7 ms·

> Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to am

• CharlesW 5y ago
  > It's an even bigger echo chamber than FB. The trick is to block early and often. The feed is what you make it.
  • arkitaip 5y ago
    This simply doesn't work. I've tried every tool and trick available and sooner than later the feed becomes filled with drama, politics and random noise. Partly because humans are inherently social and political, partly because Twitter will throw random tweets and topics at you.
    • TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
      I'm on at least my 15th account. Speaking as something with a barely-serviceable love-hate relationship with the service... You have to add people slowly, and be quick to unfollow if you notice a disturbance in the force. Even though I'm keen on programming and related topics, I don't follow a lot of very-popular IT-type folks because of the drama they bring, ESPECIALLY "infosec" Twitter. I've noticed that's a bubble among bubbles. I love a lot of the folks in that bubble, but I won't follow them because The Algorithm gets heavily weighted with them.
      • Raineer 5y ago
        Hah - I was hoping I wasn't the only one doing this. In addition to just not being good at "viral twitter", I never have any followers because I nuke-and-pave probably one a year with a new account. As you called out, most of what I follow is infosec twitter. And the drama ratio is high. I'll follow someone because they do genuinely create a couple excellent technical posts or links, only to find out they are trash and I spend the next month hearing about it.
  • ggreer 5y ago
    I can't block the topics that Twitter constantly recommends.
    • whywhywhywhy 5y ago
      This is it, no matter what words you mute, no matter how much you block/mute users. Twitter considers it of the utmost importance that they get to push content, politics and news they consider important in a 3rd of the screen, always. The last thing I care about in the world is what employees at Twitter consider valuable to put in the "What's happening" column. Twitter could do with taking a page out of TikTok's and oldschool Reddit's book at making their app about me and my interests and passions rather than being a megaphone for a few insufferable bluechecks and twitter employees that I struggle to hear my interests from under the cacophony of things I do not care about.
• taytus 5y ago
  > As much as I try, I can't seem to escape the oversaturated bubble Pro tip: Mute words and people. I can't tell you how much better my experience has been since I started growing my muted words list.
  • RankingMember 5y ago
    Thanks for pointing out that muting words was even an option! That seems like a super useful feature.
  • astrange 5y ago
    You can't mute anything in a link though, so it can't be used to block spam or people who reply to everything with their gofundme.
• zarriak 5y ago
  You really just need to follow one good Twitter account and they will usually retweet other people who are interesting and usually share a characteristic that led you to followed the original account.
  • umeshunni 5y ago
    Got it, so build a bigger echo chamber.
    • zarriak 5y ago
      I don’t follow anyone on Twitter I agree with on most issues. However I don’t think your concern here is unfounded but in my personal experience the bigger issue is on the surface non political or non biased organizations or “content creators” who’s bias is very similar to that which the viewer shares.
    • hluska 5y ago
      Or be judicious about who you give attention to. Over the last couple of years, I’ve made a concerted effort to follow smart people who I don’t agree with. Sometimes this has proven that I’m wrong and other times, it’s made me feel more secure in my own beliefs. There’s a difference between smart and toxic. Some smart people are toxic. Others are smart and passionate. If you work to follow people like that and work harder to read their words with an open mind, great things can happen.
    • PascLeRasc 5y ago
      Who cares? Friend groups are an echo chamber too.
    • hackmiester 5y ago
      By this standard, any social group is an echo chamber.
  • TillE 5y ago
    Yeah I dunno why people on HN seem to struggle with Twitter so much. You choose who to follow! It's entirely under your control. If someone starts being annoying, unfollow them. It's really simple.
• leviathant 5y ago
  Be selective in who you follow, and if you're following someone who shares interesting thoughts but retweets too much, you can turn off their retweets. That in combination with being judicious on the block button makes Twitter one of my favorite social networks.
  • tills13 5y ago
    I agree with you but don't all the actions you mention turn Twitter into an even larger, more strict echo chamber?
    • jjj123 5y ago
      I’m not sure you can make that assumption. Part of what makes these social networks echo chambers are the unconscious ways we navigate them: how long we linger on a post, stay in the site, etc. I’m not sure whether conscious decisions like being judicious with the follow and block buttons would pull you into more of an echo chamber than the algorithm does, especially if you’re selecting for things other than “this captures my short-term attention span.”
      • rhizome 5y ago
        I think that's a cop-out. There are no objective measures of these things, the meaning of "how long you linger" or where you move your mouse are completely made-up by the coders who wrote the algorithm. They don't have to be a signal of anything, but the companies just go ahead and decide it means something. Then Goodhart's Law finishes the job.
