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Anyone still actually having a good time on this service? Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past

Anyone still actually having a good time on this service? Just feels a cacophony of (US Centric) political screaming and foot stamping from both sides the past two years. Just utterly draining to scroll through my timeline some days and I only follow artists, devs and designers. I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. But starting to think it really needs a big "Politics" checkbox in settings and an algorithm to filter it all out. I'd rather get my news and politics from elsewhere. Twitter isn't even good for news because most of the time you enter half way into the conversation and have to dig to figure out what people are upset or gloating over today. Filtered words was a good first step but a lot of politics talk doesn't actually mention the words exactly. Edit - Mass replying to the careful follow question: I already choose who to follow carefully (Current count is 1000) and unfollow if it's really tiresome. No one I follow is a pure internet personality or journo, they're all people who actually do things outside of comment online. To me it's a case of I want to read my followers at their best (Posting interesting and creative work), but can't handle them at their worst (Political hot takes).

influx 9y ago
I moved to https://feedbin.com/ https://feedbin.com/ after Google killed Reader and stopped supporting me as a customer. Feedbin supported the use case I had which was nicely aggregating my RSS feeds. YMMV.
pjc50 9y ago
Politics is kind of ruining it. As is the fallout from politics - harassment. You can never be sure whether saying something and getting visibility is going to result in being quote-retweeted by a hostile party sending their followers to have a go at you. Some of whom seem to be bots, or multi-purpose Trump/Brexit promotion accounts.
levesque 9y ago
Follow people that only tweet about stuff that interests you. Don't hesitate to unfollow or mute people. You can tweak your follows and end up with a pretty low signal to noise ratio.
- kps 9y ago
  I have no problem controlling noise but Twitter seems incapable of delivering the signal. It seems impossible to have it show all the content from people I follow; instead it delivers some seemingly random subset.
  - levesque 9y ago
    As I was digging I found that Twitter started an algorithmic feed a while ago, and they optimize some metrics for interaction in order to show you the posts which are more relevant to you. IMHO, any form of feed filtering is prone to do unwanted things unless it can be explicitly controlled (Google+ was a good example of giving users control over their feed, but it didn't take off). The metrics optimized to decide which post to show or not show can never be completely correlated with user interest, that is one of the dangers of optimization. Luckily for you, the people at Twitter have added a way to opt-out of the algorithmic timeline. Go in your options and uncheck the "Show best tweets first".
    - kps 9y ago
      I did that when that particular change was announced; it still doesn't show everything and still often differs between loads. There should be a simple per-account selection of tweets, retweets, replies, and likes.
Angostura 9y ago
I use it professionally in the U.K. education sector and don’t see any U.S. commentary at all. Chose who and what you follow.
- heymijo 9y ago
  Curious, what part of education? I've found a few UK people I enjoy following (once I learned the UK education lingo).
flohofwoe 9y ago
Best knowledge-exchange platform for tech-people I've seen so far. With some careful selection of who to follow it even has an ok signal-to-noise ratio. Every single feature Twitter has implemented in the past few years made it worse for this type of audience though.
- jim_d 9y ago
  what types of features do you think would make it more useful for this use case?
  - joatmon-snoo 9y ago
    Better threading for sure. The current interface is pretty good, but it makes it hard to keep track of multiple back-and-forths and oftentimes drops tweets from threads.
    - freeflight 9y ago
      Indeed, navigating any discussion on Twitter feels like a complete mess. Imho some quirks it has in a browser are really annoying, like closing the conversation you are looking at when you click somewhere outside of it. Happened to me plenty of times that I misclicked and closed a discussion which I had been very deep in, so I had to open it again and scroll&click my way back to where it originally closed, way too much wasted time over a simple wrong click.
  - flohofwoe 9y ago
    - going back to a 'reproducible timeline', I want to see each tweet by each person I'm following, in the right order - I don't want to see tweets by persons I'm not following, unless they are retweeded or part of a thread - navigating the time line is a mess, sometimes the timeline scrolls to the top, and it's generally very hard to continue where you left - better thread visualization - clear distinction between tweets I've already seen vs 'unread tweets' - some sort of bookmarking or 'read later' for tweets - let me add tags to tweets and persons (I mainly want to add company or topic tags to people, for instance 'this is the WebGL guy at Apple') [edit: formatting]
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Try Mastodon.
- mrkrabo 9y ago
  It's sooooo annoying to hear people trying to get you into an alternate platform. app.net, gab.ai, identi.ca, etc. Seriously just stop. You're just annoying.
SonicSoul 9y ago
I still think it's a great platform and does what it does extremely well. Interesting point about Politics though, I've been using it as my #1 source of that for now. But if you don't follow people that share such content do you still see it?
