Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwmoz | Hacker News Reader

I hate Twitter for all the change they've made-more spam and useless engagement features. I noticed this in testing some time ago, constantly making it hard just to see what I want, not the Algo suggested tweets, other peoples likes, spam etc.

Every tech company is going down the same route, spam and advertising until they force power users away in disgust.

Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese language influencer advert force shown to me on Youtube on every video view, and I can't even speak Chinese.

View on HN

Don't forget other key points...

You can easily be shadowbanned by Twitter for complaining about Twitter on Twitter.

They send you accounts fake and delayed notices to drive engagement.

Muting words and phrases has not worked for years.

They interact with other apps and track words you type and use them to push content and ads to you, likely even when you have the setting for third party data disabled.

The interest keywords associated with your account cannot be changed, it is a pool of data gathered from people you follow and what you've typed over the life of running you account, it often locks you into an information bubble that dictates everything you see for the life of each account, and it also ensures that each use has a customized (yet individually/uniquely frustrating) experience that can't properly be explained nor replicated by any other user.

Twitter stream looks like MSN.com/Yahoo (News) frontpage. It's not social, it's full of suggestions I don't like.

I agree, If you have enough followers on Twitter the retweet, like and "similar posters" spam is already so severe that rather than scrolling down a mile to see if someone I follow posted the previous night I end up just visiting their profile from memory.

If this gets any worse I will just in frustration stop using the platform.

> Just this week I've had the same annoying random Chinese language influencer advert force shown to me on Youtube

You are lucky! I obviously share IP at home with my children, but how is my 13 years old daughter getting disgusting commercials (all in Portuguese for some reason??) of "Manscape" products, women's "spray everywhere even there" deodorant, some soap where interracial couple does everything other than THAT under the shower... and few others jaw-droppers I honestly forgot by now. And tons and tons of crypto spam. I honestly don't think there is anybody even manually reviewing these ads anymore?? has to be some bot fishing for keywords and nude, if none, then approve.

> And tons and tons of crypto spam.

> I honestly don't think there is anybody even manually reviewing these ads anymore??

There's no liability, so why should they waste money on reviewing ads manually?

I don’t get it. Your teenager sees advertising for body soaps, hair grooming for men, and an ad has an interracial couple? I cannot see what is remotely disgusting.

Going by how creepy advert tracking is now I'd read between the algorithms and figure it's time to talk to the child about body changes

Hypothesis: Ads are related to browsing habits, your kid's asking questions

Consider using Mastodon instead. It's the new Twitter which will never get bloated (because it's p2p and FLOSS).

Same here. Seems like they are struggling to generate more revenue without making our timelines look terrible.

That sucks! You know, you don't have to see advertisements. And you don't have to log into google. You can subscribe to feeds with RSS.

Twitter is (was?) for 1:1 discourse and updates, not consuming news or long form content. If you used Twitter like an RSS feed you were doing it wrong

Reply on news.ycombinator.com