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My approach to Twitter has been to aggressively unfollow anyone posting content that I don’t want to be consuming. That ranges from constantly dunking on every

• smithmayowa 6y ago
  Paul Graham tweets agressively, but I doubt you will block him though, not everyone who tweets agressively is toxic.
  • sevilo 6y ago
    and you just perfectly highlighted the toxicity of twitter in that sentence. Just because someone is popular doesn't mean everyone should like/listen to them if they do not find the person's content aligns with them.
  • thereare5lights 6y ago
    I did. I wouldn't unblock. > not everyone who tweets agressively is toxic. This doesn't matter. It's about controlling what kind of energy you let into your life. Negative energy needs to go.
    • HenryBemis 6y ago
      Time and attention. In my mind/book it's where you give your time and attention. I really enjoy a couple of radio shows, where I need to download the mp3 from their websites (they host/share a coupld of hours after their shows), and SecurityNow podcast. The good thing about it, is that I only listen when I want to listen, and IF I want to listen. Social media, slow and steady, absorb you into giving, increasingly, more time to them. Either by creating an echo chamber, or creating passions, promoting things you love/hate. Anything to get you hooked more. Majority of the people do not filter/reduce the alerts on their phones. Good luck working on a project when you get 10 beeps per hour from Twitter, CNN, BBC, FB, IG, YT. Time and Attention.
  • layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
    Paul who?
• 7800 6y ago
  Doesn’t this by definition mean that you’re in a social media bubble with those who agree with you?
  • xboxnolifes 6y ago
    Following that logic, you are in a bubble in any situation except where you have a feed of every single person's tweets. I don't think that is a very sustainable view.
  • jasonmp85 6y ago
    I challenge you to explain why this matters.
  • tjr225 6y ago
    I've started to wonder if "bubbles" are a good thing. Others beliefs shouldn't be foisted on me at any given moment of my day, and if I don't care to hear them there isn't anything wrong with that. Moreover, communication seems less hostile and more nuanced when we aren't forced to discuss everything with everyone at once. That is why more focused communities like this one seem to be more enjoyable to use.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • 888666 6y ago
    Sure, but I use Twitter to relax and enjoy specific types of content. It doesn't need to be your source of knowledge.
  • rablackburn 6y ago
    None of OP's criteria for unfollowing/muting people was them saying things they disagree with. It's the difference between not watching NBA games because you're not interested in basketball, and refusing to watch the local news because "they have a (left|right) bias". There is more content out there competing for your attention than you have time in your life to consume it. Rather than letting twitter's default algorithm feed you the most "engaging", OP is saying a more mindful approach works for them.
• TehShrike 6y ago
  I do similarly. My Twitter feed is pleasant and very useful. Judging from posts like these (and the other comments on this thread), most people have difficulty unfollowing others, which is a shame.
  • aylmao 6y ago
    Over the course of a few months I about halved my following count on Twitter. The application definitely makes it easier to follow people than to unfollow them, but also this mentality of thinking more about the possibly of interesting content than the damage of content that's uninteresting made getting used to reducing my following count tricky. It is kind of how when decluttering it's not only more effort to clean than to ignore the issue, but it's also easy to fall into the mindset of "I liked/needed this thing that one time, maybe I'll like/need it again sometime in the future".
• ubermonkey 6y ago
  yeah, me too. I follow a lot of authors or musicians I enjoy, plus a cadre of local and far-flung friends. I am pretty politically engaged but political twitter is just gamesmanship, so I have no time for it AT ALL. I also use a 3rd party client, so I'm not subjected to algorithmic chicanery in my feed. I mute widely. And I read it at most 2 or 3 times a day. In general, I find it WAY more pleasant than FB. (I'd love to ditch FB, but for a number of logistical/community reasons that's just not feasible for me, so I try to minimize my interaction with it.) (What I REALLY want is the old GEnie SFRT back.)
