8 ms·

Twitter Home made me miserable

85 points by brentroose 5y ago

andrethegiant 5y ago
Tweetbot is free, hides ads, can sort chronologically, and you can filter out other people's likes, retweets, and replies.
arpa 5y ago
the whole concept of fitting meaningful and thought-out things in 1xx characters is miserable imho.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  On the contrary, brevity is such a big virtue that even people who don't have it are forced to spam twitter with their tweet threads
- telxosser 5y ago
  Yes, obviously it is a political slogan and nonsense engine because the structure is not good for much else. I do enjoy occasionally going on twitter though to randomly click through profiles and see how insane and crazy people can be. It is kind of like going to the zoo to look at the animals.
Marazan 5y ago
Twitter Home is obviously bad and it scares me that the majority of people who use Twitter use Twitter Home as their setup.
- captainmuon 5y ago
  But how can Twitter work if it doesn't show you (semi-randomly) people who you don't follow? How can discovery work (and especially the other side, being found)? I still don't get Instagram. When I use it privately it just shows me accounts I followed manually, and obvious ads. I helped with a shared account some time ago and I never understood how people found our content without explicitly searching for us.
  - Raed667 5y ago
    They had a discovery mechanism built in since the start, it is retweets.
    - illgenr 5y ago
      Then expanded with #'s
    - jon-wood 5y ago
      I’m going to wade in with some pedantry here - retweets didn’t really exist for a fair bit of Twitter’s existence, and grew organically from users introducing the convention of prefixing reposts of other people’s content with an “RT @whoever”.
  - basisword 5y ago
    That’s what retweets are for. You see content suggested by people you’ve chosen to follow. On Instagram people you follow reshare posts on their stories. Why should people who don’t know you have your content shoved down their throat by generally piss poor “algorithms”? The alternative (recommendations from friends via retweets/reshares) is infinitely better.
    - captainmuon 5y ago
      But retweets is not content discovery, retweets are content posted by people you follow (albeit originally posted by somebody else). I'm looking at it from the perspective of somebody with a new account with only few followers. How do you get people to see things you post, and ultimatively follow you? In principle you can just reply to their tweets and get their attention, or approach them outside of twitter. In some fraction of cases, twitter suggests things you post to strangers that have common connections. I think that is beneficial and actually doesn't happen nearly enough, leading to people living in filter bubbles.
  - karlicoss 5y ago
    I've never used algorithmic timeline (using either Tweetdeck on desktop or Talon on Android) I discover new people via retweets, reading replies, just running into then somewhere else where they link their Twitter handle. Really don't see a problem with that :)
ejb999 5y ago
twitter's time and place has passed. Was clever and even a bit useful for a while, and like facebook, has been taken over by fake accounts, bots, scammer, shameless self-promoters and partisan hate on both sides yelling at each other Tweeting these days is like screaming into a hurricane and hoping someone will hear it. I've blocked twitter (and other social media) in my hosts file on my mac - can't get to it, can't follow links to it and haven't missed it a bit. May have even dropped my BP a couple of points.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  > twitter's time and place has passed. That would sort of imply that there is an alternative. Where else do you get near-real-time commentary from ongoing popular events, as well as bite-sized (potentially insightful) ramblings on assorted topics of your interest that are not curated by corporate news sources and that you previously might never have known existed?
  - iqanq 5y ago
    Why would I want that?
    - ejb999 5y ago
      exactly - somehow we managed to survive a long time without needing to know 'instantly' that 'something' is happening 'someplace'. Most of the instant reports are just plain lies anyway - watch any of big news channels when there is some breaking news - they literally just sit in front of the camera and make things up to fill the airtime with useless speculation, devoid of any real facts or news - I can tune in 6-12-24-48 hours later and read what really happened if I want to. Same thing happens on twitter - some big event happens and ten's of thousands of people start commenting on their version of 'the facts'. Take a 2-3 month break from twitter - see if your life is any worse of for not constantly being 'in the loop'.
      - TuringTest 5y ago
        > exactly - somehow we managed to survive a long time without needing to know 'instantly' that 'something' is happening 'someplace'. We survived millions of years without having agriculture or human-made shelter, and yet at some point we built a civilization. That's not an argument for not doing things. > Take a 2-3 month break from twitter - see if your life is any worse of for not constantly being 'in the loop'. Who says I am constantly 'in the loop'? I do check Twitter when I want to, because there are subjects where I want to get the influx of raw ideas before they are processed and packaged by the powers that be. (It's also useful to track how those ideas are later processed and packaged in real time, something that you could never get by consuming mass media alone). If you are addicted to it and can't spend one weekend without it that's your problem, don't project it on others.
mg 5y ago
