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Comment by acheron | Hacker News Reader

I would like a social network where I can choose people to "follow", and then I can see when those people post things. That means:

1) Don't show posts from people I don't follow 2) Don't hide posts from people I do follow

Facebook gave up on that years ago, and that's probably one of the reasons I've mostly stopped using it. Now Twitter is following in the same footsteps. More and more I'm getting posts showing up in my Twitter timeline that are not from people I follow and weren't retweeted, they are just "person X follows this account, so here's a tweet from it". No! If I cared, I'd have followed it myself.

And now all this talk about showing "important" tweets that Twitter thinks I "missed". Stop it! You don't know what I think is important. Again, this is what drove me away from Facebook.

(Not even talking about ads/"sponsored tweets" here, though that doesn't help either.)

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The "timeline" trend is what really throws me off. Although an algorithmically generated timeline seems like a useful feature, it's not long before it becomes saturated with irrelevant content. To add to your example of Facebook, Soundcloud also suffers a similar, although milder problem. Tracks are unfairly ordered and prioritized, which leads to a lot of big names again and again, with the other users left behind.

Twitter's choice to follow in these footsteps may be an easy one, but surely not the best.

That pretty much describes how Ello works for now.

The challenges are 1) finding interesting people to follow and 2) encouraging interesting people to post content.

I joined with much of the early-adopter crowd in September. I really like a lot of things about the site (though I've also got my usual frustrations). But what @quinn (Quinn Norton) has to say is pretty on mark: if the people you're interested in hearing from (and she's on I am) don't post, then the value of the network itself falls.

https://ello.co/quinn/post/oY_qw2Ug5znFhsIk5Nir4w

My suggestion is that there be a cross of social and interest graphs. That a set of "channels" be created that you can follow. That would take some programming, and in the interim Ello's come up with a concept of official curated interest-oriented accounts. Tag those accounts in your own posts to have submissions considered for curation. I like the idea, and think it's an innovative one busting out of many of the current online models (though it might be similar in ways to Medium or other curated content sites).

On channels: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/FTpX7LWNFjtOpYGu5xRkHg

The curated profiles: https://ello.co/chelseahelen/post/Nl9Xz4m8OdxwP8mabwePHw

As a publisher this is the reason I have put quite a bit more effort into my email newsletter rather than Twitter or Facebook.

Twitter is much more about real-time updates and conversation, so it makes sense that it isn't the best medium for letting people know what was recently published. Facebook though seems like a good medium, but apparently the people that like my page don't interact with the content so they don't get to see it in their feeds.

Email newsletters are great because people can easily subscribe/unsubscribe at their leisure and I know who is reading them whereas it is pretty much a mystery on other services.

From a readers perspective, your comments are exactly why I love instagram so much. I can easily follow/unfollow people and my newsfeed is only filled with posts from people I followed plus the occasional ad. And if I want related material, I can go to the browse page which has posts that are popular in my network.

EDIT: I'd love a service that was like a combination of instagram + RSS reader where I could subscribe to both blogs and people and can easily follow/unfollow, and have it not be so fast moving but still see all of the updates that are posted.

> Stop it! You don't know what I think is important. Again, this is what drove me away from Facebook.

You know, it's extremely possible for them to figure out what is important to you. Especially considering that the behaviour on Twitter is more interests-based than relationship-based, it's fairly plausible to assume that Twitter can guess content that you didn't see but would find interesting

I find Twitter to be the least offensive of the SNS stuff (excluding maybe LINE for being based almost entirely on sticker revenue). The ads are usually pretty relevant, very obviously ads, and not super intrusive.

If that's the cost I have to pay to easily have quick conversations with famous people on the internet (or get support from some company), then that's great. There's a balance, obviously ( I am not a superfan of the "X people favorited" thing), but Twitter's value comes from how well it can figure this stuff out

While I agree in premise, the fact it isn't an opt-in/opt-out thing is broken. There is such a thing as information overload... maybe that thing I missed is something I didn't want to see in the first place - it should be my decision, not theirs.

As a 3rd party app user I don't see any of this nonsense. I don't care if I get features months later (if at all), the core experience works correctly.

No ads/sponsored content yet, but I expect it's only a matter of time. I'd be happy to pay to get rid of them.

Edit: Ignore this, sorry for posting the link.

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