    • leviathant 5y ago
      To continue the analogy, I might say that rather than creating a larger echo chamber, it's moving into a well-tuning studio space. An echo chamber is cacophonous, a well-tuned room improves clarity by reducing excessive concentration of individual frequencies. Arguably, the curative approach lets me hear higher quality content from folks who have different perspectives than me, compared to just leaving the floodgates open.
• rst 5y ago
  You're describing what the algorithm tends to promote -- turning it off (the "latest tweets" feed) may give you a bit more variety.
• jdeibele 5y ago
  I use lists. I found https://github.com/KrauseFx/twitter-unfollow https://github.com/KrauseFx/twitter-unfollow which moves all of your follows to a private list. Then move people from the private list to a topic list. I also use Tweetbot on my Mac, which allows me to filter retweets. That means I only see what people say. I do use another filter on my National Basketball Association list to block a certain keyword. The downsides of Tweetbot is that it doesn't support everything that Twitter offers (polls, probably fleets, etc.) and is about $10.
  • underwires 5y ago
    yep, I use lists and it helps a lot with this. Twitter got a lot better for me when I put all the hot take tweeters into a list and unfollowed them, then only check that list when I feel like going there. Which is not often
• JohnFen 5y ago
  I agree. Twitter is too unpleasant (for me) to use. I know there are ways of actively managing it to reduce the toxicity, but that's a lot more work than it's worth to me. At least as far as what keeps me off Twitter, Fleets missed the point entirely.
• insin 5y ago
  If you're using Twitter on a desktop browser, I made an extension which by default removes everything but what the people you're following are actually saying or commenting on, and automatically switches you back to the chronological timeline when Twitter tries to move you back to the algorithmic timeline: https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter
  • ziml77 5y ago
    I found this extension last year and I love it! Thank you for making it. No more bullshit injected into by feed or forced upon my eyeballs from the right column and everything stays in the correct order. Twitter is vastly improved by your extension.
• topicseed 5y ago
  I had the same issue and for me it was about "Topics" I followed (e.g., computer programming). They were surfacing nonsensical self-absorbed tweets so I unfollowed these topics, and since then, my feed is a lot better.
• papito 5y ago
  I don't understand how it's even usable if you follow hundreds, let alone thousands of people.
• jimkleiber 5y ago
  Sometimes I get the impression that Twitter is like an un-moderated comments section, where people comment on comments. Almost like an infinitely connected comments sections, bringing many of the challenges of the once-isolated comments sections.
• DaniloDias 5y ago
  I currently look at Twitter as a destination for socially approved statements. Twitter is a place where you are either celebrated for having approved perspectives or risk professional destruction. New users can only be craven popularity chasers. Old users either conform or quit. Why would anyone play in that sandbox if you have any respect for diverse opinions?
  • fleddr 5y ago
    Yet the difference between socially approved on Twitter and in the real world is massive. I imagine that quite a few Twitter-socially approved statements would raise a lot of eyebrows in the real world. for being plain weird, nonsensical, or the listener simply not able to understand it at all. I imagine a subset of things said on Twitter and/or tactics used will make you wake up in the hospital when applied to the real world. This is why hardcore Twitter users tend to be so shocked when the election results come in and learn that a vast majority of people do not support their view.
    • DaniloDias 5y ago
      The weird culture around social justice and systemic racism gets treated with the same respect as Jehova’s witnesses, Mormons and Scientologists where I live. What’s commonly accepted as progressive online seems to be widely perceived as rehabilitating race-based discrimination here. Is that consistent with your experience?
      • fleddr 5y ago
        Yes, but I should add that I'm from the Netherlands. Let's for the sake of simplicity use the word "woke" for the type of politics we're talking about. We have it too, but it's far smaller. Most of our media is more left than the actual population it broadcasts to. However, our left is more traditional left, not woke left. So it's marginal. Politically, we're a very different country. We have tons of parties, and therefore are a coalition country. Extremism has no place in such society as it can't produce a working coalition. Hence, dutch society moves between a narrow band from centre-right / center / center-left. In practice, usually centre-right as the disconnect between left wing ideas and what the population actually wants is stunningly large. The absolute dumbest thing left wing movements have ever done, and this is an international thing, is to abandon white workers. In white-dominant countries. Anyway, the dutch are extremely sober, based, down to earth. We immediately reject anything that makes no sense. So to finally answer your question (sorry): wokism has no place in general society here. You can't speak it at a birthday party, it will be the last one you're invited to.
• robryan 5y ago
  It is hard to escape, a lot of the people who occasionally post interesting things are also the ones that post 20 times a day.
• ___luigi 5y ago
  > .. bigger echo chamber than FB. I would question this line, FB has a serious challenge to address in this space.