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"But I follow thousands of people" I was wondering why someone would feel this way until I got to that line! Why would you follow thousands of people if "noise

"But I follow thousands of people" I was wondering why someone would feel this way until I got to that line! Why would you follow thousands of people if "noise" bothers you? I think most people like their social media a bit more curated than that to start with, could be wrong though.

ATsch 9y ago
I follow ~30 people, but have still turned off showing retweets for some. Some people just seem to treat it as a bigger like button.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  I wonder if this is a key part of the problem, or whether it's a separate problem of its own making. I know sometimes I struggle with the decision of whether to 'like' or 'retweet'. I wonder what it would be like if there was only a 'like' button, but individuals can choose to broadcast their likes or not, and followers can choose whether to display (notifications of) likes or not.
  - mxfh 9y ago
    I'm guilty of 90% retweets or so, but have a general low output rate including them. So I made a policy of retweet only things, that people who follow me wouldn't see anyway. Like 10+ people overlap. For me it's distinctively different from a like button. The most annoying thing is having other peoples liked pushed into the timeline and the same 3 ads all over again.
- avian 9y ago
  > Some people just seem to treat it as a bigger like button. But isn't that exactly what it is? The line between retweet and like is pretty blurry with the algorithmic timeline. I often see tweets that were merely liked by someone I follow.
chooseaname 9y ago
I could not imagine following that many people. I follow my local (city) government, the NWS for weather, and Raymond Hettinger.
mtgx 9y ago
I think they're just trying to apply the wrong tool for the job. What they're probably interested in is getting news/thoughts about a handful of topics, which would be akin to following a few subreddits or forums. But the way Twitter and Facebook are set-up is that you follow people, not topics. And people tend to talk about all sorts of topics on a given day, thus the "noise."
- cpach 9y ago
  Technorati and Twingly used to provide such services but Technorati seems to have been bought and decommissioned and Twingly has pivoted into something else.
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
I follow a couple thousand people on Twitter. It's a mix of infosec folks, developers, startup friends, comic book artists, news people, comedians, a variety. It's less I'm trying to follow individual people and more that I'm trying to find interesting thoughts or articles or art that they're creating or sharing. Even so, there is still "noise" in that you'll see the same article surface multiple times or the same news story be bandied about (for the last 24 hours it's been pretty Sam Nunberg).
- agumonkey 9y ago
  > Nunberg and now even HN is :p
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  > Even so, there is still "noise" in that you'll see the same article surface multiple times For a while that was my benchmark for what was worth reading if I saw an article surface more than once it was possible of interest to multiple circles of interests rather than one, and likely worth the time to read. Of course, that was the time before sites like Buzzfeed/Upworthy and the general expansion of a culture of writing articles specifically for reshare virality.
  - alsetmusic 9y ago
    > For a while that was my benchmark for what was worth reading if I saw an article surface more than once it was possible of interest to multiple circles of interests rather than one, and likely worth the time to read. There was a clever RSS reader that worked on this principle. Sadly, it is no longer being developed. https://feedafever.com https://feedafever.com
- andrei_says_ 9y ago
  How is it humanly possible to ingest the daily feeds from a couple of thousand of people? I follow about a hundred or so and I get 300-400 items per day. I use lists for different topics but following one of the lists takes too much time. In addition to this, nobody stays on topic. The political climate is so intense that the reactions to it permeate everything. The signal to noise ratio is becoming unacceptable and I’m not aware of any tools to improve it.
yeldarb 9y ago
I wrote a script to split up the people I follow into lists according to a few different categories (based on keywords in their names/handles/bios sprinkled with a touch of manual massaging). It really helps to sort through the noise. I ended up with the following lists that I can now browse separately for several disparate interests of mine: Founders / CEOs Game Dev Apple AR / VR Iowa (local people I follow from where I'm from)
- thex10 9y ago
  This is one functionality I wish Twitter included! I’d love for it to use some machine learning or whatnot to naturally group all the people I follow into several distinct lists.
  - soylentcola 9y ago
    This is the main thing I love(d) in Google+ (yeah, yeah...) Whenever I'd add someone, I picked which group or groups they fell into. I could create as many or as few groups as I wanted and then I could view posts and threads based on which "circle" they were in. I'd be more inclined to use Twitter or any service that made this kind of sorting this flexible and useful.
abnry 9y ago
I follow only couple hundred accounts and the same problem exists for me with retweets.
radley 9y ago
> When they disappeared, my feed had less punch-the-button outrage. Fewer mean screenshots of somebody saying precisely the wrong thing. Less repetition of big, big news. Fewer memes I’d already seen a hundred times. I follow ~500 people, but I'm very selective by only following people who know better than to re/tweet wrong, irrelevant, or obvious stuff. This way, Twitter works great for me as first-hand news, rather than the usual spin cyclone. (I also use Twitter for Mac, so no promoted tweets, random order, etc).