- nailer 9y ago
  I've followed people because they're influential in tech and discovered they're Antifa members that openly advocate for political violence towards anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders.
  - SonicSoul 9y ago
    wow! seriously? so in a way you learned things about them that are probably relevant to following them :)
krapp 9y ago
I think the big problem is users trying to shoehorn increasingly long-form conversations and complex ideas into a platform designed for explicitly short top-of-mind contextless posts and link aggregation. That's why they named the service after the sound a bird makes. I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be void of quality.)
- visarga 9y ago
  There are excellent conversations carried out by Twitter. They can also act as comments to the linked content. Sometimes you get more from a 20 word comment than from a full article.
  - krapp 9y ago
    That's true, but I feel Twitter isn't really structured to handle the flow of conversations well. I've seen good conversations on Youtube, as well, but like Twitter that seems to happen in spite of the restrictions of the platform, not because of it. Also, the quality of Twitter comments doesn't seem to translate to HN, so much as the quality of the posts. Which, when those posts are emotive and lack sufficient context, tends to lead to poor threads here. And most of the rest of what's posted from Twitter seems to be HR and press releases, which are kind of uninteresting.
    - Karunamon 9y ago
      I hear this complaint often and still don't understand it. Twitter has had threaded conversations for a while now and they flow just as easily as HN comments.
      - recursive 9y ago
        Counterpoint: I can easily understand the treading on HN. Whenever I see a threaded conversation on twitter, I cannot tell what is a response to what. I'm not sure if threaded is even the right word, but you used it first. For instance: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/498008486551506945 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/49800848655150694... There are a ton of replies to things, but I can't tell where anything fits logically.
fgandiya 9y ago
Yeah, in getting annoyed with all the (US centric) politics on my feed. Similar thing is happening with Pocket. It's great at curating articles. It's just that at some point, it got hijacked by politics.
Angostura 9y ago
I use it professionally in the U.K. education sector and don’t see any U.S. commentary at all. Chose who and what you follow.
ghaff 9y ago
If Twitter's looking for a business model, I'll be the first to raise my hand to pay for filtering out tweets that have certain names in them. >I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. RSS still exists even though Reader doesn't. I use Feedly although I admit that I don't carefully curate a large number of feeds any longer because, outside of a relative handful of people/sites I want to follow, I figure news will find me through Twitter and other sources.
- intoverflow2 9y ago
  Basic word filtering was added recently https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords I'm hoping one day there is something smarter. I know RSS still exists but it feels like Google Readers death killed a lot of the blogs I followed off too. The new posts just got less and less and eventually stopped.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Didn't know about the mute words feature. Thanks! Apparently I'm not the only one who had that thought. I'm not sure Reader and the death of various blogs is necessarily cause and effect. My impression is that, to some degree, personal blog content has just shifted to Medium, podcasts, Facebook, etc.--or just gone away after it became less of a "thing" to do.
ezekg 9y ago
You should start muting people who talk politics and Twitter also allows you to block tweets containing keywords/phrases[0]. Honestly, I've started to enjoy Twitter so much more now that my feed is void of politics and sexism/sjw arguments. [0]: https://twitter.com/ajlkn/status/878717797588762624 https://twitter.com/ajlkn/status/878717797588762624
- colept 9y ago
  Why are you blocking "react?"
  - ezekg 9y ago
    That's not me. But likely because he doesn't enjoy the constant "do you use React?" and "why not React?", since I believe Pieter doesn't use frameworks. Honestly, sometimes the questions on his tweets are annoying so I bet he gets fed up with the constant questions from people who want to emulate him thinking it will make them successful.
wslh 9y ago
> Anyone still actually having a good time on this service? Not good time but there are some communities and social graphs active there that you cannot avoid if you work in specific fields. For example, computer security.
mxschumacher 9y ago
I'm @mxschumacher on the platform and it took me three years to "get Twitter", but now I love it. Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I would not want to miss. Selection criteria I use: - don't pay too much attention to profile, better to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science people who talk about their kids, sports and politics all day - sane tweet frequency: If they've tweeted 20k times, there's a good chance it is just noise/spam - select people who follow few people, anything above 2k is suspicious ("I'll follow you so you follow me") Here's the list of people I follow - the further down you go, the longer they have survived my aggressive filtering process (another design flaw: it takes minutes of scrolling to get to the good stuff): https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following
- heymijo 9y ago
  Do you use lists?
  - mxschumacher 9y ago
