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Comment by hk__2 | Hacker News Reader

My main issue with Twitter is that you follow people, but those people have different interests. So I may follow @JohnSmith because he’s a known dev in the JS community and tweets about JS, but he also tweets about his country’s politics, what he ate at lunch, and engage in heated debats about pineapple on pizza I don’t care about.

Twitter recently introduced topics, so that you can follow one topic that aggregates lots of tweets from various people. This is not what I want: I’d like to follow @JohnSmith, but only for the JS content.

As someone who tweets, I’d like some sort of kafka-ish topic queues: I would post tweets about JS in the JS queue, and tweets about Italian food in that other queue, so that people could follow the queues they want. In the end I don’t tweet on either topic because I’m afraid I’ll deceive people who followed me for the other content.

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God forbid anyone be multifaceted.

It seems the the rise of influencer culture led to everyone else feeling like they had to only be in a specific niche, and only speak about it or they weren’t going to serve their “fanbase”.

And you know they’re probably right that they wouldn’t serve that fanbase, but good grief has it made the net a generally much more boring place with space only for near-deified experts & influencers and perpetual newbs, leaving little room for anyone in the middle to have nuanced and varied conversations.

It’s not that there is something wrong with you posting that stuff. It’s that it ruins the experience for followers.

I follow a few hundred people who only post about specific topics they are experts in and it’s still almost too much.

The last thing I want to read is all of their half-baked political opinions thrown in with hemorrhoid complaints.

The truth is idgaf about the individual persona on Twitter. Being multifaceted is for friends and other real human relationships.

I agree that it's extremely important that people be multifaceted. I also think people over-weight how important it is for them to express their individuality.

That said, I think the biggest issue is neither of the above, but rather that it's really hard to design interfaces that allow people to sort the signal from the noise. To weight/filter information. I just haven't seen it.

Back to OP and @JohnSmith: if OP worked in an office with @JohnSmith, OP could tune out @JohnSmith's pineapple-pizza rants … or walk away. This would be easy and natural. OP would that they were analyzing this and adjusting appropriately to maximize JS discussion while avoiding pineapple.

We naturally weigh, throttle, and filter the input of others. This allows us to take the good with the bad.

This is the nuance that Twitter—and most social media—lacks: how do I stay up on what matters most without being overwhelmed by what doesn't without separating content from context?

Back in the day, we’d tag our blog posts and people could subscribe to any subset of tags.

Consider Asia Carrera as someone whose insights would be very interesting on a regular basis but who might also post content you would want to avoid.

> God forbid anyone be multifaceted.

It's fine (and necessary) for everyone to be multifaceted. But it's not wrong to not care about some facets of a person you follow, in the context of social media.

Even two different people following the same person would care about different facets of that person, and not care about others.

The point is it's easier to manage the stream of information available to you if you can filter signal from noise in a way that you want.

Does that create a filter bubble? Maybe. Would it be better for everyone to read everything from everyone to get a broader perspective? Maybe. Or, maybe that would be worse, since there would be so much noise to sift through that the signal would be impossible to find.

no no, that's not the problem. reddit lets one person post in a particular place for a particular topic, and other places for other topics.

no one is complaining that a given person talks about multiple things.

people sometimes complain that there is only one topic on Twitter: the main stream, and therefore only one way to consume the things those individuals say. it's all or none, and that's what people are not happy about.

there's an argument to be made that "this is how Twitter is" which is valid, I think.

there's also an argument to be made that "my interests are specific, and everything else wastes my time" and I think there is just as much merit in that point of view.

This is why I spend more time on reddit than other social networks. Though they've tried to move away from it recently reddit has always been a content-focused network instead of a people-focused network.

You’re on Hacker News, which is exactly the opposite of Reddit for the reason you describe. dang reminded me the other day of this comment of his where he lays out HN’s position as a non-siloed site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

HN definitely has a topic, it's "things that hackers find interesting". Mainstream political news is usually off topic unless it's incredibly important. And you definitely can't post about that pizza you had for lunch, unless it's a rundown of how you built an arduino-controlled pizza oven.

Twitter has no topic at all. The interesting is jumbled with the inane, so the signal to noise ratio is very poor.

I don't need nuanced and varied conversations.

I don't care about @JohnSmith's political stance or what pizza he likes.

I don't think the issue is being multifaceted, that seems a really uncharitable interpretation of what he wrote.

Twitter is really great for almost any niche interest.

It is an absolute toxic wasteland dumpster-fire for anything related to politics (yes, even your politics) so sensible people would best avoid those political posts/discussions at all costs.

I want to follow @john-smith for his nuanced, thoughtful views on solid state batteries and EVs, and I'm extremely annoyed when he's retweeting moronic, tribalist politics into my feed.

They don't do this because it would massively reduce engagement. Same reason Instagram doesn't let you categorize your follows into lists such as "Artists" and "Friends" and "Travel", it would reduce the amount of time you spend scrolling, seeing ads, and engaging with content you wouldn't have otherwise.

All of these companies build user experiences entirely dedicated to profit, not giving the user the best experience.

