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Comment by pfisherman | Hacker News Reader

I stopped using it, mainly because of an “inverse network effect”. Twitter used to be a useful place to keep up on scientific papers. Science Twitter is dead. Now my feed is like 10 percent science, 10 mildly racist / inflammatory content, 10 percent miscellaneous, and 70 percent a certain VC constantly shaking his fist, yelling about crypto, and shitting on fiat currency. And this is after aggressively curating my feed by unfollowing anybody who cheered on Musk’s takeover of Twitter. No thanks.

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I think the inherent design of Twitter has a bit of a flaw in that you're friends with people instead of joining communities. So if you think "geez, I have a lot of political content on my feed I don't want to read," you can't just unfollow all the politics topics/forums/subreddits/whatever you are subscribed to, you have to "unfriend" people, which is socially difficult if you're both small enough to follow/recognize each other. On top of that the "for you" page and trending topics seem to be injecting more stuff I don't want to read into my feed than before, which exacerbates the problem.

The 'mute' function is wonderful for opting out of certain communities

I suppose I'm really looking for a more fine-grained way to filter certain topics from certain users without ignoring them entirely.

I've thought about building a ChatGPT-based Twitter interface for this but... ironically, Twitter API is dead.

Twitter has quite an extensive option to mute things nowadays. Such as keywords, phrases, usernames and hashtags. That's how I can keep following people that sometimes go on political rants.

Twitter does have ways to follow both topics (following a hashtag, basically, iirc) and joining communities. I've never used them because what I want from a Twitter-like network is to follow people who I'm interested in, or have interesting things to say.

If I'm reading my timeline and think "geez, this person sure does post a bunch of political stuff I don't want to see" I either mute specific keywords, or just unfollow the person. Back on Twitter I was aggressive with keyword muting - I don't care about Marvel or people having passionite topics about "MCU", so I muted those phrases and my timeline was free of them.

What had made Twitter easier to use for me was the aggressive use of filters to just block out most of political Twitter. It didn’t block everything, but you would be surprised what blocking the names of Presidents, former Presidents, Presidential candidates, the clap, and a few popular political slogans can do to really cull the politics from a Timeline in the height of election season down to almost nothing. I was going to investigate targeting shibboleths next but then Twitter killed Tweetbot and Twitter is dead to me without Tweetbot.

A bit of a baby-with-the-bathwater approach as I would like to keep following straight news sources.

I mean, if you use Twitter for political news, then yes. I hadn’t even considered that, but my approach would also wreck your ability to follow political news via Twitter.

The problem is that I'm interested in what people have to say about some topics and not others. Sometimes I'll follow a musician I like and realize when he's not posting about his music he's talking about conspiracy theories I'd rather not look at. Or someone will be pretty funny and interesting but also spend a lot of time interacting with porn. Or just post a lot about a topic that I have no interest in. If it worked differently I could interact with these people on subjects I'd like to without being subjected to every thought that enters their head and everything they want to follow.

>Twitter does have ways to follow both topics (following a hashtag, basically, iirc) and joining communities

ehhh, sort of. i tried a few of these before the musk takeover, and it was pretty disappointing. it was essentially a way of opting into more of the trash algorithm-recommended tweets in your timeline. instead of just the normal "recommended for you" stuff, you'd also have "recommended for you because you follow X".

You don’t have to “unfriend” anyone. And I’ve never seen any of the “for you’ stuff:

https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/

Aren't you describing reddit?

Or a traditional forum, yes.

TBH I prefer traditional forums over Twitter/reddit. There are a few I go to every now and again, and while there is way less content, I feel people are way less inflammatory over random things and conversation is usually way more civil.

Reddit should have been a technology, like PHPBB or Wordpress, instead of a website. That would have been better.

That technology exists. It's called newsgroups, it's fast, distributed, hard to censor, without a central authority and based on community of interests. It's also pretty much dead except for sharing pirated contents.

Should it have been though? Something to be said for having it all in one place with one account.