    I would love to, e.g. "software engineers", "authors", "investors" etc, but imo the feature is completely unusable as there is no batch editing. Definitely has a lot of potential, especially when combined with filters: "Give me Silicon Valley people minus politics and hyperlocal info"
    - heymijo 9y ago
      I get that. Twitter has a lot of usability imperfections. Lists is one, but I still use them. Anywhere from 0 - 200 people, depending on how much they post, is about the maximum I can handle in any one stream. So I segregate into lists. I see you have about 400 people you follow, which would overwhelm me if they were all in my main feed.
      - mxschumacher 9y ago
heymijo 9y ago
Yes, #mtbos - The Math Twitter Blogosphere Tremendous community of math educators from pre-k through professors. Education has horrible silos, especially up and down the stack. Twitter gave this community an opportunity to break those silos down and connect across vast geographies. The community is doing so well it's even hosting it's second annual IRL conference this week: Twitter Math Camp #tmc17 While the #mtbos connects through Twitter, it seems a world away from the use case you described, which does not seem like a good time.
jsnell 9y ago
You just need to be brutal about pruning. Someone retweets politics twice in a row? Mute retweets from them. Someone posts more politics than things you want to read? Unfollow. My timeline is maybe 5% US politics. That's still 5% too much, but no more than in any other media. That's 117 people followed, and is about the maximum message volume I want to deal with in any case.
Bartweiss 9y ago
Twitter is great as a site I exclusively use by following links. I check tweets when a source I like points me to one, or I need to check outage notifications for work. Twitter is great for that, but it's of course the way Twitter desperately doesn't want to be used.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Asooka 9y ago
I do enjoy twitter, but I sort the people I follow into lists. E.g. "Actual friends", "People who post cool art", "People who just post random things", etc. Then use Tweetdeck to view all lists at the same time.
- Mad_Mac 9y ago
  I have the same kind of system. Otherwise it's just impossible to follow everything after you start to follow more people.
Karunamon 9y ago
Twitter now has the ability to hide tweets containing certain words. All you need to do is add a few major politicos and buzzwords and you'll see a lot less noise :) https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032 https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032
kalleboo 9y ago
Yes I am having a good time. But I am not American, don't live in the US and the few Americans I do follow mostly keep out of the long rambling kind of politics.
moultano 9y ago
I do feel like I get value from politics Twitter, but sometimes I'm just not in the mood, and really wish I could filter it down to scicomm twitter easily.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bybjorn 9y ago
Use "Muted words" - you'll find it under Settings. Add Trump, Republican, etc. :)
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
For me it's basically an RSS feed with comments. Very valuable for learning about and keeping up to date with narrow industry news/trends. Also a good way to connect with people professionally, but less formally than LinkedIn. The major downside is that is that a tight group or individual can get put on blast to the whole of twitter, and then just get ignorant vitriol thrown at them and that kind of ruins the whole experience. Happened to me not long ago. Not that big of a deal in the end. Just take a week off and come back and the hive will have found something else to attack. The Twitter universe has a pretty short attention span - even if it has a long memory.
_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
I'm @codemonkeyism on Twitter https://twitter.com/codemonkeyism https://twitter.com/codemonkeyism and still love it. I think it's key to always prune and trim the people you are following and keep the number low and relevant. If someone tweets several times about things I'm not interested in, I unfollow. I unfollowed some high profile tech people because of their stream being full of politics. "(Current count is 1000)" This seems much too high, I follow 500 and this already looks too high for me (some trimming needed).
nilkn 9y ago
I think you're probably following too many people. 1k is workable but it requires a lot of investment to make sure you're consistently only following quality posters. Also, as you suggest, even many high-quality posters also tend to sometimes churn out bursts of low-quality content. With 1k accounts subscribed to, that's a lot of opportunity for low-quality bursts.
norea-armozel 9y ago
I think you have to pick who you follow better to get at the good content on Twitter. Whether it's Weird Twitter or just following a bunch of artists (SFW or even NSFW) there's plenty of content out there on Twitter. I think the problem Twitter has is two fold. It wants people to come and stay on Twitter but it also wants those same people not fight with each other. The solution the developers picked was shadow banning. This banning where the user isn't aware that their tweets aren't visible to others who don't follow you and those who do follow you won't be notified of your tweets either (they only see them on their time line). The most common way this happens right now is someone uses of well known curse words. Right now, I'm shadow banned for whatever reason despite not tweeting at verified accounts often enough to run afoul their automated system. So this is the climate that new users experience where Twitter promises to help them engage with other users (especially verified users of notably celebrities and the like) but if you do anything vaguely hostile in their view then you lose the freedom to interact with anyone even those who follow you mutually. All I can say is that's probably a major contributing factor in the decline of Twitter at present. They just refuse to hire moderators to do proper moderation and to make the rules for banning or shadow banning clear and objective. Basically, it's what happens when you let technophiles try to solve a non-technological problem.
