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I totally failed to use Twitter in any reasonable way. I used it for years, trying to follow interesting people or artists but in the end, it was just an ampli

• te_chris 5y ago
  I did the same. What really ruined the product for me was the “X who you follow liked this”. If I wanted that shit I’d follow the person.
  • kkcorps 5y ago
    This thing is ruining my experience as well. I don't want any time of suggestions in my feed. I curated it so that there's only people of tech who talk mostly about tech but my feed is pure garbage now filled with political comments, holidays pics etc. of people I don't even follow.
  • oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
    Can you explain further? It sounds like you do follow that person based on the message.
    • matsemann 5y ago
      They follow person X, but not profile Y which had the tweet X liked. Thus they don't want content from Y in their feed.
      • oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
        I see. I consider this a double edged sword, but the positive edge is sharper: the people I follow tend to like things that don't annoy me more often than not. I do agree that it would be useful to be able to configure what appears, though.
  • aniforprez 5y ago
    That's because you're using the "default" view which mixes up the order of your tweets and inserts stuff like this. If you change the view by clicking the sparks icon at the top left and selecting "latest", it simply becomes a reverse chronological order of tweets by people you follow The algorithm of what I want to see is so terrible I never bother with the default view. I've been using latest for years
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • te_chris 5y ago
      I had it set to that and still saw them - I quit over a year ago, perhaps they changed this since and removed all the recommended stuff.
    • nkozyra 5y ago
      I noticed that if you do that they start injecting the same stuff into your profile notifications. They really want to feed you stuff you don't actually want.
      • wpietri 5y ago
        You can train it not to do that. When I saw those in my notifications, I kept picking the option that is something like "see less like this" and I haven't seen one in months. But yes, they are optimizing for things like UAM and engagement, so to them almost anything that draws people back looks like a good product choice.
        • kjkjadksj 5y ago
          Isn’t it ridiculous that you have to thoroughly vet people you are to follow for quality tweets, switch out of the default view, and train a machine learning algorithm just to make twitter somewhat useable? Thats not like using a computer tool, thats like trying to ride a stubborn horse.
• oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
  It's strange, but my personal experience could hardly be more different. I mainly use it for work in the gaming sector and, to a smaller extent, tech. I occasionally see rage and strong opinions, but it's a very small minority. Most of the time, it's useful, informative content. I do hide trending topics, which I think helps, but even before I did, my experience was nowhere near as negative as yours.
  • dijit 5y ago
    I see this exact exchange every thread about twitter. I’m not convinced “holding it wrong” is a good answer, but it seems to be that I and others are “holding it wrong”. I have 2 twitter accounts, I follow people who post interesting tech things. Then they retweet some more polarised stuff from others, or even if enough followers like a tweet it ends up in my feed. I would follow nobody if I unfollowed everyone who does this. The truth is that humans are varied and while they might have a hobby (tech) they also have opinions about society. It’s unfair not to assume that.
    • oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
      > they retweet some more polarised stuff from others That's true, but: a) in my experience, those tweets are the vast minority of what I see, probably less than 1% b) I just ignore them This happens in real life too. I have friends with broadly similar outlooks who, from time-to-time, say something I don't agree with. Sometimes I'll choose to engage, and this is always more productive than engaging on Twitter in similar circumstances, I fully accept that. But I'll often just change the subject or otherwise ignore them, and I find that's a perfectly viable tactic on twitter too.
    • numpad0 5y ago
      I have my Twitter accounts with 2k follow_ing_(not followers) and there should be literally 200-500 tweets/second that could fill my timeline during daytime. Of those, one or less shows up on Tweetdeck Web, and suspiciously little are relevant to my interest. I even missed a "meta" content of a past season and learned about from someone else very recently. I'm not getting anything. What I've been thinking about is there needs to be the 2020s great data exfiltration of social media, the second Googlebot Crawler moment. It has been three years since I've seen a hardcore user cry of "having limbs torn" by Twitter API changes[1] that shut down a free bulk access, and it still reads as vivid as if it was written today to me. 1: https://mizchi-hatenablog-com.translate.goog/entry/2018/08/24/060111?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=ja https://mizchi-hatenablog-com.translate.goog/entry/2018/08/2... (I know MT don't do languages half right but I don't have energy to translate manually either)
• masona 5y ago
  It was like this for me until I muted any word that was remotely political. All of a sudden it was like a toxic fog had been lifted and I could see clearly again. The article really undersells the importance of muting words. It changes everything.
  • nfin 5y ago
    is that a real feature (muting a word), or are you muting people when they write any political word in one of their messages?
    • detaro 5y ago
      it's a feature.
    • numpad0 5y ago
      https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac56f9bd36ec https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac5...
