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Comment by cvwright | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome. Not because I like Twitter. It’s pretty awful.

And I don’t hold out much hope that this will do anything to stop Twitter from boosting crazy garbage in order to maximize “engagement” and sell ads.

I’m excited because I think this will make it easier for competitors to come along and offer a better, more user-focused experience. You can do a lot with $3/user.

Full disclosure: I’m building a privacy focused social network that will be a paid subscription service. https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios

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> It’s pretty awful.

I will not talk about the ethics and privacy issues of Twitter but about user experience and quality of content on feed.

The quality of content on your feed is as good as the people you choose to follow. Choose selectively, block and mute liberally. Keep doing this, and your feed will be fantastic.

I use Twitter only for work. I set my Trending country to some country I have never heard the name of outside of trivia books containing nation capitals.

And my Twitter experience is fantastic. Have meaningful discussions, learn new things, gain new perspectives.

I keep away from politics and such.

> The quality of content on your feed is as good as the people you choose to follow

Twitter is incentivized to introduce engagement-generating garbage into your feed whether you want it or not. You'll be fighting a never-ending battle.

how is twitter "introducing engagement-generating garbage" into feeds? (well, there are ads, but I use an adblocker)

Twitter's default view is an algorithmic timeline which in addition to being ordered randomly (you can't easily tell whether you've reached the end, thus spend more time on it and more opportunities to see ads - I believe this was the original reason why all social platforms switched to this model), it will also include tweets from people you don't follow.

You can opt-out and go back to the chronological feed (not sure if that also includes tweets from people you don't follow) but the setting "accidentally" resets every so often.

"Engagement" also goes beyond ads that you see. If you "engage", despite not seeing ads yourself, you're still contributing to their DAU/MAU metrics and creating content that others might engage with and they might see ads.

I set it to chronological feed once and that works. Certainly doesn't feel like a "neverending battle".

>It’s pretty awful.

Speaking of awful: Something Awful is an example of a paid social club that flourished. It can work. Twitter is a bit large and comes with certain connotations of low-brow behavior (ie the very essence of only using 160 characters to convey a thought), so I'm not confident it will succeed. It'll be interesting to watch what comes out of the paywall though.

I don't think there's much to be learned from SA in this context. It existed during a different time of the internet, when cultural capital and honestly just raw power were allocated differently.

It existed into the "modern" era of rage engagement, influencers, clickbait etc, but I would consider its "flourishing" to have ended well before that.

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