Hacker News Reader

Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

> It's an even bigger echo chamber than FB.

The trick is to block early and often. The feed is what you make it.

This simply doesn't work. I've tried every tool and trick available and sooner than later the feed becomes filled with drama, politics and random noise. Partly because humans are inherently social and political, partly because Twitter will throw random tweets and topics at you.

I'm on at least my 15th account. Speaking as something with a barely-serviceable love-hate relationship with the service... You have to add people slowly, and be quick to unfollow if you notice a disturbance in the force. Even though I'm keen on programming and related topics, I don't follow a lot of very-popular IT-type folks because of the drama they bring, ESPECIALLY "infosec" Twitter. I've noticed that's a bubble among bubbles. I love a lot of the folks in that bubble, but I won't follow them because The Algorithm gets heavily weighted with them.

Hah - I was hoping I wasn't the only one doing this. In addition to just not being good at "viral twitter", I never have any followers because I nuke-and-pave probably one a year with a new account.

As you called out, most of what I follow is infosec twitter. And the drama ratio is high. I'll follow someone because they do genuinely create a couple excellent technical posts or links, only to find out they are trash and I spend the next month hearing about it.

I can't block the topics that Twitter constantly recommends.

This is it, no matter what words you mute, no matter how much you block/mute users. Twitter considers it of the utmost importance that they get to push content, politics and news they consider important in a 3rd of the screen, always.

The last thing I care about in the world is what employees at Twitter consider valuable to put in the "What's happening" column.

Twitter could do with taking a page out of TikTok's and oldschool Reddit's book at making their app about me and my interests and passions rather than being a megaphone for a few insufferable bluechecks and twitter employees that I struggle to hear my interests from under the cacophony of things I do not care about.

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