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Comment by thrwawy283 | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting idea: I wish you could Follow a combination of a person and the #topic they post to. You could choose to follow "all of" a person, but more realistically the default behavior would be to attach to posts from a particular topic that person is generating. This would be similar to your example of playing a game of Catan with someone and enjoying just that limited bandwidth you have with them. Knowing and seeing all of who they are is not common in our business relationships, or friendships.. I think you're right, and I appreciate how you articulated it.

Someone below this mentioned this was how Google+ was intended to work.

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I thought I saw someone proposing that Twitter do something like this, basically allowing sub-accounts. For example, I speak some Spanish and would love to tweet in Spanish, but those who follow me and don't speak Spanish may feel annoyed for it to pop up all the time. So I'd love to have sub-accounts, where I have my main account and people can choose which sub-accounts to follow.

I'd love the same for a podcast. I don't want to create 5 separate podcast channels, I want to have a main one and then have sub-channels that people can subscribe to.

It doesn't have to be this structure, it can be another way to allow us to have more power over the feed that we're seeing, giving us filter/search/sort/algorithm options.

So, in short, I love your suggestion and wish the next generation of social network implements it in some shape, whether that be from the incumbents or new ones.

Twitter seems set on going the opposite direction. The fact that likes are mixed in with posts in the main feed is infuriating, because anyone who is just using the like function as a like function instead of a lesser version of RT just floods the feed with random shit.

That is the obvious solution, but Twitter may lose revenue.

Twitter needs to incentivize using hashtags.

John Carmack can add hashtags to his tweets.

Someone can create an account that hashtags and quote retweet John Carmack’s tweets.

I think circles were too tied to privacy. Public posts ended up mushed together just like twitter.

Now I'm annoyed that in 2022 I'm understanding Google+ better. I want to follow the /intersect/ of "Jane Smith" and "Catan". Both of these are topics. I might be broadly interested in "computers", and "board games", or interested in just my friend "Jane Smith". I likely don't want to know everything Jane is posting - or those posting things about her - but when I choose to Follow her, I should be prompted with a list of topics I've subscribed to that would narrow the posts I see which intersect with Jane. Also - G+ or Twitter - would be working to autotag posts into topics/subjects to help me identify how I want to intersect with those posts. (If the author themselves don't apply tags)

I can see why limiting what you're presented with never took off from a marketing point of view. I think this is rad though.

The problem is I don't think Google+ ever worked that way either. You used circles to decide who to send to, but there wasn't a good way to filter as a receiver.

This is what I believe family/friend group chats on platforms such as WhatsApp are.

They are great in my experience, but if people started posting politics news I could see how they could turn bad.

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