Hacker News Reader

Comment by abhv | Hacker News Reader

See also this thread from yesterday, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37147914

"Thousands of scientists are cutting back from Twitter"

Essentially, a survey published in Nature about twitter usage among scientists dropping, in part, because of the phenomena mentioned in this New Yorker article.

Eg:

"Žiga Malek, an environmental scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam, mentioned in the survey that he had started seeing a lot of “strange” political far-right accounts espousing science denialism and racism in his feed. He has to block them constantly. “Twitter has always been not so nice let’s say, but it is a mess right now,” he said."

View on HN

If you don't follow people, they don't show up in your feed.

If you lurk on the firehose you get it all. Including all the parts you may disagree with or find despicable or... Perhaps also something nice?

I really don't get this point... What do you expect exactly on a large platform?

> If you lurk on the firehose you get it all. Including all the parts you may disagree with or find despicable or... Perhaps also something nice?

I mean that wasn't the case historically.

Like if your favorite spot in town was a roller rink and it got bought out by a movie theatre. You'll lamente your loss but sure nothing illegal happened there but obviously you might rethink spending your time at the specific location.

The default feed is "For You" which absolutely includes people/posts you never followed. Users have to explicitly choose the "Following" feed to only see those posts. And, the setting resets itself constantly. If you aren't diligent, you get the firehose whether you wanted it or not.

While I realize this does nothing for mobile (RIP third-party clients), Control Panel for Twitter [1] has been nice for me to use as a browserscript. Defaults/hides "For You" and tweaks a bunch of other stuff (hideable trends, etc).

[1]: https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-twitter

that's not true? it you follow the "for you" feed you'll get shit Twitter "thinks" you'll like - ie shit that'll get youre attention

Not things Twitter thinks you will like but things you are likely to engage with. Lot of rage bait.

What you're actually describing there is how Mastodon works. Twitter has been "algorithmic" for the longest time now and will show you whatever it thinks you should see.

Discovery is a feature we look for in social media platforms. Twitter offers discovery in the form of an optional more open feed. Twitters discovery feature is worse for these users now than it was before. They now feel less compelled to use the product.

1+1=2.

Twitter hasn't change for me in years, I just follow some accounts and read their posts. I'm not interested in what any social media app thinks I will like, I don't have time to waste on that, so I don't use their "discovery" algorithms, it would be like random blogs showing up in my RSS feeds.

This. I even block a bunch of elements, and sponsored tweets. But it seems a lot of people use the app rather than web interface. Not sure why.

Discovery best done via the curated list of accounts I follow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com