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Comment by The5thElephant | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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