At first I thought I would just ignore people who made me want to argue.
But then twitter had to remind me what the trending hashtags were, and they were enough to make me facepalm.
It's a shame, because there's quite a few technologists who do cool shit that talk on twitter. But I'm just over being in an environment where overly sensitive people vomit their ill thought out political opinions at me.
Not long after twitter started showing me algorithmic recommendations, it decided to show me some comments that were so vile I couldn't help but call them out. The person responded by asking "Who are you and what are you doing in my replies?". Which was a valid question. Why was I there? I didn't want to be talking to that person. Why did I even see that content? Was I rewarding the algorithm's choice by responding? Gross.
Is that the new normal for twitter? Do I have to wade through enraging AI content as payment for following the creators I love?
No. If thats the trade, its a bad trade to make. I deleted twitter and I haven't looked back. There's some fantastic creators on twitter doing cool things. But there's too many interesting ways I could be spending my time to waste time dealing with that.
Rule #1 of any algorithmic feed is that you get more of what you interact with.
If you're the type of person who can't resist engaging with things that make you angry, algorithmic feed websites are not for you.
For people who have no problem scrolling past dumb comments and pressing the like button on things they actually want to see (a lot of people refuse to "like" on principle, to their own detriment) then Twitter is actually not a bad place.
But if you're easily triggered and you gravitate toward the things that make you angry, it's best to just stay away.
I think I am that kind of guy, to an extent. I don't always indulge - but it is always a constant temptation.
Probably why I exiled myself from FB and Twitter.
The stuff inserted into my timeline is the usual.
In regards to celebrity gossip and such I guess it depends who you follow. With Nitter if you only associate with people that simply don't partake in those kind of discussions you won't see such discussions. On Twitter it's hell bent on trying to show you what is popular instead of what you asked to see so the same is not true.
I use Adblock Plus to block Twitter's trending topics and it is a huge improvement; the topics are just annoying things that get engagement. Another thing that makes Twitter tolerable is to mute words with abandon, e.g. everything from "supreme court" to "wordle". Finally, I block anyone who tweets something stupid.
The only way to win is to not play the game in the first place.
Let them fight it out in their echo-chambers. They will get bored really soon and realize that there is more to life than screaming and banning each other in the blue bird site.
Some things just need to be ignored and left alone. The outrage that is happening on the blue bird site is one of them. It is not worth it.
Essentially Twitter not only has a largely biased sample in terms of who uses it, but there's also an extreme bias in terms of who actually posts on it. About 22% of Americans (2019) use Twitter and, of that 22%, 10% are generating 80% of the posts. So Twitter is primarily driven by a bubble of 2.2% of Americans who skew younger and more liberal than the average. I would hypothesize (though it was not stated by the sources given) that the 2.2% who are posting like crazy also likely skew more radical than average as well.
It's quite dangerous because sites like Twitter can give people the imaginary perspective that they're interacting with hundreds of millions of people, when in reality they're generally communicating with an extremely unrepresentative and small sample of the world, or even of the "Western world". And now factor in the growth of tools, such as this, that add wide-range and spider-style ban/censor/muting of anybody who expresses a view you really dislike.
Everybody has an opinion on Trump, Biden, BLM, Trans Rights, Free Speech, racism, sexism, religion, immigration, abortion, war... the list goes on.
I'd actually pay money to follow technologists whose opinions on anything outside the tech in question I have no good guesses about.
The standard refrain is "well all tech is political". Well no: it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from when you're talking about a quirk of CSS or a cool e-ink project... or at least it doesn't interest me who you are or where you come from: I'm interested in what you're learning/teaching/doing with the tech.
I understand why they are doing this, but most of it is noise. I feel like if I had a way to browse twitter without any posts with more than 1,000 likes, it would be a much better experience.