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Comment by bidirectional | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, I agree regarding the constant advertisement on Twitter, but I find the constant oversharing even worse. So many times I will see a few quality tweets from someone I don't follow, either retweeted by people I do follow or just recommended by the Twitter algorithm. Then when I do follow them the occasional interesting tweet is outnumbered 10:1 by mundane personal information about e.g. their kids or what they're having for dinner. No complaints about random people who use it as a social platform amongst friends doing this, but serious jouranlists with 50k followers who use Twitter as a career tool also do it. It reeks of narcissism.

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I gotta disagree there. The original Twitter was all about sharing random shit. People take it too seriously sometimes now that it’s big business.

I just unfollow people who have no Twitter-discipline and post random useless personal stuff, even if they do post quality tweets every now and then. Best to keep your follower list small and selective. Quality info will still get to you.

Different people follow for different things. Some people like seeing that other stuff. It would be very helpful if Twitter let accounts tag tweets into categories, and let people choose to subscribe or unsubscribe to those. Maintaining multiple Twitter accounts for different content is very tedious. No doubt your point is valid as well, it's easy to get addicted to that platform, and the likes and notification system gamifies that need for validation.

>>> It would be very helpful if Twitter let accounts tag tweets into categories, <<<

Something close is ‘Topics’ where Twitter automatically categorizes tweets into Topics such as Programming, Sports, Startup, etc. You can follow a topic and thus see only tweets in that group. So Mr A sends 2 tweets - one about his kids and the other about Python. If you’re following the topic ‘Programming’, you’ll only see the second tweet

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