Consider Hacker News. It's a forum that's laid out somewhat similarly to reddit. It has pretty good moderation but in a way that is distinct from reddit. I don't think it would be better as a subreddit.

It would be nice if someone with minimal tech skills could just spin something similar up. Related forums could link to each other, like the webrings of the past lol. That would be the ideal structure of interactive communities on the web, at least to me.

lobste.rs has an open source even engine that I have seen a couple of other sites use

I used to think that following people was lame and that communities (like on Reddit) were where it was at. Until Reddit shut down a sub I joined. Because it got mass reported. Yes, it had some toxic people on it, but it also held really deep debates, and it wasn't 5% as horrendously hateful as some of the subs that still exist. It just felt wrong to me, that everyone's conversations were shut off by the electric eye, and all history off those debates was lost. How do you even begin to change your mind, or other people's minds, if you can't even talk? Isn't it the foundation of a working democracy, asking with a functioning press?

Meanwhile, my wife is playing the long game on Twitter. She has a specific way of using it that just works for her. She follows a few hundred people, and she's followed by ~5k people, mostly "nobodies", but a handful are impressive: researchers, journalists, politicians, authors. She has conversations with "household names" daily. She even orchestrated an interview been a well known researcher and an ex NYT journalist on substack. Yet she's an be absolute nobody.

The public API used to help tweets persist beyond normal (on platform) visibility thresholds. Before it was ruined, people could embed tweets in their own sites, and tweets were more persistent on platforms like tweet deck.

Musk has no real idea of the impacts of technical decisions on the platform, but he realized the tweet visibility threshold was too short bac when even his own tweets weren't seeing engagement.

Since then he's created a scheme to grant slightly better longevity to the visibility of tweets by "verified" accounts, but it's really smoke and mirrors... Tweets anyone makes (Except for Elon and his selected Twitter "buddies") only are visible for seconds and to small audiences of people... It kills interaction, growth, and engagement for everyone else, but gives the illusion that the site is still vibrant (because it makes everyone tweet more often).

Deception of this kind will just make everyone burn out and not come back... It defeats the very purpose of Twitter, as visibility of ideas is the only payment most people get on the platforms to begin with, the main problem is that most people on the platform don't know they're mostly invisible, and dropping their tweets into a waste bin.

That's where I'm at, too.

And the platform is really showing its lack of moderation, even compared to how little it was moderated in the past. I don't really want to click on webdev tweets and find replies full of hate speech and weird pornography.

> And this is after aggressively curating my feed by unfollowing anybody who cheered on Musk’s takeover of Twitter

If you care about science twitter, I wonder if that was the best criteria for filtering your content.

He doesn't care about science twitter, he cares about The Science twitter

How is that possible if one tab of the app is dedicated specifically to people you follow, and on top of that, you can use lists

Because it's not the default. Every time you go to Twitter, the first page you see is full of random recommendations.

There is a rule of thumb about online services and software: Don't fight the developers, because they have more power than you. If your usage is no longer compatible with the vision of the developers, stop using it. You may find temporary workarounds that make the service useful with a lot of effort, but it won't last. The developers will eventually find new innovative ways of ruining your experience.

Science Twitter was already dying before the takeover, because it was not compatible with the increased focus on recommendations. Musk simply accelerated the process.

YouTube is the same way (if I'm understanding this correctly, I don't use Twitter). You don't immediately land on a page full of your subscriptions. On the TV app I have to arrow left, arrow down 3 times to subscriptions, then I see my curated feed. On mobile I click the notification icon or the subscription tab.

Neither of these feels like I'm "fighting with the developers". It's such a trivial thing to do. And almost all social media apps do this. Instagram does this[0], it looks like Tik Tok only allows an algorithmic feed[1], it seems like Reddit has recommendations on by default but I'm seeing mixed things[2], LinkedIn does this (not that linked in is a model to be followed in any regard). In fact, Facebook is the only major social media company I know of that doesn't spit out an algorithmic feed by default.

