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I tried being a Twitter user for a bit last year, mostly because a lot of engineers I admire use it to communicate about interesting topics and also their work.

I tried being a Twitter user for a bit last year, mostly because a lot of engineers I admire use it to communicate about interesting topics and also their work. But after a while, I realized even they will pollute my feed with politically divisive topics, whether it be from them retweeting something, or liking a tweet, or even entering into the fray themselves -- Twitter will find a way to get me to see it. For a while, I resolved "OK, if anyone retweets this stuff, I will simply unfollow them" but eventually this felt self-defeating. I know a lot of folks in my field side by the stance that everything is political, even code. Call me irresponsible, but I've honestly led a much happier and stress-free life living in the fantasy world where that is not the case, and I can enjoy my hobby in open-source without Github issues becoming a shouting match that spans 200 comments from people who aren't even invested in the codebase. EDIT: typos

dheera 5y ago
I don't Tweet because Twitter never promotes my post to hashtags and people who might be interested in my content. People I respond to with questions never reply. Basically, nobody reads my stuff. It's a waste of time if you're not already famous.
spion 5y ago
I actually wonder if getting more people involved in politics (well, political activism, which is somewhat distinct from political action) is doing any good. It only works if you involve more people on your side, but it seems like this tends to result with more people getting involved on the other side as well.
madeofpalk 5y ago
For what it's worth, you can disable retweets for people (and I think your entire feed).
- themanmaran 5y ago
  Not for everyone unfortunately. But there is a ruby script that does it for you. https://gist.github.com/robinsloan/a045d26c513681f13680f319fbfc84d2 https://gist.github.com/robinsloan/a045d26c513681f13680f319f...
vorpalhex 5y ago
One of my pet theories for why social media is such a cesspool is that it exposes us to the whole of someone else. If I play boardgames with Sue, that's enough. We meet, enjoy a beer and play some Catan and go our separate ways. That's a fine relationship. If I follow Sue on social media, now I know her politics, religion, sex life, drug usage, opinions on every little thing.. and frankly, I don't care or want to. I'm happy just playing some Catan once in a while. Historically you didn't need to know everything about everyone. Your friends will always have opinions or lifestyles you will find disagreeable - that is the nature of human existence. Humanity either needs to "agree to disagree" on wide swaths of things we care a whole bunch about (abortion, firearms, lgbtq, etc) or we need to go back to not discussing those things in public or polite company. My $0.02 is that it's easier to fall back to rules of polite conversation than fix our compulsive need for agreement.
- wanda 5y ago
  Yes, social media is essentially a wall of noise. It's someone throwing their ego into sharp relief. Instead of a handshake and an opportunity to judge a book by its cover, you're greeted by a literal and loud book cover of the person along with blurb. Except... is it their ego? Or is it some surrogate persona? It has always struck me as more of a performance. And that's the problem with social media. Rather than encouraging an individual to be themselves and arrive at their own values independently, it on the contrary encourages inauthenticity -- perhaps not intentionally by the developers of the websites in the beginning, but it emerges through behaviour of the users. Rather than accepting of all people, people with deviant-discourse views are vilified very publicly, and either remove themselves from the platform or instead surround themselves with supporters from the deviant side. Social media does bring people together, but it doesn't bring everyone together, it just promotes the formation of ideological tribes. This effect of uniting and dividing people into tribes isn't constrained to social media. Marketing, advertising, indeed many aspects of how capitalist society has evolved has a similar effect of forming tribes. Adverts and marketing tell people that they should do a thing, and then those who agree gravitate to that product, and those who disagree gravitate toward an opposing product or a steadfast disapproval of any product in the space, and they come to define themselves by that approval or disapproval. Ask a person to define who they are. They will tell their name, their age, their occupation, where they were born and/or live, and then they'll most likely move on to what they like and dislike, what they believe and don't believe. They define themselves according to details they think are important to others and in relation to other things, usually things made by corporations or governments/bodies of power. - A name doesn't define a person, it's simply how you refer to them in conversation or get their attention without ambiguity in the presence of other humans. - Age also doesn't define a person. People look older and younger than they actually are all the time, and in my experience it has little bearing on the person's wisdom or intrigue. - Occupation matters not. All you need is the understanding that your occupation is what you do to pay for food, water, shelter and your hobbies/downtime. It can also be what you actually want to achieve with your life, but this isn't essential as long as you have awareness. - What a person likes and dislikes is not a defining feature, it's at best an expression of a person's taste. It is a description of a relation between a person and other things. Tastes are easily feigned to please others, easily changed