Comment by tmalsburg2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmalsburg2 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I settled on a similar approach. I used to liberally follow all sorts of accounts that seemed even remotely relevant, but signal to noise was abysmal and there was way too much drama. Several times I was on the verge of quitting, even though Twitter was quite useful for promoting my own work and that of my students. But recently I decided to try a new approach and systematically unfollowed a lot of accounts. Now I stick to the following diet and it produces a much more healthy and interesting feed:

  1. No politicians  
  2. No journalists
  3. No institutions
  4. No companies
  5. No entertainment
  6. No anonymous accounts
  7. Some notable exceptions in all the categories above
  8. Mute words to taste

What's left is mostly genuinely interesting people who post about things they understand and truly care about.

I primarily browse the chronological timeline without retweets courtesy of a nice search function hack (you must be logged in for this to work):

https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20exclude%3Are...

The algorithmic timeline has a bad reputation but it's actually useful for stuff you missed. But I only check it after looking at the chronological feed.

I also like and mostly follow these suggestions for using Twitter effectively: https://twitter.com/AlanLevinovitz/status/151946437478365184...

I don't understand the anonymous accounts rule. Some of the most interesting and insightful people on Twitter are anonymous. And we could say the same about Hacker News. Do you think this website would be better if we all had to use our real names?

i’m frequently confused by people referring to “anonymous” accounts on Twitter. every Twitter user needs a handle, so it’s not really possible to use it anything less than pseudonymously AIUI.

by “anonymous”, do most people mean pseudonymous users who haven’t established an identity (i.e. few to no posts, or no bio, or egg avatar)? or do most people mean to capture all pseudonymous users under that “anonymous” label? (in which case, how does one evaluate if the user is pseudonymous or using their legal name? even blue-checks can be pseudonymous).

According to the dictionary [0], the usage is fine. You seem to use the following definition:

> 3 : lacking individuality, distinction, or recognizability

Which is clearly not true for Twitter users due to their handle and public profile. However, it's also defined as:

> 2 : not named or identified

The example is even a book author, which you'd classify as pseudonymous. I think in this case it makes sense to make the distinction, since there are anonymous social networks, but it's not technically wrong.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anonymous

Yes, most people use "anonymous" in this context to mean "not directly associated with a real name, or real identity."

Arguing about pseudonymous vs. anonymous seems overly pedantic, and not particularly helpful.

In this case, I'd argue it is. Twitter is anonymous in the sense that you don't need a real name for an account, but the Twitter handle and picture is clearly presented on every Tweet and the user profile is not only very visible, it's actually pretty essential due to the follow-mechanic.

This is very different compared to more anonymous forums like 4chan, (former) YikYak and it's successor Jodel. User profiles exist in all of these, but are not presented or publicly visible and postings are not linked to the same account, excluding direct replies.

It clearly isn't because in this case the context is the OP said their rule was not to follow _anonymous accounts_. It really is just painful pedantry to do the WELL AKSHUALLY thing when the intended meaning is abundantly clear to everybody including those who have never have seen or used twitter before.

sorry to come off as pedantic: it's not my intent. everyone has different experiences on Twitter, and this relates to an experience i don't have much of.

a _lot_ of people complain about "anonymous Twitter users", and i want to understand what they mean by that. i think it's the sort of "[anonymous] asshole slides into my timeline and then leaves" behavior. and if so, i suspect it's not actually identity or its form but _reputation_ that matters in these interactions: "non-reputable asshole slides into my timeline" (and so considering reputation becomes important in your interactions). but they could equally mean "this person could have multiple identities on this site and that doesn't work for me" (e.g. some person could be playing both a left-leaning and a right-leaning account and using those multiple identities to drive a wedge into some community), so maybe they really do want to avoid interacting with people who don't have a verifiably singular identity (this isn't easy).

i should have distilled it to that point: when a person says they don't deal with anonymous users, do they actually care about identity, or are they using identity as a proxy for reputation -- and reputation is the more direct concern?