So, if having to go to a new tab is "fighting the developer", then I think we've failed extraordinarily in this regard on all fronts and Twitter isn't doing anything new here.

[0]: https://help.instagram.com/505299634436870

[1]: https://support.tiktok.com/en/getting-started/for-you

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/xhxkdc/how_do_i_only_...

All social media platforms I've used have eventually become useless for the purpose I wanted to use them.

Remember when Facebook was about staying in touch with the people you know? Then there was a huge controversy when they introduced the algorithmic feed, made it the default, and always reverted back to it despite user preferences. Today it's a wasteland full of recommendations, promoted content, influencers, silly videos, controversial topics, and other forms of spam, with some interesting content randomly sprinkled around.

Defaults are important, because they influence people's expectations. If algorithmic feed is the default, it encourages posting certain kinds of content and discourages others. Eventually even your manually curated feed will be full of content that would be successful in the algorithmic feed. That is what happened to the part of Science Twitter I was following. People started posting less and eventually left, because Twitter was discouraging the kind of content they were posting.

As for Reddit, I don't consider it a social media platform. It's more like a collection of unrelated message boards that share the same underlying technology. I'm vaguely aware that there is a front page, and I sometimes visit it accidentally, but I never go there on purpose.

> Today it's a wasteland full of recommendations, promoted content, influencers, silly videos, controversial topics, and other forms of spam, with some interesting content randomly sprinkled around.

Is it? That's not my experience at all; I'd say Facebook has mostly dropped out of the news because it's quietly kept chugging away at what it's good at.

It's just so much more noisy and garbage filled. Maybe I was in the minority, but I used it mostly to follow some bands/artists/game designers and keep up with their projects - I rarely engaged with the twitter userbase in general and it feels like that's what is being amplified and it's a lot of noise, toxic speculation, and useless opinions.

I get pushed a lot of nazi content now, so I’m using it less instead of trying to manage what their algo changes decided to promote now

Actual Nazi or just right wing / conservative?

actual nazis - they post hitler content and all, polls about why you are/aren’t a nazi too, etc. reporting sometimes works but it’s no longer permanent, you’re allowed back after some weeks if you post rule violating nazi content now. some of these nazis who were previously permanently banned learned that you just contact support and say you were banned for right wing views and they get let back in. there are a lot of active nazis who are open about it.

some are just rw who mingle with the openly nazi posters too though yeah.

Care to post some examples? I'm not saying they don't exist, I've just never seen it in the wild.

You don't get pushed anything if you are not using the "For You" tab. If you still see "Nazi" content (though I'm aware that many people on the US American left are now using the term in an inflationary way, which, as a German, I find highly objectionable) then it is because you follow people who post this content.

> You don't get pushed anything if you are not using the "For You" tab.

Yes.

I get push notifications from people I don’t follow and my follow feed has people I unfollowed (though that’s not the nazis except for some that masked off)

Out of interest, could you show me such a "Nazi" tweet? In recent years I got highly suspicious of the term.

Search for common racial slurs or /pol/ dogwhistles and you'll find mountains of such garbage.

Yes

Who are these people getting all this in their feed? Are you outing yourself or something? Why would the algorithm give you a bunch of nazi content? Never seen anything of the sort, and I follow some very edgy crypto twitter accounts among other sketchy ones. Your bar for what constitutes “nazi” content must be low.

Where do you keep up with scientific papers now, if you don't mind me asking?

Science today is exactly like the Catholic Church 500 years ago. We are supposed to worship the Gods of science and listen to everything the priests have to say. I have given up on any reformation coming from the West though because I think it is too corrupt and too powerful and don't see how it can change in the near future. I am hoping it will be from India and/or China when they catch up.

My Twitter feed started showing hot takes from more and more right-wing nutjobs, probably because I am naturally slightly conservative (small-c) in my views. Eventually I got fed up with seeing so many posts from Lotus Eaters / Alex Jones / Katie Hopkins / <insert fascist>, was thinking of leaving, then Musk took over, fired everyone and tried to charge me $8, so a good opportunity to go. Account deleted and I haven't been back since.