and highly likely to change over time, and while they can be used to stereotype people, I'm pretty sure stereotyping people is considered a bad thing to do. - Belief and disbelief aren't defining and also don't make a great deal of sense, since to believe is to hold that something is true without data -- holding that something is true OR false without data is nonsensical, and thus pointless to communicate to others, because they'll either have the same nonsensical belief or an opposing one, and probably won't be very amenable to having their belief(s) changed since there is no data to argue from. Ultimately, people don't know who they are, they know what their profile page(s) should say, and these "defining" characteristics are most likely things for which they are a willing standard bearer, things that they want to shine out like a lighthouse to attract or ward off the types of people they will get along with and not get along with. There are people that do have a notion of who they are, but I suspect they are likely too scared to reveal it, precisely because people are polarised, capricious, and unforgiving. Perhaps that's what it is, social media actually encourages people to both fall in line with a stereotype and to stereotype others. Certainly, I think social media also distorts the personality of the user as well. I avoid social media like the plague, primarily because the content social media sites generate is of little interest to me. I have absolutely no understanding of why anyone would want to do social media stuff -- so I cannot speak from any personal experience. I've created a profile on some of them for the sake of communicating with someone who refused to communicate by other means, but never have I felt inclined to use the platforms because... it's just not for me, I don't understand it. I prefer to toil in the shadows and live my life, without sharing it. Anyway, something I have observed throughout my life is that the personality is performative, i.e. most people will act differently if they have an audience. It either causes them to withdraw and hide features of who they are, or it will encourage them to reveal as much of themselves as possible and even to fabricate features of their persona that aren't authentic. This kind of behaviour is easy enough to observe in work contexts, and my intuition tells me that social media must surely have a similar effect on people. With thousands of people watching out for what banal thought you share next. The result is that not only are you exposed to the whole of the other, but you're exposed to the super-other that forms (depending on the subject type) through audience demand and expectations, or through the subject's desire to provoke a certain reaction in their audience, or indeed to attract a certain audience to serve their agenda. Much of the social media landscape is essentially just memetic. Probably quite fascinating to study if you're interested in how utterly twisted and inauthentic people can become by living an observed and performed life, rather than simply living according to their own principles, resolute and only subject to observation when necessary to achieve, say, professional or academic goals. * * * I'd like to bring up something Douglas Adams wrote about in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. He imagined an alien race called the Belcerabons, who enjoyed peace and success, no doubt in part thanks to their being a wholly quiet civilization. A Galactic Tribunal of other races, envious of their success and perceived smugness, infected them with a disease that gave them the curse of forced telepathy -- every thought would be broadcast from each Belcerabon to the rest of their kind. The only way that they could silence the artillery of communicating their every thought to each other was to constantly talk to each other instead, probably preferable just to retain some control over communicating private or awkward thoughts and instead talking about the weather etc. While Adams was undoubtedly poking fun at the sorry state of the human race when it comes to those nauseating conversations about the local weather conditions and what was eaten for lunch on a previous day, I do find it amusing that constantly bombarding one another with banalities ought to be considered a curse, and yet we have somehow managed to develop our civilization around technological platforms for that very purpose.
delecti 5y ago
You can turn off seeing retweets from accounts you follow on a per-account basis, and more people (including yourself, if you're ever curious to go back to Twitter) should more aggressively use the option to make the site far more enjoyable. Lots of accounts are fine to follow on their own, but complete spam-fests if your feed is full of everything they retweet. Just go to their profile, hit the three dots, and then click "Turn off retweets".
- dvtrn 5y ago
  Does Twitter respect this toggled option and persist the state? I’m a little burned out fighting over user preferences across social media that seem to always toggle themselves back to whatever default the platform wants that day.
  - delecti 5y ago
    I'm not going to promise it never forgets that option, but I've never noticed it forgetting across dozens of accounts I follow, and several years and multiple logins/devices/browsers. It's not like the usual per-device/session timeline options, it's more along the lines and persistence of a mute/block toggle.
sbierwagen 5y ago
Tweetdeck. It's the "pro" Twitter client that has strict chrono ordering and won't show likes or trending items. You can also set it to not show any retweets, at all.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  Even vanilla Twitter allows you to get strict chrono order by switching your home-page. It does not show "likes" and reduces the use of "trending" iirc. It does show retweets, though.