the timeline that Twitter fills using their algorithm instead of just chronologically showing tweets of people you follow You can still see the tweets chronologically: https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1482303273352769543 https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1482303273352769543
- pomber 5y ago
  that doesn't use your list of muted keywords
- Raed667 5y ago
  Yes but if you're not constantly on Twitter, you miss a lot of content. I would like to see an algorithm that is tuned for my happiness and not some product manager's metrics and KPIs
  - lokedhs 5y ago
    You're going to miss a lot of content no matter what. It might be for the better if one simply accepts this. I guess I'm speaking from my experience as a Fediverse user. I don't feel I miss anything, even though there are literally thousands of messages that have passed me by on the feed whenever I open it. Surely someone is going to comment that I'm not missing anything because nothing of value was said, but the posts I do see are things that makes me satisfied for the most part, and that's enough for me.
mehdix 5y ago
IMO as a hacker it's better to focus on maintaining a personal website, feed and newsletter which is under your control rather than spendeng time on a giant platform which is fully out of your control.
- Erikun 5y ago
  I deleted my twitter account a couple of years ago but started to read a couple of people on there during the us election and the pandemic. These last couple of months twitter has clearly decided to try to clamp down on people reading without an account (the way instagram did with their website a few years earlier). They have tried a couple of things. First there was a popup blocking the screen and scrolling telling you to log in or sign up if you clicked on any post, image or other user. At first you couldn't dismiss it. Then they changed so you could dismiss it but it would move you back to the point where you clicked (essentially as a back button). You could get around it by reloading the page instead of dismissing the popup, then you got to the page you wanted. Now they're testing activating the popup after you scroll through the feed a bit with no option to dismiss. I imagine everyone posting to twitter have no idea this behaviour have been introduced and that twitter is trying to wall their garden. This is especially depressing since there are a number of pandemic related posters (Kai Kupferschmidt among them) who have interesting feeds, but no other communication channels that I know of.
  - matthewdgreen 5y ago
    Take any Twitter link and change “Twitter.com” to “Nitter.net”.
rpastuszak 5y ago
What I do: 1. move 99% of my follows to lists, so I get less useless, dopamine level hacking spam 2. anyone can just call me to say hi, chat or rant: https://sonnet.io/posts/hi https://sonnet.io/posts/hi When it comes to making any meaningful, or at least interesting connections with people, I’ve had more success with 2. in a month, than with Twitter in the past 10 years or so. I miss forums though.
- petecooper 5y ago
  >https://sonnet.io/posts/hi https://sonnet.io/posts/hi This is great, may I use this idea – with credit – please?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rpastuszak 5y ago
    Sure! Share a link/tweet when you share it people, I'm curious to see how you'll approach the idea:)
  - nkrisc 5y ago
    You don’t need permission to do something like this for yourself.
    - rpastuszak 5y ago
      That is true, although selfishly I'd love to see how they approach it though, so I can learn from them.
    - petecooper 5y ago
      That’s fair. I was asking for courtesy.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- icy 5y ago
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
> uses twitter > get's annoyed by twitter > write's a blog post about being annoyed by twitter Am I the only one?
- nefitty 5y ago
  I'm annoyed by all the people that are going to downvote my comment. I may petition dang to remove downvotes on the premise of reducing commenter suffering.
  - 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
    That this post is near the top of HN is the same reason why twitter is annoying
cblconfederate 5y ago
For me, twitter home is just random. Developers should check their code, there must be bugs or something. I ve been using twitter chronologically for years now which begs the question: why did we give up on rss?
- ratherbefuddled 5y ago
  There was no money in it.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    I don't know i'd watch ads in a convenient rss reader that looks like twitter. I just wouldn't want users to lock their content into it.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Twitter is an endless firehose of new impressions, for the users that want that and RSS just bottoms out, you can mark everything as read and "beg for more". It's too relevant and doesn't add random new stuff. The info-addicted brain (I have some of that, unfortunately) is rewarded by twitter.
rambambram 5y ago
> So, here's where I need your help: I really want to discover more interesting people online; people who write about PHP, webdev, and programming; people who dare to challenge ideas that we take for granted; content that makes us think outside our box. But how do I find those people? I'm subscribed to your RSS feed, that's how I follow people who write about webdev. ;)
daenney 5y ago
> I'm sure Twitter is well aware of how their algorithm works, and I'm sure it yields the best results for the majority of their users, but I apparently don't belong in that group. The algorithms are optimised to crank up the engagement metrics. Though that’s certainly good for Twitter, whether that’s actually the best thing for their users is up for debate.
- ejb999 5y ago