• reaperducer 6y ago
  My approach to Twitter has been to aggressively unfollow anyone posting content that I don’t want to be consuming Doesn't that just leave you in an echo chamber of people who agree with you, and you don't learn anything new? people who simply tweet too many times per day. I'm with you on that one.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • mac01021 6y ago
    > Doesn't that just leave you in an echo chamber of people who agree with you, and you don't learn anything new? Only if the GP does not want to consume expressions of opposing viewpoints.
  • twic 6y ago
    > Doesn't that just leave you in an echo chamber of people who agree with you, and you don't learn anything new? If you follow an account that tweets (reliable!) information about space rockets, you will learn a lot of new things about space rockets. Not everything on Twitter is a manifestation of a political viewpoint. There is a huge amount of worthwhile stuff that is just informative, interesting, beautiful, or fun.
  • ska 6y ago
    > Doesn't that just leave you in an echo chamber Only if you choose to. "I don't want to be consuming" doesn't need to mean that you disagree with them, just you aren't getting value from reading it. Further to your point: It's one of those paradoxes that while the marginal utility of listening to some people you disagree with is obviously high, the marginal utility of listening to any particular person you often disagree with is likely quite low. Most people are not particularly thoughtful or particularly articulate, but your best bang-for-buck will be to try and find some who are both.
  • aylmao 6y ago
    > Doesn't that just leave you in an echo chamber of people who agree with you, and you don't learn anything new? This was an interesting question. I have two thoughts here: 1. On unfollowing content that I don't disagree with: I got very tired of a lot of the dev content I was following on Twitter and how it was flooding away other stuff I follow. I unfollowed a TON of devs. It's not that I disagree with them, I just don't want to consume that content. 2. On unfollowing content that I disagree with: I don't think the issue with echo chambers is the echo chamber itself. For example, I'm not religious. I can choose not to follow religious content and be in an "atheist echo chamber", and still, when encountering religious people talking about religious things, respect them. If I'm coming from a tolerant and accepting place, when I encounter them I can learn from them, hear them out, understand their point of view, but otherwise choose to live my life without constantly consuming religion. Religion is very much in the social discourse, but this applies to other things too. I don't know much about Nepal. If I ever go to Nepal, meet a Nepalese person, or just get curious about it I'll respect their ways and be ready to learn a lot, in spite of not consuming Nepalese content. I don't think its the "echo chamber" per-se that's the issue— it's the intolerance, and for some people the echo chamber just makes it worse.
• dmix 6y ago
  I did this for years and then Trump rolled around and every developer and interesting person thought it was their duty to use their feeds as some form of resistance. I remember one case in particular where the guy was a genius at posting niche Middle Ages history and then every other tweet became political and I was so sad, because I absolutely loved his content. As an a-political person who tried hard (but failed occasionally) at keeping my stuff a-political or othwise I’d start a new account to be political because my main one was tech stuff. Twitters biggest failure was the lack of tagging and filtering options it provided. The History Genius could have tagged his polical tweets as #political and Twitter could have an option to follow someone except their #political ones. Just like following without retweets. The solution is obvious to me. But clearly Twitter founders love the political stuff or something. So I just chose to avoid Twitter at all costs unless linked to it or researching a topic, with the odd time I got dragged into it.
  • setpatchaddress 6y ago
    One of the problems is that hashtag usage evolved into a form of signaling for emphasis (#your-slogan-here) instead of a useful way to tag a topic, to the extent that it can read as obnoxious if you do it at all in a serious way. Another is that it's another moderation headache. Anyone can insert a hashtag for any reason, so anyone will. If you don't police it, it becomes useless; if you do police it, it becomes heavy.
  • sodality2 6y ago
    Twitter loves politics: rage keeps you addicted and coming back. It keeps you on the app longer = more ads.
  • Raed667 6y ago
    > a-political there is no such thing
    • BalinKing 6y ago
      That is demonstrably false—tweets about, say, programming language theory are pretty far from politics.
