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Comment by telxosser | Hacker News Reader

I have never been able to use Twitter. Once I follow more than 30 people the feed is quickly overran with total nonsense and I delete the account.

I honestly can't imagine what the feed looks like if you follow 1k people plus. It has to be nonsense at the millisecond level. The signal to noise just scales so badly. There just isn't that much interesting things going on in real time.

This is a cool idea but I am going for a walk right now and listening to an audio book. I am really looking forward to the walk and the book. A tail to keep the flies away I am sure is nice but to me it is just better to delete the flies completely. My walks are the most peaceful part of the day for me. There is no motivation needed if you get rid of the overexcited storm of nonsense from Twitter.

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>I have never been able to use Twitter. Once I follow more than 30 people the feed is quickly overran with total nonsense and I delete the account.

It's because you quit before the reward cycle kicked in. The idea behind the scrolling timeline is that you keep scrolling until you find something that interests you (similar to a slot machine). With that reward you continue scrolling and rinse and repeat for the next item of interest.

The reason I was able to quit essentially all social media (FB, Twitter, Insta) years ago was I realized, outside of my very small circle of friends (on Discord) and the thoughts of people on HN, I have no desire at all about what other random people are thinking. After that, it was easy to throw them away.

Not who you are responding to, but maybe the slot machine effect is exactly why it does not work for me.

To me loosing at the slot roll is actually fairly annoying. When I win, it is not a feeling of reward, but disappointment at myself. Infact, all games if chance really get under my skin.

But I can doom scroll Reddit for hours. The big difference is that most posts have some reward, and a few posts have a big reward. But I don't feel like I'm wadding though mountains of garbage.

I imagine this is why TikTok is also doing so well. Most of the videos are at least somewhat interesting. However I uninstall it quickly because of how dumb the content is as well.

Twitter may have some golden nuggets, but panning for them is more painful then the reward.

Twitter, Reddit, TikTok are all using the same mechanism. It's about getting you through the initial cycles as quickly as possible to get you stuck in a longer more permanent reward cycle.

It really has nothing to do with content at the end of the day.

TikTok, to my eyes, has produced a vastly superior brand of heroin. TikTok is the Fentanyl to Reddit and Twitter's crack rocks.

In my opinion, you only get “the overexcited storm of nonsense from Twitter” if the accounts you follow are so inclined. The great experience to be had is in a careful selection of you follow. An example: As a physician I have been following a varied group of epidemiologists, virologists, and clinicians with intimate knowledge of COVID. Some of them reporting findings from their own lab in real time. This same principle applies to quite a vast number of other disciplines that although may not be near your area of expertise, you can still peek on stimulating links and discussions by those who are in those fields. I don’t know of any other platform where such vibrant discussions take place outside of conferences.

Two things that helped me (if it is useful to anyone)

- Use a third party client that isn't a trash fire. I use Tweetbot.

- Aggressively block retweets from individuals, which is supported by the API, so it persists accross clients.

It's helpful that Twitter's interface is terrible, so the frustration building with that eventually forces me to give it a rest if my own faculties don't cut me off sooner.

That and the gifs...oh, the endless, repetitive, gif-only replies...

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