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Comment by jacobsenscott | Hacker News Reader

The solution is simple - only show users tweets from people they follow. People may say twitter can't make money this way, but with this model you don't need much money. You don't need moderation, or AI, or a massive infrastructure, or tracking, etc. You don't need managers or KPIs or HR, or anything beyond an engineer or two and a server or two. Musk could pay for this forever and it would never be more than a rounding error in his budget.

But this isn't what twitter is for. Twitter is for advertising.

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As any simple solution, it becomes extremely complicated as you get into the details.

I follow official gov accounts notifying of policy changing, deadlines etc.

- Should I see their retweets ? Yes, they retweet relevant info from other gov, accounts.

- Should I see replies to these tweets ? Probably, there’s useful info coming in the comments from time to time, in particular about situations similar to mine.

So as a user, I have valid reason to whant these two mechanism. But then applying them to shitposting accounts, it becomes a hell scape. And with users who bring in valuable info but sometimes shitpost, we’re starting to need nuance. And so on.

We’re back to square one. The “simple” solution expanded to its useful form brings back the moderation issues we’re trying to flee.

This makes me wonder if part of the problem is that it’s a bit like the psychology of road rage. It isn’t so much the trigger, as it is that it happened in an perceived personal safe space. Maybe It’s not that there’s someone wrong on the internet that makes people angry, but that the comment was fed to them while they were reading things they like. Something with a blended approach that makes it clear when you’re leaving the bubble and might be more tolerable. Like turning on PVP in a mmorpg, you expect to encounter opposition.

Yes, I think there's part of that. In the same direction, compartmenting to have some stuff come within the frame you expect them might help a lot.

Google's defunct social network tried to embrace that concept to a point, and facebook also has some way to create explicit bubbles, but I think your vision of visually separate modes when moving between contexts coud be the best approach.

This is such a gross simplification. First, even people who you follow might post both wanted and unwanted content, and the platform will be more useful if it can somehow show me the things I want to see. Second, it overlooks content creator side of things. How does a new person without any followers start gaining them, or vice-versa a new person who doesn't know whom to follow yet. People keep saying this is what they want from Twitter. But Twitter is not only for them, it is valuable for these other use cases.

You can choose to unfollow someone if their noise outweighs their signal, otherwise you just put up with it. Eliminate inline "cards" so they can't force 3rd party content into your stream. If they post a bunch of stuff you don't want to see you can unfollow - there is no way for anyone to force stuff on you.

You discover content by people you follow posting links to content, and by search. Good content will gain a following, as it always has even before feed algorithms.

I don't see why my options are either "unfollow Aunt Janice" or "see all of Aunt Janice's political posts."

Yes.

I only see tweets from people I follow. There is zero chance I'd use the twitter app/site default timeline, look at "trending" topics etc. I just follow a hundred or so people and I see their tweets in alphabetical order because I use a sane client (In my case Tweetbot, but there are others).

Content/people discovery is not a problem because of retweets. Almost all the people I follow I follow because people I already followed retweeted or quoted them. Then I look at that profile, the content they write, and if they are interesting, I follow them too.

If someone produces content I don't like for whatever reason, I unfollow them. That includes content they quote or retweet too obviously.

This won’t work because it’s not good enough to just not see something you don’t like. You have to ensure that no one else can see the thing you don’t like as well. It should be deplatformed at the IP level.

Something like this, where the feed is ordered by time, has the added advantage of having a clear cue for when to stop scrolling. When you reach a post from yesterday, you know it's time to stop.

Any client that doesn't work exactly like this (doesn't let me resume from where I last read, lets me know when I have read everything I follow, and shows only what they write in alphabetical order) is a broken Twitter client.

The default behavior of both the Twitter apps and Twitter site feed is exactly like this. Plus it inserts ads into the feed, and tries to bait you with "trending" topics.

Yeah no that would not actually solve the problem.

I do want discovery though.

Make it explicit. A button that says "Show me something that I might like!" and supplies a list of tweets.

That’s what retweets accomplish.

It could be a separate tab.

I normally use the realtwitter.com redirect to get just the tweets from people I follow. Occasionally I look at the regular feed and the other stuff can be interesting, but I’m also reminded of why I don’t use it by default.

You can still have search. And the people you follow can still post links (without those "cards") to content they find interesting - but in those cases you are in control. Nothing is forced into your feed.

Youtube does this reasonably well; subscription page for channels you follow, and the home page for content discovery.

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