• chaosharmonic 6y ago
  > Removing everyone else doesn’t take as much work as I expected, as long as you’re not hesitant to unfollow (or even block) those who distract from your desired timeline. It's also not even necessarily them. Twitter is enthusiastic in assuming that, because you're engaging with one person, you must also be interested in what they're engaging with. My efforts to have reasoned debate with one person in my life who was becoming more and more aggressively MAGA (prior to some rather extreme takes on... well, several different incidents) did not in any way equate to having even a remote interest in being flooded with content from Ben Shapiro or Turning Point USA, just because she happened to give it fake Internet points. I gave up on her Twitter well before I gave up on her as a person for this exact reason.
  • WorldMaker 6y ago
    Yeah, I think the rise of "follow-of-a-follow" "engagement" content and promoted tweets were where I heavily started to lose any impression at all that I could control/curate my Twitter timeline, and started to lose a lot of interest in Twitter altogether. (Algorithmic reshuffling of the "timeline" into something that wasn't purely time-based didn't help either, but seemed a modest symptom to the other two problems.)
    • tilolebo 6y ago
      Twitter lists are a good way to regain control of your timeline. Create lists and unfollow everyone. This way you only get the content you want.
      • WorldMaker 6y ago
        I feel like I can't trust Twitter not to inject "engagement" content into the core timeline of their product, I don't see the trust in relying on a secondary feature that could be shelved or similarly injected. I'm happy scratching my "I was an early adopter Twitter user" junkie itch on Mastodon these days, where I know I'm in a lot more control than Twitter wants to give me due to business model alone.
    • 6y ago
• danaliv 6y ago
  I've had an idea rolling around for years to build some kind of classifier that sits in front of your Twitter timeline. I follow lots of accounts that tweet about one thing I'm interested in, and one thing I absolutely do not and will not care about, ever. Seems like it would be totally feasible to do automated filtering on this sort of thing rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater by unfollowing.
• Zababa 6y ago
  I have the same approach. I'll add that the "desactivate retweets" function is also very useful.
• stanrivers 6y ago
  This is the right way - what you see constantly will eventually program you a certain way. If you want to be a troll-y sarcastic person, make sure you see lots of tweets like that. Want to be a person who constantly dunks on the success of others, make sure you have lots of tweets to read like that. Don't want to be that kind of person? Better make sure you are not consuming that kind of stuff. It starts to come out unconsciously if you are not careful.
• DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  I find that tweets of people I like start going on my nerves based on how much I see of them. people overshare because they're posting both great content but also a lot of half-baked opinions that even they themselves are still not sure about and in the process of testing out on their audience. on one hand it's exciting to see the thought process of another person (who often doesn't realize they're giving you an alpha-preview release of their latest brain farts). But it gets tedious quickly. I got constantly sucked into discussions in the past simply because it's too easy to hold myself back. Now I consume twitter without an account either using nitter or directly browsing some good lists of people I used to follow.
• vincentmarle 6y ago
  My approach is similar but different: I unfolllowed everyone and now use lists exclusively. I have a politics list, a tech list and a couple more. If I want to catch up what’s going on in politics, I just check my politics list. > The mute function is also highly useful. This feature didn’t do anything for me. It still shows you tweets but muted (you have to click to see them). The FOMO in me makes me always want to click on them to see what I’m missing out on. I wish they would just completely hide them.
• kenoph 6y ago
  My problem with Twitter is that a lot of researchers I follow make a lot of noise (e.g.: giving their opinions on things 10 times a day, tweeting random "facts" about life, etc...) but once in a while they tweet very informative stuff. I feel kind of trapped following them :/ I tried using the "this tweet is not relevant" thingie but it doesn't do anything. I mean, this is a thing for which I would gladly have an AI-powered smart filter.
• sleepysysadmin 6y ago
  >My approach to Twitter has been to aggressively unfollow anyone posting content that I don’t want to be consuming. That ranges from constantly dunking on every opportunity to people who simply tweet too many times per day. I tried this. You end up shedding a ton of follows and mostly end up with people who say nothing. Then a week later you like something that person says and refollow, then they say something again and get unfollowed. I think fundamentally it's like the article says. twitter is just full of anger and paranoia. I can't say if it's twitter that creates this, but it certainly enhances. Twitter is the problem and quitting is your only option.