  >>The algorithms are optimised to crank up the engagement metrics. In other words, making sure you see a bunch of people that you agree with politically, and also throw in a handful of extremists on the other side (whichever 'other side') so that you feel compelled to fight it out back-and-forth online while twitter sells ads to the hate-fest.
ggm 5y ago
One model is to put good ideas out with minor mistakes and welcome corrections.
icy 5y ago
I’ve found http://leantl.com http://leantl.com pretty great at making Twitter at least somewhat bearable. It’s essentially a redirect to: https://twitter.com/search?src=typed_query&q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3Areplies%20-filter%3A%22RT%20%40%22%20 https://twitter.com/search?src=typed_query&q=filter%3Afollow...
- skrebbel 5y ago
  Wow, that's super handy! Also I have a pretty slow phone, and I'm baffled by how much faster that results page is than Twitter Home. Apparently all the slowdown was from the content I didn't want to see! Amazing. Nuts. Like, Twitter Home scrolls sluggishly and sometimes even freezes my phone. This search result across as fast as an HN comments page. Lean TL for the win, thanks!
- charleshan 5y ago
  I turn off retweet for most people and use chronological feed. This achieves exactly what I was doing without the manual work of turning off retweet for each user. Thanks for sharing!
- oldiphone 5y ago
  That’s and improvement, but is it not possible to filter for followers? filter:followers filter:followed filter:following none work
bachmeier 5y ago
I recommend using Twitter's search if you want to find tweets on a particular topic. If someone posts several worthwhile tweets, you can follow them. Over time, you'll start getting retweets of good content. You can follow those people. Use Tweetdeck and create lists by topic. The most important thing is to take your time. There's no way I'd let Twitter tell me which tweets I should see. You're going to end up with people that promote themselves and their friends, and that promotion gets annoying in a hurry - if I wanted that I'd watch QVC. I mostly try to avoid accounts with more than 100K followers. A lot of them post information of questionable accuracy because that's how you generate interest in your account. Moreover, they aren't likely to interact unless you're in their inner circle, which makes for a boring experience.
- BlueGh0st 5y ago
  I think the problem for a lot of people is that on Twitter you're not subscribing to information/topic streams but to personalities. I follow almost only information security accounts but I'm still subjected to authors' extreme politics, conspiracy theories, and rants touting their personal morality clogging up my feeds. I think that it's Twitter as a medium that is a flawed method of communication. Also it doesn't help that the only method of self-categorization (hashtags) penalizes the author by further reducing the limited character count.
ggm 5y ago
I always do latest, and I read reddit on new except in very specific circumstances
ux 5y ago
> Unfortunately for me, I find external sources (blog posts, news articles, etc) often the most relevant and insightful; and Twitter deliberately filters them out when discovering new people. Right, so what the author is looking for is... RSS feeds? Twitter is simply a poor-man marketed RSS feeds aggregation with all kind of flavored noises. To me it feels like the author is not interested in what the people have to say, but more like a network of shared resources on specific topics. Well then, maybe reddit is a generic answer, and HN or lobste.rs for specialized topics.
nirui 5y ago
Back in the day when blogging is still hot, many "tech bloggers" that I read exchanges "friend links" between their blogs so their readers can discover other blogs. Many high-end bloggers are quite picky on who they would exchange links with (after all the link is displayed on the home page), which resulted a high quality read list. Maybe people should resume doing it. PS. "back in the day" does makes it sounded old, but it was just 15 years ago or so.
- iruoy 5y ago
  I've noticed Drew Devault still does this. https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
- maccard 5y ago
  15 years ago was an eternity ago in internet terms. That predates windows 7, iphones, and almost intel macs.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  Folks on HN have postulated that the reason Google search results are so terrible these days may have something to do with content being terrible. A garbage-in garbage-out problem. Maybe this lack of friend links is contributing.
  - epicide 5y ago
    Sturgeon's law/revelation: "It is in this vein that I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of [sci fi] is crud. The Revelation: Ninety percent of everything is crud." As the amount of content on the internet grows dramatically, that 90% appears much larger. The problem of finding the good 10% does not scale proportionately. Therefore, I fully believe the ratio of good:bad content remains the same as it ever was (~1:9), but sifting through the "crud" is much harder and will continue to grow harder. Perhaps exponentially.
  - 5y ago
raverbashing 5y ago
Go to the icon on the top right (the star one), select 'See Latest Tweets'. The experience will improve
cormacrelf 5y ago
You can only complain up to a point. Twitter cannot stand in for your own judgment about who to follow. If you blindly follow the recommendations of a free engagement machine you will get what you paid for. Twitter is big enough that there is a huge variety on there, and almost always the solution is to follow better people. You cannot do that overnight. I have a great experience on Twitter, because I follow some really excellent people. It took 5-10 years to get there, and it should, because you can't speedrun the process of figuring out who you want to listen to and what you care about.
flohofwoe 5y ago
