Ask HN: Is Twitter unbearable for anyone now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Twitter unbearable for anyone now?

22 pointsaltdataseller34 comments

It seems in the past 3 months, Twitter now is showing a lot more tweets in your timeline from ppl you dont follow. Based on topics you’ve liked, ppl whose tweets you interacted with once, or tweets most of your followers interacted with.

As a result, when I now open Twitter the first things I see are these awful self-help type threads from “gurus” with their long threads giving out advice. Or gifs/memes that were taken from TikTok.

It has really ruined the Twitter experience for me. I guess i probably need to cut down my followers or use lists more.

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Just switch to "Latest tweets" (chronological feed), creating a list of all users you follow is also a good solution.

I’ve observed Twitter showing me two different sets of “Latest Tweets” on two different devices- I’ve only found Twitter tolerable on third party clients recently

I'm comparing "Latest tweets" with lists all the time on the web version (looking at "Latest tweets" throughout the day, and scrolling through lists of users I follow in the end of day) - inconsistencies are pretty rare, sometimes a tweet disappears from "Latest tweets" for no obvious reason, but that's like 1/1000 occurrence.

I noticed they used to switch me back to "top tweets" after I had clicked on latest. It has happened several times. I'd click on "latest tweets" and it'd show the latest tweets for a while, then I'd visit the site and would see the top tweets and find it weird, and have to click on "latest tweets" again.

I found in sleazy. It's not happening anymore recently.

Which client or browser are you using?

Chrome on Ubuntu and Android. I doubt this to be browser dependent as the preference should be stored server side.

The preference is actually stored client side in IndexedDB.

How can I do this?

It's actually quite unobvious - you should click on "sparkly" icon on the upper right corner:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21167920/twitter-chronolog...

I hate the UX of Twitter threads. There’s far too much non-content (navigation, buttons etc) interrupting the flow of the content for what really should be a long-form post on a blog or HN or what have you. (edit: typo)

I use their Lists feature. Once the initial work is put in of curating high signal useful people to follow, you can relax. I never look at my main feed as it’s full of noise and as you said, full of self-styled gurus with annoying threads. Some people really need to start blogging instead of creating clickbait threads.

Apart from getting tweets I really don't care about in my feed, I think the overall quality of tweets really decreased in the past months, especially in the dev/SaaS entrepreneurs/Indie hackers space. My feed is full of startup memes or bogus questions like "Are you also drinking coffee right now?". And these kind of tweets are also created by well known people with lots of followers who usually publish quality content. Which means that creating a list would solve nothing. I understand they have to create a community, but come on, it's just noise.

I noticed that too, and fixed it by clicking the triple-dot icon on suggested tweets, then choosing “don’t show me (this category).” After doing that a few times, they all went away.

This was on the iOS app.

Use Twitter lists. Put accounts you want to follow into those lists and never deal with ads or "suggested" tweets again. Plus, those tweets will be sorted chronologically.

I've yet to find a good solution for viewing lists while also keeping threads ordered correctly, and also hiding retweets.

Showing RTs in a list seems (to me) to defeat the purpose of a list in the first place.

> Showing RTs in a list seems (to me) to defeat the purpose of a list in the first place.

If someone is retweeting too much, remove him or her from the collection.

I started using a browser extension to mitigate this, and hide all the fluff like trending topics and algorithmically recommended tweets. Called 'Tweak New Twitter'.

I just use Twitter to Nitter.

Wasn't aware of Nitter, will check that out, that looks very interesting. Love the idea of different front-ends to access content.

As someone who likes to keep in check what’s going on back home while being permanently away from it, I HATE how twitter trends are hijacked by political parties to shit on the other parties. There trends are purely dogshit and nothing more than memes. There is no value I get from the trending section. Anything important is lost in the noise. I tried to switch to Worldwide trends I remember twitter used to have but got rid of it for some reason.

I only get tweets from people I follow

How are you getting them from people you don't?

I also curate my follows pretty carefully (albeit ... they're all over the place (technically, socially, philosophically, religiously, etc)), and mostly interact through Tweetdeck, Notifications, and Lists

Using "Latest Tweets", I've not noticed any change in the last few months.

What ruined Twitter for me was spaces and communities. Communities was way worse because the spam is unbearable. I literally saw a nude blogpost link on the Apple community and stayed there for days.

If you are looking for a solution: Don't follow anyone, use lists.

You can pin 5 lists to the main page, which is enough for my main interests, and I use the lists page for niche ones.

Use an adblocker, and only use Twitter on desktop. Like you said, it's become more and more unbearable

Its been unbearable for me for 5+ years. Its dns black-holed on all my networks.

Don't even look at the main page. Use lists and read them preferably with tweetdeck.twitter.com.

Use Tweetdeck. That way you will have at least one lane that is your feed in cronological format.

Nope, I think it’s great!

Twitter has always been unbearable for me. I got a look at it in 2008, decided it was the men's room wall of the internet, and haven't been back since.

Wow, good for you because that platform has become a shit show.

I closed my account in 2020.

Same. Which is a real pity because Twitter is actually great for some niche communities I was interested in. But I can't do that to my mental health.

I just finished a two month break from all social media. Feel much better mentally for it. Now I can take-it-or-leave-it, and have very little inclination to use it. I get most of my news via RSS feeds anyway, and it isn't doom-and-gloom, it's all stuff that's actually relevant to me and my career.

So, it got even worse? For some reason I'm not surprised.

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