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Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

Why do you have him blocked, and just not following him?

So after naughty ol' Mr Car took over Twitter, but before I stopped using the site (this would probably have been around Oct 22), I started, after never having followed or interacted with him, getting multiple inane tweets from Musk in my feed every day, along with constant suggestions to follow him. So I blocked him (I think he was one of three people in 15 years on the site who I felt the need to block). I assume this is fairly common for Twitter users; can't imagine it's gotten _better_ since.

Not following is for content you don't mind seeing, muting is for annoying friends you can't be screenshotted blocking, and blocking is for content you don't care.

I don’t know if you’ve been on X lately but even if not following him you can receive push notifications from his tweets. Tested this on multiple accounts now, he’s unavoidable unless blocked and sometimes not even then because of all the bootlicker accounts that screenshot and repost his tweets. Frankly it’s made the platform unusable to me, almost nothing he posts is interesting or worth reading.

Why be on X in the first place? I lost all reason to be there about around the time of the rename.

A lot of scientists and journalists have not moved to other platforms. I tried to use instagram instead but the algorithmic injection of content and a terrible UI make it unusable for me.

I find using Twitter in the "following" mode, as opposed to the default "for you", I get a lot of value content and almost no noise.

Yeah Instagram's algorithm is garbage. I get repetitive generic content no matter what. It doesn't seem responsive at all.

Even Musk has recommended doing this.

If you are a content creator on Twitch or YouTube you pretty are being held hostage on Twitter due to critical mass. Migrating would require a mass protest of large content creators to choose a new platform and move over all at once.

It's his personal blog, and he allows the plebs to post comments.

exactly!

reading xitter today is worse than daytime television.

contributing to it's content pool is just counter intuitive.

So my understanding is Elon reduced the algorithm's bubble effect - causing people to be exposed to contrarian content, content a person doesn't agree with, so that it would be witnessed by more people.

Do you think it's a problem that people are coddled in bubbles?

Do you think it's a problem that people are inundated with rage bait and scams? That's it's own "bubble".

People aren't getting educational and uplifting material shoved into their feeds.

Should a person with the most followers in the world have more people seeing, to then be able to know what they are sharing or saying, to then have more eyeballs to scrutinize them?

Should they have more or less eyeballs witnessing them, and responding to them?

I'd rather see what they are saying directly vs. seeing other articles about him that are most likely propaganda nowadays with how corrupted the media currently is, hence partly why ELon felt compelled to buy Twitter-X to begin with.

But fair enough, blocking him then could make sense.

I just have Musk muted and I never, ever see his posts nor retweets.

I stopped using X because it was literally impossible to not see his posts.

/shrug

My partner has the same. …but, to be fair, who knows what different variants of the platform are given to different people in different regions at different times.

Dissenting opinions are Not Tolerated

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