Recommendation algorithms really need to come with extensive UIs for tweaking, tuning and cleanup (less like this, more like this, don't include this, you're seeing this because of... etc...), maybe completely new 'exploration UIs' to actively find new stuff at the edge and beyond my own bubble. For instance, having to open random YouTube links in private browsing mode just to prevent that the home page is forever "poisoned" with this specific type of crap is kinda bizarre. IMHO recommendation algorithms could be really useful if they allowed the user to play a more active role. Give us a "power user UI".
- ssss11 5y ago
  I feel as though companies want their “smart” things (algorithms, recommendations, devices) to do stuff better than us, maybe they think that’s what we want, but I’d just like them to serve us better instead - let me tell it what to do and it do exactly that.
- arepublicadoceu 5y ago
  > Recommendation algorithms really need to come with extensive UIs for tweaking, tuning and cleanup (less like this, more like this, don't include this, you're seeing this because of... etc...), maybe completely new 'exploration UIs' to actively find new stuff at the edge and beyond my own bubble. > IMHO recommendation algorithms could be really useful if they allowed the user to play a more active role. Give us a "power user UI". I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the optimization behind “the algorithm”. They’re not optimizing for usefulness or, god forbid, life enhancing stuff. They’re optimizing for engagement. Sugar for our brains. If the user could control what they see in the platform we could self optimize for usefulness. This would go directly against their wishes. 1h week of life enhancing videos = 10$ 10h week of clickbait or rage inducing videos = 100$ Yeap, user control, never gonna happen.
- lonk11 5y ago
  How about a recommendation algorithm that works like this: - When you upvote an item, the algorithm connects you to other people who upvoted it and shows you what else they upvoted ("more like this") - When you downvote - the algorithm disconnects you from those who upvoted it and you see less content from them ("less like this") Some properties: - You have an easy way to expand your connections - just upvote/submit content you liked. - Because it is so simple, the algorithm can explain to you exactly why you are seeing a given recommendation - because it was liked by people who liked X, Y and Z (where X, Y and Z are things that you liked before). - Since your connections are a result of your explicit content ratings - you don't have to worry about poisoning your recommendations by content you merely viewed. You have active control over your recommendations. If that sounds interesting, check out my hobby project that works exactly this way: https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com - it's free, no ads, no tracking.
frouge 5y ago
Twitter (social media) goals and your (our) needs won't ever be aligned you (we) should use something else.
retrac98 5y ago
Hard same: https://mcarter.me/posts/twitter-makes-me-feel-bad https://mcarter.me/posts/twitter-makes-me-feel-bad
ARandomerDude 5y ago
> Twitter Home made me miserable This is more the author's fault than anyone else's. Sure, Twitter is a scammy cesspool, but the author needs to exercise some self-control.
rdxm 5y ago
jccalhoun 5y ago
People complain about how bad twitter is all the time and that just isn't my experience. Sure, I sometimes search for my shitty senator and get pissed off by the terrible things he is doing but most of the time what I see on twitter is interesting at best and boring at worst. If twitter recommends something I don't like, I click on the three dots and click not interested in this tweet.
mxuribe 5y ago
@brentroose Have you considered either of the following? Path A: 1. Search and find folks that you wish to follow...i think you mentioned php devs, etcx. But, look for their personal blogs, websites - not twitter. 2. When you have found the folks you might want to follow, try and follow any rss/atom feeds that they be publishing for their blogs/sites. If none, then maybe reach out to them and ask what might be a good mechanism to follow them (which ideally is not twitter). Path B: 1. Research the Fediverse (https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse)...for https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse)...for platforms, communities on mastodon, pleroma, etc. 2. Once you have established your identity on the fediverse (either stood up your own instance, or joined someone else's or whatever), then look for communities focused around the topics for the people you wish to follow...and then follow them on the fediverse (no twitter-like algorithm here on the fediverse). Finally...Path C: You can actually pursue both of the above paths if you wish! :-)
deergomoo 5y ago
I wish there was an option for an algorithmic timeline but only across accounts I follow. I use the algorithmic timeline because a lot of people I follow are in a different timezone, so chronologic means I just never see their tweets. But in the last few months, it feels like I see more tweets from accounts I don’t follow than those I do.
coolandsmartrr 5y ago
Like many homepages powered by recommendation algorithms, it's useful to actively dislike content you don't want to see. (e.g. YouTube) Twitter tends to suggest trending tweets on topics it assumes I'm interested in. It tends to pick up self-promoters posting sensational headlines. I tell Twitter "See less tweets like this" and also mute that account. Doing so a few times definitely improved my experience on the timeline. Recommendation algorithms help me find interesting content I wouldn't have found otherwise, but are not yet smart enough to filter noise on its own. Just like one tends their own garden by pruning weeds, it helps to actively maintain one's timeline.
yob22 5y ago