boyce 9y ago
It's awful Twitter used to feel like a good party, with a great range of people with stories and opinions and hopes to talk about. That's definitely over now. I'm really enjoying mastodon.social though, it feels like how the internet used to
RodericDay 9y ago
1k is an absurd number of people. Try <100.
joelrunyon 9y ago
It's really good for sub-communities. Following the NBA on twitter is actually an awesome experience. I wish they would stop comparing twitter to other social media networks + focus on what is good about it (live, sports, entertainment) and double down on that & figure out how to make money by offering more services in that space.
tomjen3 9y ago
Add 'Trump' to your blocked words. That removes most political bullshit. Then take every account that can't handle responsible retweeting and remove retweets from that account (which is now possible while still following the account). I did this and twitter is now useful again. I
zippergz 9y ago
It seems like a lot of people are trying to solve your problem, but I'll just answer the direct question as a data point. Yes, I am still having a good time on Twitter, and I have been since shortly after it launched. It has definitely changed in many ways, good and bad, but overall I still use it a lot and enjoy it. That doesn't mean you have to :)
elmar 9y ago
I have a simpler tactic I don't follow anyone I search for hashtags, so my experience is not person driven is subject driven. I also have a couple of lists that I sometines look at tweets.
r0fl 9y ago
Donald trump seems to be having the best time on Twitter. If he stops using the service the stock will plummet 10-20%
acchow 9y ago
> Twitter isn't even good for news because most of the time you enter half way into the conversation I also don't like it for news because a single piece of news will appear a thousand times in my feed.
dmix 9y ago
I haven't been able to use Twitter since the election. I was using it daily up until then. It seems like people have stopped treating politics as something you only talk about with restraint. And I mean smart urban people, not your crazy hippie Aunt on Facebook. People have been sold the idea that they need to be "doing something" by complaining about everything into an echo chamber of people who agree with them. And everyone thinks they are a mini-Jon Stewart in the process. It just stopped being fun because I don't want to spend hours filtering through this hoise building up a new list of 100 people I like to follow...again. I left Facebook under similar circumstances. Basically when all of it became baby photos and FW:FW:FW: email list quality news articles, instead of my friends having fun.
dredmorbius 9y ago
On any platform which allows curating feeds: Block fuckwits. If someone isn't doing it for you, unfollow. 1,000 is almost certainly too many. https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm7Tq https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm...
egypturnash 9y ago
I have this habit of checking Twitter in the morning. Lately it's become a kind of Russian Roulette: is my timeline going to be 90% people screaming about whatever horrible thing Trump did today? Sometimes I join in that screaming, too. I keep on trying to shift over to Mastodon. It's not quite at critical mass of enough of my friends being there, but it's slowly growing. Mastodon has a system of 'content warnings'; a user can mark their toots to be hidden, and give any arbitrary reason. 'Politics' is very much considered to be one of the reasons you should put a content warning on a toot, along with other reasons like 'NSFW', 'moping', 'spoilers for the latest episode of Gamey Throney', or 'raw unadulterated shoe-lust'. It's also got a 500 character limit, a distributed architecture, a tendency for people running servers to crack down on jerkwaddery, and is pretty much supported entirely by Patreon right now rather than pouring venture capital down a hole while trying to chase advertising dollars.
natecavanaugh 9y ago
I have to agree with you, but I don't think I've ever had a "good time" on twitter. It's not optimized for conversation, and it doesn't even optimize for thoughtful condensation of ideas; it just optimizes for the quickest brain diarrhea you can squeeze out in 140 characters). Sure, I get its use as a broadcast platform, but it's not even flattening the world all that much in that regard. The lions share of attention still goes to those who probably need that kind of reach the least (granted, what social sphere is there where that's not really the case?) Maybe it's just my innate crotchety-ness, but I feel like a lot of people think about Twitter like owning a boat: fun in theory but a big PITA that probably won't be missed except once or twice a year. Of course, this is all imbued with my own personal gripes and prejudices with social media, so take it as a commiserating vent :)
karzeem 9y ago
The key is don't follow accounts that tweet about politics. I filtered mine down a few years ago and have loved it ever since.
ivcha 9y ago
yes, me... please refrain yourself from starting your replies like that...
vxNsr 9y ago
I think I just realized how everyone who uses twitter regularly actually uses it[1]. I had no idea this existed (maybe others did...) but it's honestly 1000 times better than the official website and you get the old timeline back and following conversations is much easier, stays on one page. [1] tweetdeck.twitter.com

