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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

There are two reasonable ways of using twitter

1) on a third party client like Tweetbot which just shows exactly the tweets of those you follow, in order, and nothing else. Nothing promoted, no ads, no trending keywords

2) Not at all

I have no idea why anyone would want to use the official Twitter app or the twitter dot com web site. Once you have used a third party client (which behaves like the original Twitter!) you won’t go back.

Granted, you need an account to use a third party client so the no-login thing is obviously not working there either, but at least you are protected from the constant front end churn in the official clients. This is just one such example.

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> Granted, you need an account to use a third party client

You don't: https://fritter.cc ("A privacy-friendly Twitter frontend for mobile devices")

This is one I use. Very good. It even lets you subscribe to people so their posts show up on the home feed (like what NewPipe does!)

That sounds perfect, do you know of one that works on iOS?

You could build Fritter with Xcode and sideload it through AltStore: https://github.com/jonjomckay/fritter/issues/55

Thanks, I’ll look into this!

I’m maybe the only HN person that prefers the algorithmically sorted Twitter feed on the official site?

I really don’t want to see every post by everyone I follow. I prefer to just see the good stuff and get the hell out. Social media is a horrendous time sink.

In my opinion everyone should be doing all they can to spend less time on there.

What worked for me was to move all the time wasting apps off my phone’s Home Screen.

I like it and even the promoted content is quite often relevant (unlike facebook where I had literally 0% ads about anything I cared about in the decade+ I was on it; they can have to best AI people on earth, on paper, but they really seem to know nothing at all about me even though they know everything about me so i'm not sure what those people are doing /rant). I often see interesting stuff, but I do curate who I follow (more and more); I am interested in retro computers, startups and programming language theory/formal verification (including the math). I hardly get stuff that is not relevant to those things. During Covid people talked about the politics (polarised vaxxer/anti vaxxer shouting matches from generally very, very smart people) which I ignored and even unfollowed some who just went to far, but generally it's good content. I really hate the format it has; I wish it would auto-aggregate threads, but I know why it is the way it is and changing it would probably hurt it.

What does happen to every platform including twitter (and those are the people I unfollow the most) is that the 'internet marketing' people take over and use every opportunity to push in some affiliate link or product. Sometimes these products are good and welcome, but mostly they are just uninspired rehashes of other get-rich-quick drivel.

Twitter does have a "latest tweets" option in the standard client which spares you from most algorithmic manipulation (reshuffling, trends, showing stuff someone else "like"d), though not paid promotion. Putting all of your "follow"s into a large Twitter list is another way to get similar behavior (which I've used on the mercifully rare occasions where I'm opted into an experiment that messes with "latest tweets").

This option "accidentally" resets every so often.

I might be in the minority, but I actually really like the new features of the official twitter app. I mostly use twitter as a way to keep on top of interesting things that are happening in my fields, and I find that twitter is pretty good about introducing me to relevant content I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

That said, the reordering of the feed by inferred relevance is kind of annoying when someone does a rant without using threads - often the first tweet I see is like the 4th tweet in the series

> Granted, you need an account to use a third party client

But that's basically what the OP wants to avoid. It's not a question of creating an account, but giving them your phone number.

I find the official website ok, assuming you use the option to sort the feed by time rather than algorithmically.

I use the Brave browser on desktop and Tweetbot on iOS.

I get two completely different timelines on these devices.

thank you for the tweetbot tip -

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