85 points by brentroose 5y ago

Tweetbot is free, hides ads, can sort chronologically, and you can filter out other people's likes, retweets, and replies.

arpa 5y ago

the whole concept of fitting meaningful and thought-out things in 1xx characters is miserable imho.

cblconfederate 5y ago
On the contrary, brevity is such a big virtue that even people who don't have it are forced to spam twitter with their tweet threads
telxosser 5y ago
Yes, obviously it is a political slogan and nonsense engine because the structure is not good for much else. I do enjoy occasionally going on twitter though to randomly click through profiles and see how insane and crazy people can be. It is kind of like going to the zoo to look at the animals.

Marazan 5y ago

Twitter Home is obviously bad and it scares me that the majority of people who use Twitter use Twitter Home as their setup.

captainmuon 5y ago
But how can Twitter work if it doesn't show you (semi-randomly) people who you don't follow? How can discovery work (and especially the other side, being found)? I still don't get Instagram. When I use it privately it just shows me accounts I followed manually, and obvious ads. I helped with a shared account some time ago and I never understood how people found our content without explicitly searching for us.
- Raed667 5y ago
  They had a discovery mechanism built in since the start, it is retweets.
  - illgenr 5y ago
    Then expanded with #'s
  - jon-wood 5y ago
    I’m going to wade in with some pedantry here - retweets didn’t really exist for a fair bit of Twitter’s existence, and grew organically from users introducing the convention of prefixing reposts of other people’s content with an “RT @whoever”.
- basisword 5y ago
  That’s what retweets are for. You see content suggested by people you’ve chosen to follow. On Instagram people you follow reshare posts on their stories. Why should people who don’t know you have your content shoved down their throat by generally piss poor “algorithms”? The alternative (recommendations from friends via retweets/reshares) is infinitely better.
  - captainmuon 5y ago
    But retweets is not content discovery, retweets are content posted by people you follow (albeit originally posted by somebody else). I'm looking at it from the perspective of somebody with a new account with only few followers. How do you get people to see things you post, and ultimatively follow you? In principle you can just reply to their tweets and get their attention, or approach them outside of twitter. In some fraction of cases, twitter suggests things you post to strangers that have common connections. I think that is beneficial and actually doesn't happen nearly enough, leading to people living in filter bubbles.
- karlicoss 5y ago
  I've never used algorithmic timeline (using either Tweetdeck on desktop or Talon on Android) I discover new people via retweets, reading replies, just running into then somewhere else where they link their Twitter handle. Really don't see a problem with that :)

ejb999 5y ago

twitter's time and place has passed. Was clever and even a bit useful for a while, and like facebook, has been taken over by fake accounts, bots, scammer, shameless self-promoters and partisan hate on both sides yelling at each other Tweeting these days is like screaming into a hurricane and hoping someone will hear it. I've blocked twitter (and other social media) in my hosts file on my mac - can't get to it, can't follow links to it and haven't missed it a bit. May have even dropped my BP a couple of points.

TuringTest 5y ago
> twitter's time and place has passed. That would sort of imply that there is an alternative. Where else do you get near-real-time commentary from ongoing popular events, as well as bite-sized (potentially insightful) ramblings on assorted topics of your interest that are not curated by corporate news sources and that you previously might never have known existed?
- iqanq 5y ago
  Why would I want that?
  - ejb999 5y ago
    exactly - somehow we managed to survive a long time without needing to know 'instantly' that 'something' is happening 'someplace'. Most of the instant reports are just plain lies anyway - watch any of big news channels when there is some breaking news - they literally just sit in front of the camera and make things up to fill the airtime with useless speculation, devoid of any real facts or news - I can tune in 6-12-24-48 hours later and read what really happened if I want to. Same thing happens on twitter - some big event happens and ten's of thousands of people start commenting on their version of 'the facts'. Take a 2-3 month break from twitter - see if your life is any worse of for not constantly being 'in the loop'.
    - TuringTest 5y ago
      > exactly - somehow we managed to survive a long time without needing to know 'instantly' that 'something' is happening 'someplace'. We survived millions of years without having agriculture or human-made shelter, and yet at some point we built a civilization. That's not an argument for not doing things. > Take a 2-3 month break from twitter - see if your life is any worse of for not constantly being 'in the loop'. Who says I am constantly 'in the loop'? I do check Twitter when I want to, because there are subjects where I want to get the influx of raw ideas before they are processed and packaged by the powers that be. (It's also useful to track how those ideas are later processed and packaged in real time, something that you could never get by consuming mass media alone). If you are addicted to it and can't spend one weekend without it that's your problem, don't project it on others.