influx 9y ago

I moved to https://feedbin.com/ https://feedbin.com/ after Google killed Reader and stopped supporting me as a customer. Feedbin supported the use case I had which was nicely aggregating my RSS feeds. YMMV.

pjc50 9y ago

Politics is kind of ruining it. As is the fallout from politics - harassment. You can never be sure whether saying something and getting visibility is going to result in being quote-retweeted by a hostile party sending their followers to have a go at you. Some of whom seem to be bots, or multi-purpose Trump/Brexit promotion accounts.

levesque 9y ago

Follow people that only tweet about stuff that interests you. Don't hesitate to unfollow or mute people. You can tweak your follows and end up with a pretty low signal to noise ratio.

kps 9y ago
I have no problem controlling noise but Twitter seems incapable of delivering the signal. It seems impossible to have it show all the content from people I follow; instead it delivers some seemingly random subset.
- levesque 9y ago
  As I was digging I found that Twitter started an algorithmic feed a while ago, and they optimize some metrics for interaction in order to show you the posts which are more relevant to you. IMHO, any form of feed filtering is prone to do unwanted things unless it can be explicitly controlled (Google+ was a good example of giving users control over their feed, but it didn't take off). The metrics optimized to decide which post to show or not show can never be completely correlated with user interest, that is one of the dangers of optimization. Luckily for you, the people at Twitter have added a way to opt-out of the algorithmic timeline. Go in your options and uncheck the "Show best tweets first".
  - kps 9y ago
    I did that when that particular change was announced; it still doesn't show everything and still often differs between loads. There should be a simple per-account selection of tweets, retweets, replies, and likes.

Angostura 9y ago

I use it professionally in the U.K. education sector and don’t see any U.S. commentary at all. Chose who and what you follow.

heymijo 9y ago
Curious, what part of education? I've found a few UK people I enjoy following (once I learned the UK education lingo).

flohofwoe 9y ago

Best knowledge-exchange platform for tech-people I've seen so far. With some careful selection of who to follow it even has an ok signal-to-noise ratio. Every single feature Twitter has implemented in the past few years made it worse for this type of audience though.

jim_d 9y ago
what types of features do you think would make it more useful for this use case?
- joatmon-snoo 9y ago
  Better threading for sure. The current interface is pretty good, but it makes it hard to keep track of multiple back-and-forths and oftentimes drops tweets from threads.
  - freeflight 9y ago
    Indeed, navigating any discussion on Twitter feels like a complete mess. Imho some quirks it has in a browser are really annoying, like closing the conversation you are looking at when you click somewhere outside of it. Happened to me plenty of times that I misclicked and closed a discussion which I had been very deep in, so I had to open it again and scroll&click my way back to where it originally closed, way too much wasted time over a simple wrong click.
- flohofwoe 9y ago
  - going back to a 'reproducible timeline', I want to see each tweet by each person I'm following, in the right order - I don't want to see tweets by persons I'm not following, unless they are retweeded or part of a thread - navigating the time line is a mess, sometimes the timeline scrolls to the top, and it's generally very hard to continue where you left - better thread visualization - clear distinction between tweets I've already seen vs 'unread tweets' - some sort of bookmarking or 'read later' for tweets - let me add tags to tweets and persons (I mainly want to add company or topic tags to people, for instance 'this is the WebGL guy at Apple') [edit: formatting]

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

Try Mastodon.

mrkrabo 9y ago
It's sooooo annoying to hear people trying to get you into an alternate platform. app.net, gab.ai, identi.ca, etc. Seriously just stop. You're just annoying.