I think in general just limiting your world view to singular topics is also just not a great way to learn about the world. We all have our blindspots, and it's exacerbated by that sort of curation

Twitter shows me a world of hate. More so than 4chan ever did. No thanks.

Everyone posting about $CURRENT_POLITICAL_ISSUE is not a great way to learn about the world, especially when they have no idea of what's actually happening and just post to feel good or be part of something. It's also way too biased for current US things. I don't need to see people talking about California fires for a month, and never ever hear about what's happening in my country. This is not "learning about the world", this is just a new flavor of the US cultural hegemony.

But on Instagram each post has tags and you can follow tags instead of people in your main timeline. This solves the problem mentionned.

Per the grandpost:

> Twitter recently introduced topics, so that you can follow one topic that aggregates lots of tweets from various people. This is not what I want: I’d like to follow @JohnSmith, but only for the JS content.

I don't want to follow a tag, I want to follow the specific artists that I like and just see their work without all my friends' vacation posts in between.

Unless I'm missing something, Twitter does support lists?

Yes Twitter does, but doesn't do a good job of making them easy to use.

Maybe, but I barely tweet and don’t follow any individuals for the reasons OC mentioned. I’d love to follow an individual working on ML or AI, but the individual’s content is only interesting to me 5-10% of the time because of the varied interests OC mentions.

If Twitter could give me interesting topical content I’d be much more engaged on the platform.

> As someone who tweets, I’d like some sort of kafka-ish topic queues: I would post tweets about JS in the JS queue, and tweets about Italian food in that other queue

Very much this. As it is, if you've been followed mostly for JS, starting to tweet about Italian food feels like standing up at a JS meetup and telling people about Italian. I'd tweet more, on a greater diversity of interests, if that didn't mean hosing people. I'd also like to have tagging of "value vs smalltalk", to distinguish a JS thing worth standing up and bending 50 people's ears on, vs only worth an aside in an after-meetup bar-table JS discussion among local friends.

How might the market be altered to avoid network effects plus we've-thankfully-found-a-viable-niche conservatism from stagnating societal infrastructure progress?

Or even a personal vs. professional persona.

In this aspect, Pownce[1] had 'channels' and later on Google+ had 'circles', so one could subscribe to a subset of one's interests. Pownce came along one year after Twitter and was quickly abandoned.

Meanwhile, somewhat on-topic, I'm still annoyed that Facebook's mighty algo is showing me posts in languages that I don't speak / interact with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pownce#Comparisons_with_simila...

Circles were a way to organize contacts and had nothing to do with posts. It allowed you to share posts with a subset of your contacts, but offered no control to those users about which of your posts they see.

Google+ had Circles for this reason and you could follow only a specific Circle (tag) of a person. But people thought Google+ was not cool enough :)

But weren't circles selected by the poster? In this case the "follower" want to filter

You are correct, but most people where using the feature, creating topic-based Circles for their posts.

Google+ had this concept and I really liked it.

Google+ "Circles" didn't really do this. As a poster I want to be able to say "this is a post about parenting" which is either a hint to the Algorithm which it can use in its quest to maximize engagement, or an explict signal to notify people who follow jefftk:parenting. With Circles, the best I could do was say "please show this post only to the friends who are in my 'parenting' Circle". This has two problems:

1. What topics someone is interested in is something they probably know more about than the poster does.

2. Because Circles were used for access control, someone I had not placed in the "parenting" Circle would not be allowed to read the post.

The closest thing I've seen to this is bloggers having tags, and making RSS feeds available both for everything and for individual tags.

> kafka-ish topic queues

Initially I was very confused as to why you would want kafkaesque features added.

This is the biggest pain I have in Twitter. I use Twitter mostly for Statistics/Bayesian methods (in English) and Chilean politics (in Spanish). I wished people could chose which topic to follow — I don't want to SPAM people with irrelevant content.

As someone who post about cryptography a lot, but sometimes, literally, talks about pineapple on pizza (what would be the chances that you’re talking about me right?) I’ve always wondered how I’m not losing more followers by not remaining on topic.

isn't this what hashtags _should_ be used for?

When using Tweetdeck, you can create a column for only posts with a certain hashtag. It works well, I have several such columns which I can expand or collapse as I wish.

So I may follow @JohnSmith because he’s a known dev in the JS community and tweets about JS, but he also tweets about his country’s politics, what he ate at lunch, and engage in heated debats about pineapple on pizza I don’t care about.

You're following the person, not the vision you have of the person. If you're interested in just posts about a topic then Twitter isn't the platform for you.

I could see Following topics from a person becoming a feature. It's a natural extension of the current feature set.

If someone says "I wish X had feature Y", answering "then X isn't for you" does not contribute to the discussion. Products can change and feature requests shouldn't be dismissed on the grounds that the feature doesn't exist yet.

In this case it certainly could, and is almost already implemented (in the form of both the "hashtags" and "topics").

Yeah, I follow one person whom I deeply respect for his FOSS work, but he is so rabidly anti-Trump (despite being French!), that it was hard to bear, he retweeted every single story critical of him, even complete lunatic ones. I really wanted some kind of filter to silence this part of his stream.

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