mg 5y ago

the timeline that Twitter fills using their algorithm instead of just chronologically showing tweets of people you follow You can still see the tweets chronologically: https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1482303273352769543 https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1482303273352769543

pomber 5y ago
that doesn't use your list of muted keywords
Raed667 5y ago
Yes but if you're not constantly on Twitter, you miss a lot of content. I would like to see an algorithm that is tuned for my happiness and not some product manager's metrics and KPIs
- lokedhs 5y ago
  You're going to miss a lot of content no matter what. It might be for the better if one simply accepts this. I guess I'm speaking from my experience as a Fediverse user. I don't feel I miss anything, even though there are literally thousands of messages that have passed me by on the feed whenever I open it. Surely someone is going to comment that I'm not missing anything because nothing of value was said, but the posts I do see are things that makes me satisfied for the most part, and that's enough for me.

mehdix 5y ago

IMO as a hacker it's better to focus on maintaining a personal website, feed and newsletter which is under your control rather than spendeng time on a giant platform which is fully out of your control.

Erikun 5y ago
I deleted my twitter account a couple of years ago but started to read a couple of people on there during the us election and the pandemic. These last couple of months twitter has clearly decided to try to clamp down on people reading without an account (the way instagram did with their website a few years earlier). They have tried a couple of things. First there was a popup blocking the screen and scrolling telling you to log in or sign up if you clicked on any post, image or other user. At first you couldn't dismiss it. Then they changed so you could dismiss it but it would move you back to the point where you clicked (essentially as a back button). You could get around it by reloading the page instead of dismissing the popup, then you got to the page you wanted. Now they're testing activating the popup after you scroll through the feed a bit with no option to dismiss. I imagine everyone posting to twitter have no idea this behaviour have been introduced and that twitter is trying to wall their garden. This is especially depressing since there are a number of pandemic related posters (Kai Kupferschmidt among them) who have interesting feeds, but no other communication channels that I know of.
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  Take any Twitter link and change “Twitter.com” to “Nitter.net”.

rpastuszak 5y ago

What I do: 1. move 99% of my follows to lists, so I get less useless, dopamine level hacking spam 2. anyone can just call me to say hi, chat or rant: https://sonnet.io/posts/hi https://sonnet.io/posts/hi When it comes to making any meaningful, or at least interesting connections with people, I’ve had more success with 2. in a month, than with Twitter in the past 10 years or so. I miss forums though.

petecooper 5y ago
>https://sonnet.io/posts/hi https://sonnet.io/posts/hi This is great, may I use this idea – with credit – please?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rpastuszak 5y ago
  Sure! Share a link/tweet when you share it people, I'm curious to see how you'll approach the idea:)
- nkrisc 5y ago
  You don’t need permission to do something like this for yourself.
  - rpastuszak 5y ago
    That is true, although selfishly I'd love to see how they approach it though, so I can learn from them.
  - petecooper 5y ago
    That’s fair. I was asking for courtesy.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
icy 5y ago

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

> uses twitter > get's annoyed by twitter > write's a blog post about being annoyed by twitter Am I the only one?

nefitty 5y ago
I'm annoyed by all the people that are going to downvote my comment. I may petition dang to remove downvotes on the premise of reducing commenter suffering.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  That this post is near the top of HN is the same reason why twitter is annoying

cblconfederate 5y ago

For me, twitter home is just random. Developers should check their code, there must be bugs or something. I ve been using twitter chronologically for years now which begs the question: why did we give up on rss?

ratherbefuddled 5y ago
There was no money in it.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  I don't know i'd watch ads in a convenient rss reader that looks like twitter. I just wouldn't want users to lock their content into it.
kzrdude 5y ago
Twitter is an endless firehose of new impressions, for the users that want that and RSS just bottoms out, you can mark everything as read and "beg for more". It's too relevant and doesn't add random new stuff. The info-addicted brain (I have some of that, unfortunately) is rewarded by twitter.

rambambram 5y ago

> So, here's where I need your help: I really want to discover more interesting people online; people who write about PHP, webdev, and programming; people who dare to challenge ideas that we take for granted; content that makes us think outside our box. But how do I find those people? I'm subscribed to your RSS feed, that's how I follow people who write about webdev. ;)

daenney 5y ago

> I'm sure Twitter is well aware of how their algorithm works, and I'm sure it yields the best results for the majority of their users, but I apparently don't belong in that group. The algorithms are optimised to crank up the engagement metrics. Though that’s certainly good for Twitter, whether that’s actually the best thing for their users is up for debate.

ejb999 5y ago
>>The algorithms are optimised to crank up the engagement metrics. In other words, making sure you see a bunch of people that you agree with politically, and also throw in a handful of extremists on the other side (whichever 'other side') so that you feel compelled to fight it out back-and-forth online while twitter sells ads to the hate-fest.

