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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you very strongly. My Twitter feed, which I cull carefully, is deeply rewarding and enriching for me.

At the same time, doing that feed management feels increasingly like swimming upstream against Twitter's desires. First, they started showing tweets that people I follow simply liked. Now they suggest "topics" all the time.

I have to spend more and more time reminding Twitter not to do that garbage. But, overall, I still find the time spent is worth it in return for the quality of conversation and education I get in return.

Reddit is like this for me 10x, with very little effort required to maintain my feed. Spend a few minutes picking a handful of healthy subreddits and unsubscribing from the giant ones and Reddit easily becomes one of the best sites out there.

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In my experience, many subreddits that should be healthy are too small to engage a serious community. For example, r/statistics ends up with teenagers posting homework questions. OTOH the big ones are indeed trash. The only thing to do is to follow fashion. Wallstreetbets was funny and insightful, then funny, now neither. NonCredibleDefense is funny and relevant at the moment. Nothing lasts.

Yes, subreddits really are communities: unique spaces populated by real humans and cultivated by actual human moderators. Each has its own microclimate and culture.

While in principle, you might assume certain topics should have a community of a certain size and caliber, there's no guarantee that such a community exists if the right set of humans haven't happened to coalesce around it.

That's just the nature of human group behavior. You might live in a city that has enough disco fans to support a thriving disco night every Saturday, but there's no guarantee that the right DJs and nightclub will get together to make it happen.

That's a moderation problem, not scale problem.

Subs like /r/sysadmin ban this sort of question and tend to be mostly populated by working professionals.

Communities where all the top 10 hottest posts are made by newbies generally never grow into great subs. That sort of thing should be prob reserved to /r/askfoo or something.

Switching to the "latest tweets" view instead of the algorithmic "home" view helps.

Also, twitter lists have stood the test of time and seem to bypass any changes they've made to force algorithmic view. That, or using an alternate client (eg. tweetbot, Echofon)

And likewise with YouTube. I often see folks complain about the junk YouTube is feeding to them or their kids, but I find nearly all their recommendations are fully in line with the stuff the family does regularly seek out and watch. To the point where some evenings I'll just visit youtube.com and expect to find something interesting, versus using many of the streaming services I pay for (Netflix, Hulu, Disney, etc.).

This makes sense. These platforms are in the "engagement" business. They're trying to have you spend more time by suggesting content you will watch, not turn you off and have you close the tab.

Yes, I have YouTube Premium and it is, by far, the best money I spend every month on video.

During the pandemic, my family settled into a routine of watching some YouTube every evening before we get the kids in bed. The recommendation system has dialed in our tastes very well and basically get an enriching, relaxing, enjoyable ~30 minutes or so of shared experiences every night specific to our hobbies and interests.

When we pick up a new interest, it's quick to notice and start recommending related stuff. When we move on, it doesn't tend to take long to get it to stop recommending stuff in that category.

It definitely tends to overfit, but it's so much better than most other systems and I will absolutely take that over it recommending garbage-but-popular content.

Also, most of my music listening these days is DJ mixes on YouTube.

My twitter using SO has complained that twitter constantly suggests tweets to her from people she is specifically not following due to their toxicity (and also doesn't care to block because doing so would potentially generate drama).

I have so, so may people on my Twitter feed muted for this reason. Toxic crap gets immediately muted - sometimes blocked. Have practically zero patience for crap so Twitter is quite nice for me. If you want to engage in a screaming contest you certainly can but that's not for me.

I just asked: Muting would make it so you couldn't see their part in conversations, which is a problem for their non-toxic content showing up in conversations that you're a part of.

What do you do when someone somewhat important in your industry puts out 20% abusive/toxic content (and that 20% is probably 90% of their engagement)? If you ban them you create drama, if you mute them you're still cutting yourself out of potentially important non-toxic conversations.

But when you don't ban/mute them twitter seems to want to constantly show you their hottest hottakes-- the very reason that you're not following them. (I'm not even sure if muting is enough to prevent the recommendations).

You can mute words. I’ve banned various crypto keywords and it keeps out just the right amount (99%).

To add to the annoyances, I always get 2 notifications, which in reality are ads. every single time I login.

> First, they started showing tweets that people I follow simply liked. Now they suggest "topics" all the time.

These features aren't available on any third-party clients. You should give a third-party client a try, because you'll just get the straight timeline.

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