SonicSoul 9y ago

I still think it's a great platform and does what it does extremely well. Interesting point about Politics though, I've been using it as my #1 source of that for now. But if you don't follow people that share such content do you still see it?

nailer 9y ago
I've followed people because they're influential in tech and discovered they're Antifa members that openly advocate for political violence towards anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders.
- SonicSoul 9y ago
  wow! seriously? so in a way you learned things about them that are probably relevant to following them :)

krapp 9y ago

I think the big problem is users trying to shoehorn increasingly long-form conversations and complex ideas into a platform designed for explicitly short top-of-mind contextless posts and link aggregation. That's why they named the service after the sound a bird makes. I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be void of quality.)

visarga 9y ago
There are excellent conversations carried out by Twitter. They can also act as comments to the linked content. Sometimes you get more from a 20 word comment than from a full article.
- krapp 9y ago
  That's true, but I feel Twitter isn't really structured to handle the flow of conversations well. I've seen good conversations on Youtube, as well, but like Twitter that seems to happen in spite of the restrictions of the platform, not because of it. Also, the quality of Twitter comments doesn't seem to translate to HN, so much as the quality of the posts. Which, when those posts are emotive and lack sufficient context, tends to lead to poor threads here. And most of the rest of what's posted from Twitter seems to be HR and press releases, which are kind of uninteresting.
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    I hear this complaint often and still don't understand it. Twitter has had threaded conversations for a while now and they flow just as easily as HN comments.
    - recursive 9y ago
      Counterpoint: I can easily understand the treading on HN. Whenever I see a threaded conversation on twitter, I cannot tell what is a response to what. I'm not sure if threaded is even the right word, but you used it first. For instance: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/498008486551506945 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/49800848655150694... There are a ton of replies to things, but I can't tell where anything fits logically.

fgandiya 9y ago

Yeah, in getting annoyed with all the (US centric) politics on my feed. Similar thing is happening with Pocket. It's great at curating articles. It's just that at some point, it got hijacked by politics.

Angostura 9y ago

I use it professionally in the U.K. education sector and don’t see any U.S. commentary at all. Chose who and what you follow.

ghaff 9y ago

If Twitter's looking for a business model, I'll be the first to raise my hand to pay for filtering out tweets that have certain names in them. >I grew to rely on Twitter to find interesting content after Google killed Reader. RSS still exists even though Reader doesn't. I use Feedly although I admit that I don't carefully curate a large number of feeds any longer because, outside of a relative handful of people/sites I want to follow, I figure news will find me through Twitter and other sources.

intoverflow2 9y ago
Basic word filtering was added recently https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords I'm hoping one day there is something smarter. I know RSS still exists but it feels like Google Readers death killed a lot of the blogs I followed off too. The new posts just got less and less and eventually stopped.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Didn't know about the mute words feature. Thanks! Apparently I'm not the only one who had that thought. I'm not sure Reader and the death of various blogs is necessarily cause and effect. My impression is that, to some degree, personal blog content has just shifted to Medium, podcasts, Facebook, etc.--or just gone away after it became less of a "thing" to do.

ezekg 9y ago

You should start muting people who talk politics and Twitter also allows you to block tweets containing keywords/phrases[0]. Honestly, I've started to enjoy Twitter so much more now that my feed is void of politics and sexism/sjw arguments. [0]: https://twitter.com/ajlkn/status/878717797588762624 https://twitter.com/ajlkn/status/878717797588762624

colept 9y ago
Why are you blocking "react?"
- ezekg 9y ago
  That's not me. But likely because he doesn't enjoy the constant "do you use React?" and "why not React?", since I believe Pieter doesn't use frameworks. Honestly, sometimes the questions on his tweets are annoying so I bet he gets fed up with the constant questions from people who want to emulate him thinking it will make them successful.

wslh 9y ago

> Anyone still actually having a good time on this service? Not good time but there are some communities and social graphs active there that you cannot avoid if you work in specific fields. For example, computer security.

mxschumacher 9y ago

I'm @mxschumacher on the platform and it took me three years to "get Twitter", but now I love it. Went from following 1500 to only 400. Almost no politics now and high granularity & outstanding signal to noise ratio. An insight-machine that I would not want to miss. Selection criteria I use: - don't pay too much attention to profile, better to check actual tweets. Plenty of smart/impressive sounding tech/science people who talk about their kids, sports and politics all day - sane tweet frequency: If they've tweeted 20k times, there's a good chance it is just noise/spam - select people who follow few people, anything above 2k is suspicious ("I'll follow you so you follow me") Here's the list of people I follow - the further down you go, the longer they have survived my aggressive filtering process (another design flaw: it takes minutes of scrolling to get to the good stuff): https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following https://twitter.com/mxschumacher/following

heymijo 9y ago
Do you use lists?
- mxschumacher 9y ago
  I would love to, e.g. "software engineers", "authors", "investors" etc, but imo the feature is completely unusable as there is no batch editing. Definitely has a lot of potential, especially when combined with filters: "Give me Silicon Valley people minus politics and hyperlocal info"
  - heymijo 9y ago
    I get that. Twitter has a lot of usability imperfections. Lists is one, but I still use them. Anywhere from 0 - 200 people, depending on how much they post, is about the maximum I can handle in any one stream. So I segregate into lists. I see you have about 400 people you follow, which would overwhelm me if they were all in my main feed.
    - mxschumacher 9y ago

heymijo 9y ago

Yes, #mtbos - The Math Twitter Blogosphere Tremendous community of math educators from pre-k through professors. Education has horrible silos, especially up and down the stack. Twitter gave this community an opportunity to break those silos down and connect across vast geographies. The community is doing so well it's even hosting it's second annual IRL conference this week: Twitter Math Camp #tmc17 While the #mtbos connects through Twitter, it seems a world away from the use case you described, which does not seem like a good time.