ggm 5y ago

One model is to put good ideas out with minor mistakes and welcome corrections.

icy 5y ago

I’ve found http://leantl.com http://leantl.com pretty great at making Twitter at least somewhat bearable. It’s essentially a redirect to: https://twitter.com/search?src=typed_query&q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3Areplies%20-filter%3A%22RT%20%40%22%20 https://twitter.com/search?src=typed_query&q=filter%3Afollow...

skrebbel 5y ago
Wow, that's super handy! Also I have a pretty slow phone, and I'm baffled by how much faster that results page is than Twitter Home. Apparently all the slowdown was from the content I didn't want to see! Amazing. Nuts. Like, Twitter Home scrolls sluggishly and sometimes even freezes my phone. This search result across as fast as an HN comments page. Lean TL for the win, thanks!
charleshan 5y ago
I turn off retweet for most people and use chronological feed. This achieves exactly what I was doing without the manual work of turning off retweet for each user. Thanks for sharing!
oldiphone 5y ago
That’s and improvement, but is it not possible to filter for followers? filter:followers filter:followed filter:following none work

bachmeier 5y ago

I recommend using Twitter's search if you want to find tweets on a particular topic. If someone posts several worthwhile tweets, you can follow them. Over time, you'll start getting retweets of good content. You can follow those people. Use Tweetdeck and create lists by topic. The most important thing is to take your time. There's no way I'd let Twitter tell me which tweets I should see. You're going to end up with people that promote themselves and their friends, and that promotion gets annoying in a hurry - if I wanted that I'd watch QVC. I mostly try to avoid accounts with more than 100K followers. A lot of them post information of questionable accuracy because that's how you generate interest in your account. Moreover, they aren't likely to interact unless you're in their inner circle, which makes for a boring experience.

BlueGh0st 5y ago
I think the problem for a lot of people is that on Twitter you're not subscribing to information/topic streams but to personalities. I follow almost only information security accounts but I'm still subjected to authors' extreme politics, conspiracy theories, and rants touting their personal morality clogging up my feeds. I think that it's Twitter as a medium that is a flawed method of communication. Also it doesn't help that the only method of self-categorization (hashtags) penalizes the author by further reducing the limited character count.

ggm 5y ago

I always do latest, and I read reddit on new except in very specific circumstances

ux 5y ago

> Unfortunately for me, I find external sources (blog posts, news articles, etc) often the most relevant and insightful; and Twitter deliberately filters them out when discovering new people. Right, so what the author is looking for is... RSS feeds? Twitter is simply a poor-man marketed RSS feeds aggregation with all kind of flavored noises. To me it feels like the author is not interested in what the people have to say, but more like a network of shared resources on specific topics. Well then, maybe reddit is a generic answer, and HN or lobste.rs for specialized topics.

nirui 5y ago

Back in the day when blogging is still hot, many "tech bloggers" that I read exchanges "friend links" between their blogs so their readers can discover other blogs. Many high-end bloggers are quite picky on who they would exchange links with (after all the link is displayed on the home page), which resulted a high quality read list. Maybe people should resume doing it. PS. "back in the day" does makes it sounded old, but it was just 15 years ago or so.

iruoy 5y ago
I've noticed Drew Devault still does this. https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
maccard 5y ago
15 years ago was an eternity ago in internet terms. That predates windows 7, iphones, and almost intel macs.
notreallyserio 5y ago
Folks on HN have postulated that the reason Google search results are so terrible these days may have something to do with content being terrible. A garbage-in garbage-out problem. Maybe this lack of friend links is contributing.
- epicide 5y ago
  Sturgeon's law/revelation: "It is in this vein that I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of [sci fi] is crud. The Revelation: Ninety percent of everything is crud." As the amount of content on the internet grows dramatically, that 90% appears much larger. The problem of finding the good 10% does not scale proportionately. Therefore, I fully believe the ratio of good:bad content remains the same as it ever was (~1:9), but sifting through the "crud" is much harder and will continue to grow harder. Perhaps exponentially.
- 5y ago

raverbashing 5y ago

Go to the icon on the top right (the star one), select 'See Latest Tweets'. The experience will improve

cormacrelf 5y ago

You can only complain up to a point. Twitter cannot stand in for your own judgment about who to follow. If you blindly follow the recommendations of a free engagement machine you will get what you paid for. Twitter is big enough that there is a huge variety on there, and almost always the solution is to follow better people. You cannot do that overnight. I have a great experience on Twitter, because I follow some really excellent people. It took 5-10 years to get there, and it should, because you can't speedrun the process of figuring out who you want to listen to and what you care about.

