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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

I blocked him and I don't see his posts any more. What did you try to do?

I'm the opposite of an Elon fan, but so many people don't seem to know how to actually use social media. Who/what you follow and who you block can completely change your experience.

Social media growth is all about recommendations and algorithms, people actually curating their network a la 2010 facebook is dead, so your idea of "how to use social media" is also aligned with completely not knowing how to make a growing social media platform where almost >99% of users are consumers and automatically are recommended things and curate their experience implicitly. People do not want to manually do anything for the most part.

The general issue of forcing recommendations and the general population not doing anything manually anymore is separate from the fact that as an individual you have lots of tools to curate your feeds on twitter/facebook/etc.

It's also just really silly to have conversations like:

"I can't stand seeing Elon on my feed!"

"Have you blocked him?"

"No"

You're missing the point, recommender algorithms are supposed to show people what they want. Even if what you said is true, the experience is absolutely doomed, because its a shitty UX

It's three clicks to block someone. That's bad UX?

(three dot menu -> block @whoever -> confirm).

> so many people don't seem to know how to actually use social media

Because social media (well, Twitter at least) gets ever more opaque and unpredictable. I blame the social media, not the users.

I thought I scrubbed things by hitting "I am not interested in Elon Musk". Prompted by your tweet I checked what it says, and the offending post on my timeline has an option "I am not interested in Business People".

So that's probably how it got through. I still stand by my grossly hyperbolic diatribe about how twitter is definitely getting shittier, though.

> How is it better than ever? I told the damn thing I have no interest in seeing ol' Muskrat's posts, yet there it is on my timeline: [0]

I bet that's by design. His posts weren't getting as much engagement as he thought they should, so his tweets now get an artificial boost to "fix" the algorithm.

> [0] on the risk of feeding the troll, here it is: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1632574090216103937

As long as it's acceptable to say stuff like "men are trash," that post is in the clear.

For the time being you can get rid of naughty ol' Mr Car by blocking him, though I'd honestly question how long this will be effective for.

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