Hacker News Reader

Comment by chaosharmonic | Hacker News Reader

> Removing everyone else doesn’t take as much work as I expected, as long as you’re not hesitant to unfollow (or even block) those who distract from your desired timeline.

It's also not even necessarily them. Twitter is enthusiastic in assuming that, because you're engaging with one person, you must also be interested in what they're engaging with.

My efforts to have reasoned debate with one person in my life who was becoming more and more aggressively MAGA (prior to some rather extreme takes on... well, several different incidents) did not in any way equate to having even a remote interest in being flooded with content from Ben Shapiro or Turning Point USA, just because she happened to give it fake Internet points.

I gave up on her Twitter well before I gave up on her as a person for this exact reason.

View on HN

Yeah, I think the rise of "follow-of-a-follow" "engagement" content and promoted tweets were where I heavily started to lose any impression at all that I could control/curate my Twitter timeline, and started to lose a lot of interest in Twitter altogether. (Algorithmic reshuffling of the "timeline" into something that wasn't purely time-based didn't help either, but seemed a modest symptom to the other two problems.)

Twitter lists are a good way to regain control of your timeline.

Create lists and unfollow everyone. This way you only get the content you want.

I feel like I can't trust Twitter not to inject "engagement" content into the core timeline of their product, I don't see the trust in relying on a secondary feature that could be shelved or similarly injected. I'm happy scratching my "I was an early adopter Twitter user" junkie itch on Mastodon these days, where I know I'm in a lot more control than Twitter wants to give me due to business model alone.

There is a star in the upper right that lets you put the timeline back to chronological order. Note that after undoing it (I couldn't stand the constant inanity), your timeline will take some time (~ a couple of weeks) for things to return to normal.

I did that as soon as it was offered back as an option. As I said, that wasn't the problem on its own, that felt like more of a symptom of the bigger problem that Twitter decided it was all about engagement and decided they wanted to inject whatever they wanted where ever they wanted into a timeline. The last time I tried to scroll through my Twitter feed in scrolling through 25 items every (!) fifth one was a mostly toxic "engagement trolling" or clickbait Promoted tweet from someone that I would never follow.

Maybe try realtwitter.com, which is a redirect to a useful search that only includes posts from people you follow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com