jsnell 9y ago

You just need to be brutal about pruning. Someone retweets politics twice in a row? Mute retweets from them. Someone posts more politics than things you want to read? Unfollow. My timeline is maybe 5% US politics. That's still 5% too much, but no more than in any other media. That's 117 people followed, and is about the maximum message volume I want to deal with in any case.

Bartweiss 9y ago

Twitter is great as a site I exclusively use by following links. I check tweets when a source I like points me to one, or I need to check outage notifications for work. Twitter is great for that, but it's of course the way Twitter desperately doesn't want to be used.

deleted 9y ago

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Asooka 9y ago

I do enjoy twitter, but I sort the people I follow into lists. E.g. "Actual friends", "People who post cool art", "People who just post random things", etc. Then use Tweetdeck to view all lists at the same time.

Mad_Mac 9y ago
I have the same kind of system. Otherwise it's just impossible to follow everything after you start to follow more people.

Karunamon 9y ago

Twitter now has the ability to hide tweets containing certain words. All you need to do is add a few major politicos and buzzwords and you'll see a lot less noise :) https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032 https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032

kalleboo 9y ago

Yes I am having a good time. But I am not American, don't live in the US and the few Americans I do follow mostly keep out of the long rambling kind of politics.

moultano 9y ago

I do feel like I get value from politics Twitter, but sometimes I'm just not in the mood, and really wish I could filter it down to scicomm twitter easily.

deleted 9y ago

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bybjorn 9y ago

Use "Muted words" - you'll find it under Settings. Add Trump, Republican, etc. :)

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

For me it's basically an RSS feed with comments. Very valuable for learning about and keeping up to date with narrow industry news/trends. Also a good way to connect with people professionally, but less formally than LinkedIn. The major downside is that is that a tight group or individual can get put on blast to the whole of twitter, and then just get ignorant vitriol thrown at them and that kind of ruins the whole experience. Happened to me not long ago. Not that big of a deal in the end. Just take a week off and come back and the hive will have found something else to attack. The Twitter universe has a pretty short attention span - even if it has a long memory.

_Codemonkeyism 9y ago

I'm @codemonkeyism on Twitter https://twitter.com/codemonkeyism https://twitter.com/codemonkeyism and still love it. I think it's key to always prune and trim the people you are following and keep the number low and relevant. If someone tweets several times about things I'm not interested in, I unfollow. I unfollowed some high profile tech people because of their stream being full of politics. "(Current count is 1000)" This seems much too high, I follow 500 and this already looks too high for me (some trimming needed).

nilkn 9y ago

I think you're probably following too many people. 1k is workable but it requires a lot of investment to make sure you're consistently only following quality posters. Also, as you suggest, even many high-quality posters also tend to sometimes churn out bursts of low-quality content. With 1k accounts subscribed to, that's a lot of opportunity for low-quality bursts.

norea-armozel 9y ago

I think you have to pick who you follow better to get at the good content on Twitter. Whether it's Weird Twitter or just following a bunch of artists (SFW or even NSFW) there's plenty of content out there on Twitter. I think the problem Twitter has is two fold. It wants people to come and stay on Twitter but it also wants those same people not fight with each other. The solution the developers picked was shadow banning. This banning where the user isn't aware that their tweets aren't visible to others who don't follow you and those who do follow you won't be notified of your tweets either (they only see them on their time line). The most common way this happens right now is someone uses of well known curse words. Right now, I'm shadow banned for whatever reason despite not tweeting at verified accounts often enough to run afoul their automated system. So this is the climate that new users experience where Twitter promises to help them engage with other users (especially verified users of notably celebrities and the like) but if you do anything vaguely hostile in their view then you lose the freedom to interact with anyone even those who follow you mutually. All I can say is that's probably a major contributing factor in the decline of Twitter at present. They just refuse to hire moderators to do proper moderation and to make the rules for banning or shadow banning clear and objective. Basically, it's what happens when you let technophiles try to solve a non-technological problem.

