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I agree.

A while ago a deleted an old profile I had that followed a number of political and/or hot-take types, which were addictive but never left me feeling happy. With my new account, I follow only makers, artists, engineers and software people.

I don't mind if those people very occasionally post something political, but if they do it too often I unfollow. Nothing personal, I just want my Twitter experience to be a happy and inspiring place.

Now, what if one of those people liked some post that I don't think people Ought to like? Should I ban them by association, even though I previously enjoyed their creative content?

(I guess this is moot -- a person who follows based on their interests rather than their political echo-chamber wouldn't use this tool.)

You already likely have people in your life you just ignore the opinions of on certain subjects, or anything, because you know there's never going to be anything there. But there frequency and interjection is pretty well controlled by meatspace reality. Basic example: I will not watch any movie my brothers recommend. 10 years of trying and it turns out our tastes are pretty much exactly divergent.

This tool is basically a practical implementation of trust markets for a very large space. I'd say the one flaw in its implementation is that you might like to block only the intersecting set of users which liked 2 or more tweets - which would be a pretty good selector function in a lot of cases for "nuanced perspective or accident" versus "consistent pattern of behavior".

I did that and made a point of following only people who tweet things that are interesting or funny. I would mute any account they posted something that made me feel bad. But Twitter kept finding ways to recommend tweets that would get under my skin in some way, no matter how many accounts I mute.

My biggest issue with Twitter these days is that my curated social garden keeps being invaded by engagement farmers who use the thread feature to post obnoxious listicles. I’m constantly being recommended tweets like these in my feed:

“I hunted, killed, and ate a wild baboon (brains and all)…Here are the 13 things I learned about human health along the way.”

“I read all 40,000 words from Jeff Bezos' Amazon shareholder letters. Here are 9 lessons worth your time:”

“We keep seeing the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is a feature of the system, not a bug. Time for a thread”

They remind me of Buzzfeed articles back in the early 2010s and there’s no way to turn it off besides muting the word thread and its emoji.

I'm always amazed by the number of people who use the native Twitter interface. I started with third party clients pretty early and never regretted it. Being able to see a natural, unmolested timeline + the advanced filtering tools most third party clients provide make them essential (for me anyway) if you are going to screw with twitter at all.

Despite having used the megablock tool in the past when I was on twitter (no longer active on there), I completely agree with your idea of social gardens. It's a large part of why I moved from there and tumblr to dreamwidth which has attracted a significantly more laid back and nuanced collection of people than the other two platforms. It's nice because you can subscribe to people's journals who have a very different collection of hobbies, and yet it doesn't feel forced for engagement or anything - it's their whimsies and thoughts, hollistically, and under various privacy filters if it's a delicate topic.

The main reason I used megablock on twitter was to reduce harassment from younger folks who send death threats for the sole perceived crime of creating NSFW art. I wish I were joking. Didn't follow anybody, it was already too toxic with those messages alone ... and why post if you can't create?

I think that would be conflating Twitter with a different type of social tool. Because Twitter has such a critical mass of users it's not surprising that they're hitting some fundamental issues with internet communities, and users want to solve them on twitter instead of using a tool or platform better suited to the task of having a tightnit community or a space for discrete topic matters.

> There is of course the argument that this could lead to even worse echo chambers

I think it's chasing a red herring to think we can harmonize such broad points of view in the same room, so treating Twitter like a discussion platform while also trying to think of it as a broadcasted social network, you just get a lot of yelling and extremely shallow discussions. If you want in depth discussions, more than a few people is usually too many, let alone tens to hundreds to thousands. I've seen some entirely novel conversations come out of twitter, but I've seen far, far, far more shallow bullshit. It's the wrong tool.

> Ah, but who am I kidding, people would much rather possess a nuke than a garden.

I think you're very right here, people are afraid of not being part of the bigger conversation, and so they hesitate to find places to start their more discrete conversations elsewhere. I think that's made people forget how to have in depth discussions online, instead most topics circle around the same more broadcasted points as to not stray too far from the consensus, and accidentally disagree with their peers on the finer details.

> Meanwhile, I find that Twitter is actually a really useful platform if you carefully curate the people you follow.

Exactly this. If you put some effort into following and unfollowing people regularly and you're the type of person who can resist engaging with inflammatory content, Twitter can actually be quite nice.

But for the people who just can't scroll past ragebait or inflammatory Tweets, Twitter is not a good place to be. People who can't exercise self-restraint or shrug things off seem to get pulled into angry, combative bubbles. It's basically the old mailing list flamewars but with shorter content and faster pace. These people are better off staying clear of Twitter entirely.

> What I think would be nice is if there we tools that better allowed us to create "social gardens"

You can already make Twitter work this way: https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/

I mostly see relevant information and never anything promoted by Twitter, because I never look at my timeline.

> What I think would be nice is if there we tools that better allowed us to create "social gardens" on platforms like Twitter, platforms that allowed us to better cultivate the topics we care about while allowing us to keep out some stray topic from someone who we otherwise follow because of something entirely different.

isn't this essentially what mastodon is?

All the garden-tenders are happily reading their RSS feed-readers in peace.

Sounds like you're describing federated microblogging. There's mastodon or pleroma that you could check out.

social gardens, like what google+ could have been.

but greed and internal team politics led to the demise of the project. and this is an outsider's remark by the way. greed because google+ was chasing after an ever increasing monthly active users. internal team politics because of spamming. it made no sense, to me at least, that the same company that gave us gmail could not deal with spamming on google+. spamming has also become rampant on youtube as well.

so yeah, google has been there and abandoned the idea.

These gardens sound like federated social networks, like mastodon or pleroma hosts in the Fediverse.

Isn’t this just Twitter topics?

Sure, if you're going to completely delegate the curation to the platform's black box.