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Comment by nirui | Hacker News Reader

One question: does it monitors the Tweet and keeps banning new likers?

I found that most people in my block list were fans of few propaganda accounts. It could be a nice addition if the service can monitor those accounts, and keep banning people who liked any Tweet posted by those accounts.

I know there are side effects for doing that, but I have other ways to gather valid information and opinions so I don't really care. I rather save my time from useless and baseless online arguments (a lot of those were sent by bots), and focus on things that are really important.

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Unfortunately, no. Not yet.

But this service makes Twitter soo much more useful I wonder why it is not a standard built in option??

>But this service makes Twitter soo much more useful I wonder why it is not a standard built in option??

A lot of people are about to have very quiet, very calm, very rational feeds, and this isn't good for engagement metrics.

I still wouldn't go near Twitter if my life depended on it, but it will certainly help people who are already hooked.

I’m glad it isn’t built in. Twitter is already enough of an echo chamber.

Not all echo chamber are bad.

It's like religions. Somebody who lives deep in the religion that they believing in might deny all other beliefs, and almost all religions were created from adult fairy tales (in another word, lies). But what if a religion makes people peaceful, kind, productive and healthy while strongly rejects the idea of harming the others? Is that religion bad?

Contrary to what people might think, more information does not necessarily make you more rational and reasonable. It can be the opposite, sometimes information makes you anger and hatred, while ignorance gives you the power of justice and forgiveness. That's why sometimes those who made improvement to the world were doing so from their own veil of ignorance. Nobody tell them to hate, so they helped instead.

Echo chamber is an overly stigmatize word. It's true that some people handled it poorly, thus sadly created a spiral that dragged them all the way down. But on the other hand, echo chamber can also be a useful moderate tool to keep yourself out of those harmful ideas online too. It depends on how you craft the chamber, how you use it, and whether you left the door unlocked.

I would rather use my ignorance as a vault to keep my humanity.

Reddit has a similar feature built in. How is it used? Trolls post something inflammatory and then block people that post dissenting opinions. In the end all that’s left is a comment chain normalizing whatever hate or drivel got posted.

If I block a person how does that affect your ability to see that person's dissenting opinions?

See the comments in this thread [1]. If I make a post and then block you, you can’t reply to anyone else in my thread, not just me. You can’t even participate in my discussion thread, even if you aren’t directly replying to me.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/s71g03/announcing_blo...

> anyone have suggestions for my next career move?

Because it works against the viral rage amplifying feedback loops that the advertisers and shareholders demand...

> > anyone have suggestions for my next career move?

Guessing you forgot to hit 'copy' before you pasted that quote? Looks like you've re-pasted the same quote from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30839804) :D

Yup. Ooops, sorry...

I'd _intended_ to quote:

> this service makes Twitter soo much more useful I wonder why it is not a standard built in option??

It would result in less "engagement". (And a better "filter bubble". At this point, I don't know which is worse.)

I expect it's about farming hate engagement.

Not that Twitter would openly say it.

This may seem a bit crass, but I mean it honestly. Why not just leave twitter?

I assure you, you will quickly realise you miss nothing.

Parts of Twitter are great. Endless US culture wars, not so much.

Because Twitter is one of the important way to get informed in near realtime on what's happening around the world, simply due to the size of it's user base. And this makes it useful ...before bots and mobs catches the wind too of course.

For the average person that information is pretty much useless, it's just another type of entertainment.

My parents grew up, just as people started to get TV in their homes. Mostly, when very very young, they only had radio.

And as they matured, so did TV. Became larger, colour emerged, audio improved, and the wonder of viewing events live, in real time, from around the world was fascinating to them.

Soon, cable TV, and eventually 24 hour news appeared.

I watched the news morph from a 30 minute nightly summary, to a relentless repeat of the same news over, and over again. And talking heads, opinions relentlessly speed forth, by "experts" and "analysts", just droning on, hour after hour. All basically gossiping, rehashing the same info endlessly.

You, instead, have twitter. You, are in the same trap.

There is nothing of value there. No in depth news. No thoughtful information.

Just a relentless spew of opinion, talking heads...

Decades ago, magazines abounded. What does celebrity $x think of politics today? Or, what does the CEO of Ford, think about this and that?

This is the level of most of Twitter, the rest being people working (eg, fully biased) to amass follower. Once gained, via fraud, or being trendy (same thing really), they then sell their output to the highest bidder.

This can be political, or commercial.

Twitter makes my parents addiction to 24 news, alway on at home when I visited, seem trivial in comparison.

You have been tricked, had manipulated. There is nothing of value on twitter. Nothing.

If something is important, it will only be a mess of tangled garbage on twitter.

You know this. You already work against twitter's addictive, and useless properties, for you attempt to remake it into something sane, and useful.

But you cannot. It is designed to prevent this, designed to pull you in to the absurdities.

Get out. Follow what you secretly want.

Abandon twitter completely.

> You, instead, have twitter. You, are in the same trap.

> There is nothing of value there. No in depth news. No thoughtful information.

I think you're not aware of how much in depth, very specific information, and thoughtful analysis your can find on Twitter. Sure, there's going to be lots of crap, but you don't have to watch it.

That's a generous way of describing anonymous 'rumours'.

The more real-time it is, the more likely it is misinformation.

Some of us have gained work from Twitter. I can assure you, we would have missed something.

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