boyce 9y ago

It's awful Twitter used to feel like a good party, with a great range of people with stories and opinions and hopes to talk about. That's definitely over now. I'm really enjoying mastodon.social though, it feels like how the internet used to

RodericDay 9y ago

1k is an absurd number of people. Try <100.

joelrunyon 9y ago

It's really good for sub-communities. Following the NBA on twitter is actually an awesome experience. I wish they would stop comparing twitter to other social media networks + focus on what is good about it (live, sports, entertainment) and double down on that & figure out how to make money by offering more services in that space.

tomjen3 9y ago

Add 'Trump' to your blocked words. That removes most political bullshit. Then take every account that can't handle responsible retweeting and remove retweets from that account (which is now possible while still following the account). I did this and twitter is now useful again. I

zippergz 9y ago

It seems like a lot of people are trying to solve your problem, but I'll just answer the direct question as a data point. Yes, I am still having a good time on Twitter, and I have been since shortly after it launched. It has definitely changed in many ways, good and bad, but overall I still use it a lot and enjoy it. That doesn't mean you have to :)

elmar 9y ago

I have a simpler tactic I don't follow anyone I search for hashtags, so my experience is not person driven is subject driven. I also have a couple of lists that I sometines look at tweets.

r0fl 9y ago

Donald trump seems to be having the best time on Twitter. If he stops using the service the stock will plummet 10-20%

acchow 9y ago

> Twitter isn't even good for news because most of the time you enter half way into the conversation I also don't like it for news because a single piece of news will appear a thousand times in my feed.

dmix 9y ago

I haven't been able to use Twitter since the election. I was using it daily up until then. It seems like people have stopped treating politics as something you only talk about with restraint. And I mean smart urban people, not your crazy hippie Aunt on Facebook. People have been sold the idea that they need to be "doing something" by complaining about everything into an echo chamber of people who agree with them. And everyone thinks they are a mini-Jon Stewart in the process. It just stopped being fun because I don't want to spend hours filtering through this hoise building up a new list of 100 people I like to follow...again. I left Facebook under similar circumstances. Basically when all of it became baby photos and FW:FW:FW: email list quality news articles, instead of my friends having fun.

dredmorbius 9y ago

On any platform which allows curating feeds: Block fuckwits. If someone isn't doing it for you, unfollow. 1,000 is almost certainly too many. https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm7Tq https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm...

egypturnash 9y ago

I have this habit of checking Twitter in the morning. Lately it's become a kind of Russian Roulette: is my timeline going to be 90% people screaming about whatever horrible thing Trump did today? Sometimes I join in that screaming, too. I keep on trying to shift over to Mastodon. It's not quite at critical mass of enough of my friends being there, but it's slowly growing. Mastodon has a system of 'content warnings'; a user can mark their toots to be hidden, and give any arbitrary reason. 'Politics' is very much considered to be one of the reasons you should put a content warning on a toot, along with other reasons like 'NSFW', 'moping', 'spoilers for the latest episode of Gamey Throney', or 'raw unadulterated shoe-lust'. It's also got a 500 character limit, a distributed architecture, a tendency for people running servers to crack down on jerkwaddery, and is pretty much supported entirely by Patreon right now rather than pouring venture capital down a hole while trying to chase advertising dollars.

natecavanaugh 9y ago

I have to agree with you, but I don't think I've ever had a "good time" on twitter. It's not optimized for conversation, and it doesn't even optimize for thoughtful condensation of ideas; it just optimizes for the quickest brain diarrhea you can squeeze out in 140 characters). Sure, I get its use as a broadcast platform, but it's not even flattening the world all that much in that regard. The lions share of attention still goes to those who probably need that kind of reach the least (granted, what social sphere is there where that's not really the case?) Maybe it's just my innate crotchety-ness, but I feel like a lot of people think about Twitter like owning a boat: fun in theory but a big PITA that probably won't be missed except once or twice a year. Of course, this is all imbued with my own personal gripes and prejudices with social media, so take it as a commiserating vent :)

karzeem 9y ago

The key is don't follow accounts that tweet about politics. I filtered mine down a few years ago and have loved it ever since.

ivcha 9y ago

yes, me... please refrain yourself from starting your replies like that...

vxNsr 9y ago

I think I just realized how everyone who uses twitter regularly actually uses it[1]. I had no idea this existed (maybe others did...) but it's honestly 1000 times better than the official website and you get the old timeline back and following conversations is much easier, stays on one page. [1] tweetdeck.twitter.com