Ask HN: Has your Twitter feed gotten worse? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has your Twitter feed gotten worse?

14 pointscbiscuit16 comments

in the last few weeks my twitter feed is no longer showing content that's relevant even from the same accounts that I followed. it's almost unusable. has anyone else ran into a similar issue?

View on HN

I rarely look at it anymore, but when I do it usually seems broken in quite varied ways; recently for instance, the linear feed was only showing retweets. The algorithmic feed has always, IMO, been kinda useless, but it's just _nonsense_ now.

A surprising amount of the algorithmic feed seems to be accounts that repost TikTok and reddit stuff.

No it cannot be. The whole Elon shtick was "fighting botspam". Of course they also said "make it lucrative", which is kinda at odds with the botspam-fighting claim... And now the blue ticks are getting paid to spout polarizing nonsense.

Interesting observation: I deleted my Twitter account, but created one again recently. Turns out, I was better off without it, so I only login a few times a month to see content from a few people I get a lot of value from. All it shows me in the recommended section is right-wing accounts?? The only accounts I look at are pretty darn far from anything political. My guess is that pushing political stuff drives up view numbers? Not completely sure.

I’ll probably delete it for good soon. It was a lot easier to separate myself from the platform than I thought.

You know, it kinda makes sense. His political alignment is well known; it is also well known that pushing controversy (political or otherwise) is a strategically sound way to get people to interact and rev up the engagement machine.

I don't know, since I have been falsely permanently suspended and the Big Guy who is apparently all about freedom of speech and such is actively refusing to revert my suspension.

That said, while I am logged in, I can only read 5 or so tweets before kicked out with the dreaded "Rate limit exceeded"

And even so, all what is left is a poisonous shithole wherein the remnants of the political left and the political right are doing everything they can to make eachothers lives miserable.

Twitter is dead to me.

A _lot_ worse. I follow actual people not corpos, and the algorithmic feed is mostly unusable. The mobile app is even worse. An ad every 4 tweets. "Please upload your phone contact list".

The latest change to DMs is getting me to seriously consider campaigning for people to leave.

My twitter feed really hasn't changed in the past year. I lost a few people I followed as they fled in advance of Elon, but otherwise nothing really has changed. I curate my feed carefully, and never let the algorithm pick for me.

There’s been more irrelevant crap in my “for you” tab. Notably me and a few other people ended up seeing a bunch of straight up porn in our feeds, but that was a few months back. I stopped paying attention Twitter.

Yes. Over the last few months I've noticed increasingly political content from accounts I do not and would not follow. My feed used to be mostly upbeat, a mix of technical posts, lighthearted humor, and the occasional news story. News on my feed came from real people, not news accounts, as I've blocked just about every corporation on the app.

What I've noticed lately is more fringe personalities coming up on my feed, and several times I went into the replies just to see if anyone I followed was interacting with the post. Many times, the tweet was recommended just because Elon Musk replied to it. I used to follow him so it makes sense, but I am confused for two reasons: one, this happened far less in the past, and two, Twitter used to IDENTIFY why a tweet showed up in my timeline with a label (ex: "Elon musk replied to this") but those labels do not show up anymore.

Twitter used to be a place for real people and real news. It's becoming more and more of an echo chamber every day.

You’re still on Twitter?

No, it’s gotten much better! I really like the For You page.

> No, it’s gotten much better!

How?

Hard to say. It seems some people fall into algorithm holes and have worse experience than others. One has to be careful who they interact with.

I'm using "Following" feed and it works as usual - showing tweets from people I follow in chronological order.

No I dont think so. The For You and Following tabs work well for me. I didnt get bent out of shape over Elon though

Nope, much better recommendations than couple of months ago

Reply on news.ycombinator.com