Where do you go for AI news? I haven't found anywhere close to as good as Twitter for AI stuff (admittedly I didn't unfollow anyone because I just ignore political tweets)

> ow my feed is like 10 percent science, 10 mildly racist / inflammatory content, 10 percent miscellaneous,

So basically it's the new Facebook

> Science Twitter is dead

Yes, and a lot haven’t gone to Mastodon. Where are they?

> 70 percent a certain VC constantly shaking his fist

> And this is after aggressively curating my feed

If you're "aggressively curating [your] feed", just mute/block them

The allegations is that mute/blocking no longer is working consistently on Twitter. Which is further proof that the platform is dying.

The "I dont like this tweet" function is completely broken. I don't like blocking or muting, but I have to tell Twitter over and over I don't want to see certain people (including King Joffrey) but it never works.

Right, I feel like the environment of the site has done a lot more damage to it than the unreliability/bugginess/downtime.

Did science twitter migrate to somewhere else? Where would you go to keep up with scientific papers?

> Did science twitter migrate to somewhere else? Where would you go to keep up with scientific papers?

Science Twitter in particular has mostly migrated to Mastodon (although it's split between a few different subgroups).

A number of other de facto Twitter communities have migrated to Mastodon. Some have stayed on Twitter. And some have basically died without moving anywhere else.

(although it's split between a few different subgroups)

This is the big problem with Mastodon. Some people want highly curated communities on small instances, and it's great for that. But it's really bad for people who want to make us of network effects - as exemplified by the very phrase '______ Twitter'.

Where do you look now?

> shitting on fiat currency

I hope you're enjoying inflation, then.

Is the implication here that crypto coins are immune to inflation and instability?

Genuinely asking because if I know my crypto history it basically says the opposite.

The history of fiat money is always one of endemic inflation, sometimes really wild inflation.

When the US was on the gold standard, the inflationary periods were during the California and Yukon gold rushes, which had the effect of "printing" more gold.

The inflation we see today in the US is due to massive deficit spending, which is enabled by fiat money. All countries today use fiat money, because then they can spend money without limit and without raising taxes. They always blame the resulting inflation on something else.

The value of crypto currency is based on supply & demand. To me it seems more like collecting Beanie Babies than being a substitute for money. We'll see how it fares in the next few years.

Interestingly, when Spain looted the New World of gold and silver, it did not make Spain any wealthier. The result was just inflation - the gold was worth less. The more gold that was imported, the lower the value the gold had.

It's just like the government deficit printing fiat money.

Sounds like there's no particular advantage to the gold or silver standard and no reason to complain about fiat money then.

Except that the net inflation from 1800 to 1914 on the gold standard is zero, and from 1914 to today is a factor of 30.

Sounds like a particular advantage to me, unless you prefer your money to be worth about 3% of what it used to be.

I prefer my society to allocate valuable goods and services to those who are contributing positively to it today over those who had the luck to be born earlier and/or to wealthy families, so a stable but nonzero inflation suits me very well thank you.

Does inflation seem stable to you today?

Inflation hurts poor people, too.

Compared to the horror stories of the gold standard days? Yes. 0% -> 5% overnight is not nothing but it compares favourably to most assets one could pick.

Edit in response to your undeclared edit: inflation hurts those who hold cash, by its very nature; on average inflation is a transfer of real value from the rich to the poor, although of course there will be exceptions.

> horror stories

What horror stories?

The wages of the poor do not keep up with inflation.

> inflation is a transfer of real value from the rich to the poor

No, it isn't. It's a transfer from the rich and the poor to the government.

The fact of the matter is that the ability for the government to print money when needed and not be beholden to a scarce element for currency and wealth reserves has allowed our economy (and the world economy, and trade) to grow. If there is no 'extra' money when we need it, economies stagnate. The side-effect of 'extra' money is inflation. However, I think that we have a lot to show for it -- considering that economic disasters haven't completely destroyed the wealth of entire generations of people since we started doing it this way, and we have a least a passable system of class mobility.

