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Comment by tijs | Hacker News Reader

I think there definitely is a market for better filters. But i do think it's a bit weird that we seem to need more technology to save us from technology. Instead of muting users you follow the more obvious fix is simple; unfollow some of those people, unsubscribe from those newsletters, mailing lists and RSS feeds and basically close the tap instead of corking the firehose.

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Well consider HN frontpage during the past 24 hours. I like to read stories, and I dislike it when half of the stories cover the topic I've already read about a few times.

I want to ignore the stuff I am not interested in, while being subscribed to the feed.

I completely agree. Self-restraint is a huge piece and something I don't talk about in the post.

I'm more talking about muting topics from sources you like. I want to subscribe to you on Twitter but I don't want your SXSW tweets, for example.

Yes that makes sense. Not an easy problem to fix as ideally it would take minimal management but as new 'keywords' need filtering with every new event flooding your stream you'd be spending all your time filtering. Kinda defeats the purpose. Maybe you'd want to set a maximum distraction level per day over all your social media and simply mute the biggest meme offenders automatically. I might even sign up for that :)

But i do think it's a bit weird that we seem to need more technology to save us from technology.

When you think about it, that path is extremely well-trodden.

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