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Comment by hnbear | Hacker News Reader

I have the "hide comments section" turned on my ad blocker. Makes the internet a much nicer place in general on a lot of general news/info type sites that aren't explicitly for discussion (eg. HN, Reddit).

I was pretty excited a couple of years back when some bigger news sites explicitly turned off their comments saying they only generated distracting noise and added no value.

Then, after that I can rigorously filter what I see - on Reddit I have multireddits that I care about, and set those to Home using Apollo to browse, and I keep only generally positive sub-reddits in there.

I think there's huge value in going out of you way to block negative noise in bulk. Same reason I deleted Facebook - don't invite in the noise, and don't engage with trolls.

It's the same old strategy - the only way to win is not to play.

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>I think there's huge value in going out of you way to block negative noise in bulk.

I'll go on a tweet made by a Twitter user with a large follower count and just start blocking people. AOC and Ilhan Omar are great because I can very easily pick out the crap comments being made just to try and troll them, I've started reading George Takei's tweets recently to block the trolling homophobes that respond to him.

How many monthly active users does Twitter have? I mean, blocking trolls individually is certainly a way to keep busy, but ultimately useless as there are too many, and the craftier and more dangerous trolls (i.e. government sponsored) might have a blue checkmark next to their name and already in your follows list.

It also affects what the what algorithm recommends for you and which comments on highly commented threads will be at the top and being verified doesn't protect you from being blocked by me.

Or at least that was the way in the past, haven't used twitter since a long while.

And the main purpose is to filter out all the pointless noise which existence has in the end absolutely no meaning for you. Keeping some of the clever expertised subtle manipulator in your timeline can be useful to better understand what is going on. You know like the people which aren't just misguided or afraid but are instead misguiding and outright deeply rooted evil knowing exactly how much pain and suffering their manipulative spiel will create.

Creating an echo chamber where you assume any criticism of members of a certain political faction are motivated by bigotry and are seeking to troll and deceive, and block the critics accordingly, is going to leave you woefully under-informed.

As original poster I meant more that if you know somewhere like 4Chan is generally a highly negative place, I'd stay away from it, and in bulk (ie, the whole site), cut off that source of noise.

Really applies to somewhere like Facebook too.

I didn't mean to cut off discussion or specific sides in a view point, but more to cut off sources of low-quality discussion. I do realize there's danger in how you categorize low quality too.

I don't go on Twitter to be informed, and the informers I block are liars so I'm OK with my actions.

You’re leaving lot of noise on the table if you only look with one eye.

If I didn't close one eye I'd be blind when I went from light to dark.

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