It’s true that some of best accounts are anonymous (that’s why I have rule 7), but also 90%+ of the most toxic accounts are anonymous. Hacker news is a different population, and heavily moderated. Can’t usefully compare IMO.

I'm a little confused about the blocking of RTs. Finding interesting technical content in my timeline and retweeting it to my followers is the activity I feel best about on Twitter. The algorithmic timeline (which I don't use, but others do) has made this less useful, but I think this retweet capability is a huge part of the value of the platform. I certainly don't have time to quote-tweet all of those interesting tweets, and I think sometimes it feels like "taking credit for someone else's work" when I do.

I don't block all retweets but there are too many abusive retweeters who retweet every retweet of their own post. If you don't block their retweets the whole timeline is nothing but the same post retweeted 100 times.

Some retweets are useful, true, but I’m more interested in people’s original thoughts. Retweets also used to be 90% of my feed which means that the vast majority of tweets in my feed were by people who I wasn’t following. Original content by people I was following got drowned out. Some accounts also retweet a lot and Twitter didn’t deemphasize these, which allowed some people to basically take over my feed. Having said that, the search function hack that I mentioned does include quote-tweets which tend to be higher quality.

some people spend all day retweeting hot takes, you just have to whittle it down to people who are sharing what you like (since there's a difference between following someone whose tweets I like, and wanting to know every tweet they think is worth boosting)

This begs the question to me, is there a way to "fix" Twitter, without greatly reducing its impact? It seems to me some people talk about making Twitter "the" public forum, but most of the fixes to Twitter seem to be about how to make it work for your niche. Which is great! Things shouldn't have to be big or making billions of dollars to be good. But "No politicians, no journalists, no institutions" doesn't sound like a public forum to me, and I can't imagine some people would buy Twitter in order to dramatically shrink it.

The only talk of "public forum" comes from people who are desperate to force others to listen to them. I don't need TERFs and neo-Nazis in my feed, but they want to be there.

There's plenty of non "public forums" out there. Hop onto a Matrix room, Discord guild, Subreddit, IRC room, Fediverse instance, whatever. The whole point of "social media" is that it's socializing "in the large". You might not like this, I don't either, but some people do derive value from socializing "in the large". The fact that so many people in this post go into the necessary contortions necessary to make Twitter work for them _shows_ how much latent demand there is for socializing in the large.

> The only talk of "public forum" comes from people who are desperate to force others to listen to them.

Occasionally, it's used by other people properly to refer to a space used by government for official purposes; I suspect much of the other use is dual purpose, that is, it intends to discredit the proper use as much as to advance a more overt purpose.

Twitter is of course completely unsuitable as means of official communication - just the word limit makes it terrible for the purpose.

What it is good for is sending sound bites at each other.

(For emergency communications SMS is better and sufficient.)

Not to mention that you can no longer view more than a couple tweets of a given user without having the experience blocked with a "sign in!" modal covering the screen, preventing further use of the platform. This change alone has made the platform less accessible than ever.

[self-promotion] My browser extension for iOS and macOS can stop this and allow you to browse Twitter while logged out: https://underpassapp.com/tweaks/

Sweeet. I am a frequent favorite-r of your rants on Twitter about related subjects, haha :)

> Twitter is of course completely unsuitable as means of official communication

Whether or not you believe it is unsuitable for such purposes has no bearing on the fact that government has indeed used it for such purposes, and that this imposes legal requirements on the use of those government accounts as public fora that do not apply to Twitter generally.

Regarding 1, I actually go much further and have blocked many of the major politicians (on every side of the spectrum), and muted their names.

I see very little partisan politics on my timeline now.

Yes, this is necessary to avoid seeing quote tweets of them.

You can turn off retweets for accounts that you follow, btw. I use lists in a third party app for a chronological feed.

with 6 you miss some good accounts, anonymity is not always a bad thing

This is covered by rule 7.

Ah, somehow I missed that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com