    • dgellow 5y ago
      Go to https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords, you can mute words you don't care about. The feature is a bit hidden in the settings, but the twitter experience is way better once you remove content that makes you angry.
    • ryantgtg 5y ago
      I muted the word “trump” and it made an incredible impact on my twitter experience.
  • dpifke 5y ago
    Have they removed the 200 muted word limit? Or at least implemented word stemming? This feature, besides being hidden, always felt unreasonably crippled to me. And they banned third party clients that might be able to implement it better. I gave up on Twitter as a platform because Twitter Inc. refused to give me enough control over my feed. (This applies to banned accounts as well - I would have liked the ability to judge for myself, rather than have an overworked, outsourced, minimum wage moderator decide for me.)
• whiplash451 5y ago
  The real problem of Twitter IMO is their retweet feature. This feature fuels hate and unfair attacks. You should never be allowed to take a message sent to someone’s audience and transfer it to your audience. You should only be able to engage with their audience. The only reason I imagine this feature exists is because it generates engagement and revenue for Twitter.
  • jtbayly 5y ago
    No. The reason it exists is because people like to share things they like. If you removed that button people would copy and paste or screenshot and share.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • whiplash451 5y ago
      If Twitter wanted to stress the sharing feature in a genuine way, they would put your comment below (not on top of) the post you are re-tweeting.
    • Mezzie 5y ago
      No, it was initially made as a micro-blogging service inspired by AIM and LJ, neither of which were primarily made for sharing. The Retweet button and the sharing aspect came later.
    • pimlottc 5y ago
      > If you removed that button people would copy and paste or screenshot and share. I’m not sure if this would really be worse; it would slow down viral retweets and could induce users to add context or reframe the shared item to better suit their audience. I mean, imagine what it would be like if someone in real life just constantly repeated things their friends said, word for word, to everyone in the room. Yes, people do sometimes parrot things from other people, but more often it’s modified, filtered through their own understanding and viewpoint, adapted to the present context and audience, and selected for relevance and appropriateness.
• Mezzie 5y ago
  Twitter is good for a few things, but they all have alternatives. My healthy uses for Twitter (as opposed to my using it as part of my studying of the impacts social media has on its users/trolling/shitposting) are: 1. Local events, governments, and establishments. It's a great way to get information on things like road closures, last minute weather adjustments, ideas for places to go around town, etc. 2. Professional orgs or academics in areas that I'm interested in. I prefer organizational Twitters because there's usually some sort of social media policy preventing them from Tweeting about politics.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Everyone there is trying to push its personal fight Unfollow those people. Twitter can be a good place for discussion, but you have to take control of your follow list. I think a lot of people end up following the most prolific Tweeters in their domain rather than the most interesting (who often post infrequently). The prolific Tweeters reach for drama to bait people into engagement. If you don’t make a point of unfollowing the empty drama-producing Twitter users, your timeline will eventually fill up with their drama.
  • photochemsyn 5y ago
    I fail to understand how a format that limits 'discussion' to a few sentences at most per post can be a good medium for anything other than dumbed-down one-liners. Even the most basic format for expository discussion, the simple paragraph, structured as introduction - content + examples - conclusion, won't fit on Twitter. It's a format designed to eliminate nuance and discussion, not to promote it. That means using Twitter constantly makes people dumber, i.e. less able to follow a complex argument or look at an issue from multiple points of view. Someone who'se been Twitterized and Facebooked is someone whose communication skills have been reduced to one-liner blurbs and who lives in a closed siloed environment.
    • mattgreenrocks 5y ago
      See also: the increase in bad pun tweets with more followers. I don’t mind bad puns, but I cannot unsee this.
    • SkyMarshal 5y ago
      I used to think that was the case too, but it’s not universally, it depends on the person. For some people, Twitter’s forced short-form focuses their content, cuts out all the bs, and reduces it down to its essence. It prevents them from being overly wordy, and is one of the best available antidotes to modern information overload. And if the essence of subject is fundamentally nuanced, the twitter discussion still can be too, though it may take multiple tweets to address all of it (a tweet-storm). If a subject requires long-form, then people tend to write that in a blog post or a paper and link it on twitter, and then discuss whatever aspects of it their followers have questions about. But again you have to do what the OP article says, and only follow people with shared interests and who meaningfully engage with their followers, and don’t just use Twitter to broadcast stuff without then discussing it (eg accounts with less than 1000 followers).
• laputan_machine 5y ago
  This is _exactly_ my take on Twitter, I noped out of it and other social media 2 years ago and I feel much happier. (For the pedants: no, forums like this are not social media.)
• chakkepolja 5y ago
  I only follow technical people & topic accounts, and unfollow if i see them posting any political content.