This whole 'pining for the gold standard' is ridiculous. Do you want to go back to zero-sum economics because you don't like the Fed? Everyone hates the Fed, but it happens to be the least bad option that we have come up with so far.

If you don't think the US economy didn't grow enormously from 1800-1914, what can I say?

> If there is no 'extra' money when we need it, economies stagnate

The banks create money as needed through supply & demand. This is complex subject, but the fact that the US economy thrived from 1800 to 1914 shows your dire predictions to be simply lacking.

> class mobility

Was very robust in the 1800s. The US moved scores of millions of people from poverty into the middle class, and a lot into the wealthy class.

May I recommend reading some history books about 19th century America.

> it happens to be the least bad option that we have come up with so far.

Your dire predictions didn't happen in the 19th century, and we didn't have endemic inflation.

There were huge economic busts in the 19th and first half of the 20th. They made the 2008 crisis look like nothing. You glorifying the gilded aged is quite alarming.

When you read history do you skip over the parts that don't agree with your philosophy, or do you just assume you would be one of the robber barons?

Also, our economy grew a lot in a large part because we expanded westward exterminating the people who lived on the land and taking it from them and all the resources underneath. We got a lot of that 'extra' money as gold from that expansion.

The first half of the 20th was under fiat money.

> You glorifying the gilded aged is quite alarming.

LOL. Read "Historical Statistics of the United States". You can download it for free from archive.org.

> our economy grew a lot in a large part because we expanded westward exterminating the people who lived on the land and taking it from them and all the resources underneath

So "we" stole railroads and steel mills and factories and shops and mills and textiles etc. from the Indians?

> We got a lot of that 'extra' money as gold from that expansion.

Spain looted enormous quantities of gold from S America and transported it to Spain. Did it turn Spain into a wealthy industrial powerhouse? Nope. Is Russia's oil extraction industry making Russia an economic powerhouse? Nope again. How about Saudi Arabia? Nope nope nope. Venezuela? Nopety nopety nope.

Your theory needs a lot of work.

What theory are you speaking of? My point was that you claim that the USA was better off under the gold standard economically. We weren't -- we were subject to incredibly large booms and busts. Just because there was a railroad boom doesn't mean there wasn't a bust.

The ability to control boom and bust cycles by messing with the money supply is the whole point. Of course the gold standard is awesome if we ignore the busts and only look at the booms.

Regarding the Spanish -- I fail to see how that refutes anything? They were a poorly run religious monarchy operating in the pre-industrial age. Cool. What's your point? Are you contending that vast amounts of free land are not conducive to rapid economic expansion under capitalism?

> The ability to control boom and bust cycles by messing with the money supply is the whole point.

Except they're a failure at it. We have boom and bust cycles anyway. Remember 2000, 2008, 2022? Friedman also demonstrates in "Monetary History of the United States" that the hand of the Fed on the tiller results in less stability of the money supply.

The "whole point" of fiat money is to be able to spend money without having to tax it first. That's why the European powers adopted it in WW1 - to finance the war.

> I fail to see how that refutes anything?

It refutes the notion that the quantity of gold in an economy has anything to do with prosperity.

> free land

Why have Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S Korea, and New York City become economic powerhouses despite little or no land?

> Except they're a failure at it. We have boom and bust cycles anyway. Remember 2000, 2008, 2022?

Those cycles weren't nearly as bad as the ones that came before it.

> The "whole point" of fiat money is to be able to spend money without having to tax it first. That's why the European powers adopted it in WW1 - to finance the war.

Sure. You haven't explained why this is bad except 'inflation'. I think inflation is a small price to pay for relative stability.

> It refutes the notion that the quantity of gold in an economy has anything to do with prosperity.

No it doesn't. It illustrates that idiotic people with a lot of resources can do stupid things with them.

> Why have Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S Korea, and New York City become economic powerhouses despite little or no land?

Poor people do become rich, but that doesn't refute that it is a lot easier to become rich(er) when you already have a lot of money.

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