Hacker News Reader

Comment by dulvui | Hacker News Reader

This is the reason I really like Mastodon. No algorithm, just timesorted posts by who you follow.

This limits how many people you can follow. You can't follow people who occasionally post a banger but also post a lot of stuff you don't care about.

I don't think algorithms are the issue but the intent of the algorithm is where it falls apart for most social media. It's not to cater to what you want to see but to what will keep you watching.

Mastodon missing a feature to somewhat curate your timeline automatically is what stops it from wide adoption.

> This limits how many people you can follow.

Which is valid to be looked at as a feature rather than a deficiency.

> Mastodon missing a feature to somewhat curate your timeline automatically is what stops it from wide adoption.

Citation needed. There’s always something that someone points out as “the reason that stops Mastodon from wide adoption”, yet its usage continues to rise slow and steady. Maybe what’s wrong is not the slow adoption of Mastodon, but the rapid adoption of other social networks which have billions of dollars behind them with perverse incentives to consume your life so you consume advertised products.

Apparently what stops it from wide adoption is people commenting on Mastodon while not knowing it.

If you want to curate your timeline you use lists; one I use is "those accounts who rarely post and I want to see it all"

> You can't follow people who occasionally post a banger but also post a lot of stuff you don't care about.

Well, you can. It depends how much you care about the part of their content that you like.

Mostly you'd follow someone else who does the job of filtering for you, and you'd hear about the great stuff slightly slower than people who followed that guy directly. You might not see that banger until the following day.

Follow hashtags. I don't follow anyone on Mastodon. That way I only see posts that are relevant to my interests.

If it is "a banger", there is reasonnable change it goes to you through shared posts.

Also there is a page with Trending Posts, Trending Hashtags, Trending News and Trending Accounts.

That's exactly what Twitter does if you use the "Following" tab instead of the other one.

Yea, the article seems to not understand that there's a tab to make it to what he wants. Weird.

I love that it’s easier to close as well! If I see stuff I’ve already seen it gives a natural stopping point.

It’s also great for engagement from the right audience. Posts on Twitter now get little to no response, whereas the same on Mastodon results in more followers and more actively engaged humans (also way nicer). Interestingly TikTok is really good for this, but you do have to bend the content to fit a shorter attention span.

I wanted to love Mastodon.

While slightly better, both seem to me like an utter waste of time to me.

There is just an unsolvable, signal to noise problem when it comes to a personal optimal feed for me.

The content I will like best will not be popular. If that is true then it is hopeless for me because of the scaling properties of the assumptions of the system and incentives for users of the system.

I am better off just talking to chatGPT4o and it isn't even close.

The trick to Mastodon is to follow hashtags instead of people. I have a couple of people I follow but I mostly follow hashtags relevant to my interests. The signal-to-noise ratio is very high. This also means it is critical to include hashtags when you post or comment to attract attention.

> The content I will like best will not be popular. If that is true then it is hopeless for me because of the scaling properties of the assumptions of the system and incentives for users of the system.

I don't understand. The content you want is accessiblto you and anyone who wants it, where is the scaling problem ?

> just timesorted posts by who you follow

The same as Twitter, following tab is literally this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com