ATsch 9y ago

I follow ~30 people, but have still turned off showing retweets for some. Some people just seem to treat it as a bigger like button.

oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
I wonder if this is a key part of the problem, or whether it's a separate problem of its own making. I know sometimes I struggle with the decision of whether to 'like' or 'retweet'. I wonder what it would be like if there was only a 'like' button, but individuals can choose to broadcast their likes or not, and followers can choose whether to display (notifications of) likes or not.
- mxfh 9y ago
  I'm guilty of 90% retweets or so, but have a general low output rate including them. So I made a policy of retweet only things, that people who follow me wouldn't see anyway. Like 10+ people overlap. For me it's distinctively different from a like button. The most annoying thing is having other peoples liked pushed into the timeline and the same 3 ads all over again.
avian 9y ago
> Some people just seem to treat it as a bigger like button. But isn't that exactly what it is? The line between retweet and like is pretty blurry with the algorithmic timeline. I often see tweets that were merely liked by someone I follow.

chooseaname 9y ago

I could not imagine following that many people. I follow my local (city) government, the NWS for weather, and Raymond Hettinger.

mtgx 9y ago

I think they're just trying to apply the wrong tool for the job. What they're probably interested in is getting news/thoughts about a handful of topics, which would be akin to following a few subreddits or forums. But the way Twitter and Facebook are set-up is that you follow people, not topics. And people tend to talk about all sorts of topics on a given day, thus the "noise."

cpach 9y ago
Technorati and Twingly used to provide such services but Technorati seems to have been bought and decommissioned and Twingly has pivoted into something else.

michaelbuckbee 9y ago

I follow a couple thousand people on Twitter. It's a mix of infosec folks, developers, startup friends, comic book artists, news people, comedians, a variety. It's less I'm trying to follow individual people and more that I'm trying to find interesting thoughts or articles or art that they're creating or sharing. Even so, there is still "noise" in that you'll see the same article surface multiple times or the same news story be bandied about (for the last 24 hours it's been pretty Sam Nunberg).

agumonkey 9y ago
> Nunberg and now even HN is :p
WorldMaker 9y ago
> Even so, there is still "noise" in that you'll see the same article surface multiple times For a while that was my benchmark for what was worth reading if I saw an article surface more than once it was possible of interest to multiple circles of interests rather than one, and likely worth the time to read. Of course, that was the time before sites like Buzzfeed/Upworthy and the general expansion of a culture of writing articles specifically for reshare virality.
- alsetmusic 9y ago
  > For a while that was my benchmark for what was worth reading if I saw an article surface more than once it was possible of interest to multiple circles of interests rather than one, and likely worth the time to read. There was a clever RSS reader that worked on this principle. Sadly, it is no longer being developed. https://feedafever.com https://feedafever.com
andrei_says_ 9y ago
How is it humanly possible to ingest the daily feeds from a couple of thousand of people? I follow about a hundred or so and I get 300-400 items per day. I use lists for different topics but following one of the lists takes too much time. In addition to this, nobody stays on topic. The political climate is so intense that the reactions to it permeate everything. The signal to noise ratio is becoming unacceptable and I’m not aware of any tools to improve it.

yeldarb 9y ago

I wrote a script to split up the people I follow into lists according to a few different categories (based on keywords in their names/handles/bios sprinkled with a touch of manual massaging). It really helps to sort through the noise. I ended up with the following lists that I can now browse separately for several disparate interests of mine: Founders / CEOs Game Dev Apple AR / VR Iowa (local people I follow from where I'm from)

thex10 9y ago
This is one functionality I wish Twitter included! I’d love for it to use some machine learning or whatnot to naturally group all the people I follow into several distinct lists.
- soylentcola 9y ago
  This is the main thing I love(d) in Google+ (yeah, yeah...) Whenever I'd add someone, I picked which group or groups they fell into. I could create as many or as few groups as I wanted and then I could view posts and threads based on which "circle" they were in. I'd be more inclined to use Twitter or any service that made this kind of sorting this flexible and useful.

abnry 9y ago

I follow only couple hundred accounts and the same problem exists for me with retweets.

radley 9y ago

> When they disappeared, my feed had less punch-the-button outrage. Fewer mean screenshots of somebody saying precisely the wrong thing. Less repetition of big, big news. Fewer memes I’d already seen a hundred times. I follow ~500 people, but I'm very selective by only following people who know better than to re/tweet wrong, irrelevant, or obvious stuff. This way, Twitter works great for me as first-hand news, rather than the usual spin cyclone. (I also use Twitter for Mac, so no promoted tweets, random order, etc).