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Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

I keep my twitter politics-free. And I follow tech/hacker people and routinely mute/block those who think I want to hear their inane/naïve political opinions.

And you know what? Twitter is pretty nice! It keeps me in a nice tech filter bubble where the biggest argument is 8080 vs 6502.

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Agree here. For example I used to follow Scott Hanselman of Microsoft on there as he has some interesting tech material but it was constantly blended in with his far left views so I quit. I follow tech folks for the interesting tech opinions they have. Their expertise or thoughts on politics are about as important to me as my 10 year old neighbor’s.

I went a step further and unfollowed all individuals. I read Twitter about 1 or 2 times a week, in a browser. It starts to feel like what RSS was. It's reasonably useful to keep up on things this way. And I do "go play outside" enough.

I'm currently following 50 accounts. No journalists (i.e., no news accounts). I get enough new things to think about and gadgets to consider. Quick examples:

When there's an outage, Cloudflare Radar can be useful. When there's a traffic event, my US state's DOT can be useful. When there's a new release of OpenBSD: @OpenBSD.

Same, and with Reddit too (for me).

Reddit politics is on a whole new level of extremism.

I literally don’t see it and don’t care. I’m there for the chicken videos and Hold My Cosmo.

Not proud of the Hold My Cosmo thing...

What do you do about the recommendations? I am constantly bombarded with suggestions for topics that I have 0 interest in. I click not interested, I update my settings, I create custom ublock rules, and yet they always come back eventually.

I ignore them.

Use lists.

stop using the home page, and switch to the normal timeline from the star icon.

I've mentally tuned them out! Also, twitter seems to have made recommendations more in-line with my filter bubble so even when I notice them, they're often relevant.

Trending for me now is "retrogaming."

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