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Comment by greggh | Hacker News Reader

If the ads on Twitter were even close to relevant I wouldn't mind just scrolling past them. But every ad I see lately is just right-wing idiocy like PragerU.

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Who else would still want to advertise on twitter?

I don’t understand why people even use twitter at all at this point.

Bubbles, my friend.

Addiction to scrolling

That’s probably not it. I still have Twitter because the people I follow are on there (mostly music artists). I’ve never opened the algorithmic feed. There is also a huge chance that much of the activity you see are bots. I have 0 posts and 2000 followers somehow. No way they’re human

It's not it for you, but it sounds like you are more of an edge case. I think it is true for a lot of people.

I don't see any activity myself, I don't use Twitter any more. I had an addiction which peaked with the UK 2019 election and I had to quit after that. It's an awful drug which gives no high and terrible side effects.

Please be aware that the both of you don’t know, unless you’re not mentioning any studies on purpose. You’re both projecting your own subjective experience onto an entire community.

You’re right. Did some googling and it seems I’m wrong.

https://pro.morningconsult.com/analysis/doomscrolling-impact...

> 53% of Gen Z “doomscroll” and 31% of adults in general do so.

Now I understand how Facebook/Twitter are worth so much. This is crazy

>I don’t understand why people even use twitter at all at this point.

Because it hasn't really changed for me. Some things are better (less censorship), some things are worse (bots and spam). But the overall signal is the same.

All my friends are on there and haven't switched to another site. Some nice features are definitely getting removed from it though (like being able to hide a tweet so only a subset of your followers can see it).

I use mostly to follow indie game devs, to follow their progress and not miss announcements of release dates, and also a few artists.

Japan's crazy mascot, Chiitan, the god of advertising

>But every ad I see lately is just right-wing idiocy like PragerU.

Any ideas why the algorithm is feeding you those ads?

I agree the ads suck, but I'm mostly getting drop-shipping junk and crypto.

I really think the question is why wouldn't you block those ads using something like ublock origin or adguard (admittly you will lose using the app which is better for some people) but you solve your greatest point of pain.

I think the original question is valid here - I also don’t get any right-wing ads. I guess that is because I never interact with those kind of post, also not negatively, exactly BECAUSE I want to see less of them.

Twitter still allows you to mute/block any advertiser… I’ve seen fewer big companies that make a million throwaway accounts for advertising to make it hard to mute. Any ad account I notice more than a couple times gets muted, Twitter asks me if I want to upgrade to paid and I ignore that.

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