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Comment by foreigner | Hacker News Reader

Personally I would prefer social media without the ability to "retweet" at all. I want actual original updates from the people I follow, not news (fake or otherwise) or chain letters.

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That makes it harder to find new accounts to follow though. I would say that the vast majority of accounts that I follow were discovered because other people that I follow retweeted (or boosted in the case of Mastodon) them.

That's arguably what "the algorithm" is about.

I think there's a marked difference between seeing boosts of the people you directly follow versus an opaque algorithm that shows you content from the broader network. The former puts you in control: you choose who to follow based on if you like their content and their boosts. The latter is usually tuned towards showing you content that will keep you on the site (and looking at ads), but isn't necessarily content you want to see. As commercial social networking sites become increasingly profit driven, they'll crank the algorithm towards engagement at the cost of everything else. In contrast, a chronological feed of content created by or boosted by the people you directly follow is not "the algorithm".

On Mastodon, I discovered someone via a boost who had wrote a great blog post. I followed them but found my feed was now full of bird photography (their main hobby, and something I don't care for). I added a filter for "#BirdsOfMastodon" (or something), but there were still too many without that tag. So I unfollowed them and now I don't see any bird photos.

Also I recently learned that different people see different comments on the same Instagram post and they to me is something I’d never thought of about echo chambers. Like you could send someone an Instagram post and assuming Instagram has their history they might see different comments than you

I use Mastodon but with out retweets ("boosts") in my timeline, because some of it I find only marginally interesting. I can still find new accounts to follow by reading discussions under tootd.

I feel similarly about “boosting”, a lot of people who I follow that sometimes have worthwhile things to say in my opinion boost stuff that is utter trash leaving the question of do I unfollow the booster, mute the OP, block the OP, etc.

There are a few ways a toot can get boosted massively, politically oriented outrage is by far the most common.

That's just about adding more people to your echo chamber though isn't it?

pretty fun though.

This idea that you should "escape your bubble" on the internet being better than not is confusing to me. If someone enjoys a personalized experience that's what they should have. Or are you telling someone who only reads fiction horror books that they need to escape their echo chamber and read other stuff because under your definition they are not eclectic enough in the media they consume?

"Needs to escape their echo chamber and read other stuff" is a bit too strong, but if you moderated it to "would benefit from escaping their echo chamber and being exposed to other stuff" then yes, I would take that position for literature preferences as well as political news.

I sometimes read literature outside my comfort zone. Sometimes I put it down -- not for me. But occasionally I discover a new genera I enjoy.

The trouble with political content is the style rather than the content, I think.

If you see ads for Ground News on YouTube they make it sound like you need add up what the right-wing ideologues say and what the left-wing ideologues say you get the truth. I get accused of being a “centrist” when I point out that people are using a toxic, hateful and othering style of communication (e.g. capitalizing Black doesn’t do anything about the difficult and long-standing problems of racism, maybe even mocks or trivializes the problem, but it sure polarizes the world into big B and little B people)

That sounds like a good change?

I mean, if you don't actually know someone yet, is it really a good idea to hang on their every word the way social media does?

If you follow people of certain hobbies - for example, retro computing - then it's a great way to discover others sharing the same interest. You can check their timeline to see if that's someone you want to follow or just choose not to. And if you really dislike someone, you can just block them. I think that retweets/boosts become a really good discovery mechanism here.

If your hobby is e.g., NFL Football, then yeah, the signal/noise ratio makes retweets a terrible thing that just clutters your feed.

>That makes it harder to find new accounts to follow though.

That would be the benefit.

What does that mean? If you don’t want to follow accounts, I would have thought that sort of social media isn’t for you (which is a pretty valid stance!)

Using social media to follow people you already know about is fine.

Retweets on Twitter predate the official feature, people used to prepend "RT @username" to the message they wanted to retweet. So I don't know that you could ever stop this.

Elon managed to stop people posting links on Twitter by basically killing any tweet that has one.

One could imagine doing the same for any tweet starting with "RT @username" or its variants.

I don't say this whatsoever to show off but just as an observer of the system: when I tweet about a new blog post I write which includes the link to the post (not in a followup tweet), the single tweet often gets a few hundred likes and tens of retweets.

While to a degree I believe people (even Twitter themselves) when they say tweet with links are downgraded, it clearly isn't crippling.

Sure, when you have 18k followers, you’re in the point-{oh,…}-one percent.

Meanwhile with 7k followers I barely get ten.

But I’ll try it more and see. Thanks for pointing that out.

EDIT: it’s possible you might be preempting the downweight because you’re including a screenshot with all of your links. I.e. the downweight only happens if twitter shows the expando for an external link, which doesn’t happen when screenshots are included. Either way, I’ll be implementing your technique. :)

> EDIT: it’s possible you might be preempting the downweight because you’re including a screenshot with all of your links. I.e. the downweight only happens if twitter shows the expando for an external link, which doesn’t happen when screenshots are included. Either way, I’ll be implementing your technique. :)

Interesting. The reason I've always done this is just because I want to give people a meaningful preview of the first few paragraphs. And I figured that it's been effective. In more than one ways, perhaps, now I see.

It’s possible that the screenshot is just so good at grabbing attention that it cancels out the downweight, too. It’s hard to know anything when the algorithm is a black box.

Your previews are very good, by the way. Much better than anything you’d see from a default expando. I’ll try the same.

There's certainly a system behind the scenes on twitter accounting for links-- I have many times your followers (80k)since I have abused the system (mostly though giveaways from my sponsor) my links often get many times fewer than hundreds of likes and tens of retweets.

You can experiment with the no link vs link thing for yourself by putting the link it a followup reply like some news accounts do btw.

Retweets are arguably better then the alternative since they create a chain of association back to the original source.

The problem is people uncritically believe the original source which is just someone saying something like "I just heard X is happening!" with no actual evidence at all.

Retweet was not originally a feature of Twitter. It was initially a convention where users would write "RT @user Their tweet"

Exactly

RTs were done manually before they were a thing. Hashtags, the same (so you could search for #something more easily as a topic).

That doesn't make sense. People will just copy the text and/or link the post.

That takes more effort though, which is probably a good thing.

This is what people were doing, writing "RT:" with the other post copy pasted. That's why Twitter (and probably others) created the retweet functionality, it was created by usage first.

I agree, particularly with regard to FB (which is the only social media I use regularly). Most reshared stuff is junk

However, most things FB promotes (i.e. suggests, or that just shows up in my feed for no reason) are the same, and they are all there for the same reason. To increase engagement.

Make a feature to reshare so that reshares are tracked

If I’m not mistaken, that is what WhatsApp does - you can only forward a message so many times. They implemented this to counter fake news spreading in India quickly. I didn’t follow whether that worked as intended, however.

You don't need to. Every social media implements this and has done so for years.

You can trust tradition, your instincts, logic, or science, whatever.

If you are stuck on constant skepticism questioning even the most blatant truths you will be stuck on step 1.

That’s pretty much what you have on Facebook. It’s also the reason that that platform is completely uninteresting, intellectually. What you get is famous people capitalizing on their fame / follower count, and the rest of us having no chance.

>[...] and the rest of us having no chance.

Chance for what?

Of getting any reach for our thoughts, ideas, opionions, of course…

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