flohofwoe 5y ago

Recommendation algorithms really need to come with extensive UIs for tweaking, tuning and cleanup (less like this, more like this, don't include this, you're seeing this because of... etc...), maybe completely new 'exploration UIs' to actively find new stuff at the edge and beyond my own bubble. For instance, having to open random YouTube links in private browsing mode just to prevent that the home page is forever "poisoned" with this specific type of crap is kinda bizarre. IMHO recommendation algorithms could be really useful if they allowed the user to play a more active role. Give us a "power user UI".

ssss11 5y ago
I feel as though companies want their “smart” things (algorithms, recommendations, devices) to do stuff better than us, maybe they think that’s what we want, but I’d just like them to serve us better instead - let me tell it what to do and it do exactly that.
arepublicadoceu 5y ago
> Recommendation algorithms really need to come with extensive UIs for tweaking, tuning and cleanup (less like this, more like this, don't include this, you're seeing this because of... etc...), maybe completely new 'exploration UIs' to actively find new stuff at the edge and beyond my own bubble. > IMHO recommendation algorithms could be really useful if they allowed the user to play a more active role. Give us a "power user UI". I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the optimization behind “the algorithm”. They’re not optimizing for usefulness or, god forbid, life enhancing stuff. They’re optimizing for engagement. Sugar for our brains. If the user could control what they see in the platform we could self optimize for usefulness. This would go directly against their wishes. 1h week of life enhancing videos = 10$ 10h week of clickbait or rage inducing videos = 100$ Yeap, user control, never gonna happen.
lonk11 5y ago
How about a recommendation algorithm that works like this: - When you upvote an item, the algorithm connects you to other people who upvoted it and shows you what else they upvoted ("more like this") - When you downvote - the algorithm disconnects you from those who upvoted it and you see less content from them ("less like this") Some properties: - You have an easy way to expand your connections - just upvote/submit content you liked. - Because it is so simple, the algorithm can explain to you exactly why you are seeing a given recommendation - because it was liked by people who liked X, Y and Z (where X, Y and Z are things that you liked before). - Since your connections are a result of your explicit content ratings - you don't have to worry about poisoning your recommendations by content you merely viewed. You have active control over your recommendations. If that sounds interesting, check out my hobby project that works exactly this way: https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com - it's free, no ads, no tracking.

frouge 5y ago

Twitter (social media) goals and your (our) needs won't ever be aligned you (we) should use something else.

retrac98 5y ago

Hard same: https://mcarter.me/posts/twitter-makes-me-feel-bad https://mcarter.me/posts/twitter-makes-me-feel-bad

ARandomerDude 5y ago

> Twitter Home made me miserable This is more the author's fault than anyone else's. Sure, Twitter is a scammy cesspool, but the author needs to exercise some self-control.

rdxm 5y ago

jccalhoun 5y ago

People complain about how bad twitter is all the time and that just isn't my experience. Sure, I sometimes search for my shitty senator and get pissed off by the terrible things he is doing but most of the time what I see on twitter is interesting at best and boring at worst. If twitter recommends something I don't like, I click on the three dots and click not interested in this tweet.

mxuribe 5y ago

@brentroose Have you considered either of the following? Path A: 1. Search and find folks that you wish to follow...i think you mentioned php devs, etcx. But, look for their personal blogs, websites - not twitter. 2. When you have found the folks you might want to follow, try and follow any rss/atom feeds that they be publishing for their blogs/sites. If none, then maybe reach out to them and ask what might be a good mechanism to follow them (which ideally is not twitter). Path B: 1. Research the Fediverse (https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse)...for https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse)...for platforms, communities on mastodon, pleroma, etc. 2. Once you have established your identity on the fediverse (either stood up your own instance, or joined someone else's or whatever), then look for communities focused around the topics for the people you wish to follow...and then follow them on the fediverse (no twitter-like algorithm here on the fediverse). Finally...Path C: You can actually pursue both of the above paths if you wish! :-)

deergomoo 5y ago

I wish there was an option for an algorithmic timeline but only across accounts I follow. I use the algorithmic timeline because a lot of people I follow are in a different timezone, so chronologic means I just never see their tweets. But in the last few months, it feels like I see more tweets from accounts I don’t follow than those I do.

coolandsmartrr 5y ago

Like many homepages powered by recommendation algorithms, it's useful to actively dislike content you don't want to see. (e.g. YouTube) Twitter tends to suggest trending tweets on topics it assumes I'm interested in. It tends to pick up self-promoters posting sensational headlines. I tell Twitter "See less tweets like this" and also mute that account. Doing so a few times definitely improved my experience on the timeline. Recommendation algorithms help me find interesting content I wouldn't have found otherwise, but are not yet smart enough to filter noise on its own. Just like one tends their own garden by pruning weeds, it helps to actively maintain one's timeline.

yob22 5y ago