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Comment by te_chris | Hacker News Reader

I did the same. What really ruined the product for me was the “X who you follow liked this”. If I wanted that shit I’d follow the person.

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That's because you're using the "default" view which mixes up the order of your tweets and inserts stuff like this. If you change the view by clicking the sparks icon at the top left and selecting "latest", it simply becomes a reverse chronological order of tweets by people you follow

The algorithm of what I want to see is so terrible I never bother with the default view. I've been using latest for years

I had it set to that and still saw them - I quit over a year ago, perhaps they changed this since and removed all the recommended stuff.

I noticed that if you do that they start injecting the same stuff into your profile notifications.

They really want to feed you stuff you don't actually want.

I just disabled all of the keywords one by one. It took some time but at the end of that it was very quiet. No more sponsored tweets either.

You can train it not to do that. When I saw those in my notifications, I kept picking the option that is something like "see less like this" and I haven't seen one in months.

But yes, they are optimizing for things like UAM and engagement, so to them almost anything that draws people back looks like a good product choice.

Isn’t it ridiculous that you have to thoroughly vet people you are to follow for quality tweets, switch out of the default view, and train a machine learning algorithm just to make twitter somewhat useable? Thats not like using a computer tool, thats like trying to ride a stubborn horse.

Yeah, I don't like it. But I recognize that a) my needs are different than most, and b) we are all caught up in a capitalist system where incentives for exploitation abound. So if I can get by with a few tweaks, I'm ok with it.

It took me a long time to figure this tip out... But also noticed it reverts back to default view after a week or so (on mobile app). Like they wanted to force the "X who you follow liked Y".

I've not had it revert on mobile so far. It does revert on desktop after a few weeks

This thing is ruining my experience as well. I don't want any time of suggestions in my feed. I curated it so that there's only people of tech who talk mostly about tech but my feed is pure garbage now filled with political comments, holidays pics etc. of people I don't even follow.

Can you explain further? It sounds like you do follow that person based on the message.

They follow person X, but not profile Y which had the tweet X liked. Thus they don't want content from Y in their feed.

I see. I consider this a double edged sword, but the positive edge is sharper: the people I follow tend to like things that don't annoy me more often than not. I do agree that it would be useful to be able to configure what appears, though.

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