSS feed of a bunch of twitter digital artists. Means I have no contact with twitter itself, but I do get exactly the content I want.

The key, for me, was to leave social media entirely. I can’t trust myself with that sort of moderation.

You mean Ben Shapiro didn't actually have to make his tweet about how his sex life sucks and his wife had gone on a two month getaway with her personal trainer? :o

I never "got" Twitter, it's a rapid fire barrage of random remarks and unless you spend a lot of recurring time on it you won't be able to follow what's going on. In my opinion anyway, my GF is really into it.

if i may share my personal experience with twitter: like any social media platform, it might be beneficial to actively avoid content that the platform is known for i.e. mainstream content.

i'm on twitter because i think there are some pretty funny people on there. so i only follow people i think are funny, and i actively block any type of content at first sight that kind of annoy me. worked out pretty well for me so far.

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