  - fotta 5y ago
    I switched to this view a few days ago and it’s infinitely better. Originally when Twitter rolled out the toggle I figured I’d give the algorithmic feed a chance but eventually it got to the point where 80% of my feed was algorithmically recommended tweets from people I wasn’t following and I got fed up.
datavirtue 5y ago
I'm only a douchebag if I'm anon. No idea where people are getting that it's OK to be authentic while attached to your real name.
wpietri 5y ago
- civilized 5y ago
  > "my life as a member of group X should be better than that of other groups" is a political position. This isn't at all what the GP said, and that fact is one of the biggest reasons we don't like engaging in these types of conversations: a hostile stranger is liable to stop in and hammer you with a comment that reeks of contempt and disdain, and egregiously distorts what you said. "I don't want to experience all the worst experiences that anyone on the planet is having" is an extremely different statement from "my life should be better than anyone who is less fortunate than me". If you fail to distinguish these two, you're definitely just as guilty of the latter as anyone else. So, sorry, we're not here for it. And if you want to persuade us into being here for it, distortion-loaded shaming definitely isn't the way to accomplish that.
  - throwaway1492 5y ago
    > distortion-loaded shaming definitely isn't the way to accomplish that. I'd go further and say the poster you're responding to is non charitable and down right hateful, violating at least two community guidelines: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    - LAC-Tech 5y ago
      It isn't what he said, but it's apparently what he meant. Again with the mind-reading. Maybe people don't want to talk politics because so many people debate in bad faith and not only put words in peoples mouths, but thoughts into their heads.
onion2k 5y ago
I know a lot of folks in my field side by the stance that everything is political, even code. Twitter isn't code. Why would you expect someone to limit what they publish to code topics just because you want to limit what you read to just code things? Their Twitter account is their domain. There's no reason why someone shouldn't tweet about code and other stuff if they want to. I honestly have no idea why people think they should have any say over what someone tweets, and even suggest that people are wrong to tweet the way they do. That level of entitlement is baffling. Please don't follow me on Twitter. You'll hate my account.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Please don't follow me on Twitter. You'll hate my account. Followed, of course, just for that. Hey, an old retweet of yours already got me blocked by some fuckwit who, like Mike Pence, can't trust himself to be alone with women other than his wife, so that's a win all around! :-D
- fleddr 5y ago
  Nobody said that people can't tweet about any and all aspects of their lives. The point was that some followers may only be interested in one particular part. This would dramatically cut the noise from Twitter, as well as its divisiveness and general unpleasantness. You can still tweet whatever you want, but Twitter would be more usable for many people if you could cherry pick the signal and get rid of the noise.
Uhhrrr 5y ago
>I realized even they will pollute my feed with politically divisive topics, whether it be from them retweeting something, or liking a tweet, or even entering into the fray themselves Sorting by "Latest" rather than "Home" makes it so you don't see their likes and replies. I would recommend it to anyone.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  And you can disable retweets. I don't use twitter anymore but when I did I used these features to make it less toxic.
deleted 5y ago
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dwighttk 5y ago
One thing that helps (a tiny bit) is to go to newest tweets first instead of the algorithm. This cuts out all of the likes (which are 99% noise for me… I wish I could make it so people didn’t see my likes, that is what retweets are for!) Still gonna get the retweets, but you won’t get the most “engaging” stuff brought to your attention which tends to be the worst.
- ripper1138 5y ago
  Predictably, when I changed my feed back to newest tweets, I spent wayyyy less time on Twitter. Which is great.
partisan 5y ago
Excellent points and completely agreed. Social media has turned the private into the public. The old adage, don’t talk politics and don’t throw stones has been completely abandoned. We used to discuss these divisive topics within the contexts in which it was appropriate to do so. Now, it’s literally everywhere. I am not sure what the solution is. It’s a societal pandora’s box and it’s open.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Yeah. A few years ago I revisited a Twitter account I had registered and not used. And I posted for a while. And then I realised I hated the trajectory I was on, and I deleted every single post and the account. I now have an account and, like the article says, I don't post. Twitter is a bonfire of nastiness. You either give in to it or you have to commit to spending an awful lot of time ignoring the cesspit of general awfulness, and pretending bad faith is good faith for the purposes of dialogue with sealions who learned their chops through Gamergate. If you tire of all that (or if you are a woman and tire of the astonishing, violent sexualised nastiness that you disproportionately attract) and make use of the conversation controls so you can continue to peacefully discuss things only with people you want to, everyone else accuses you of being "aFrAiD oF dEbAtE" or censorship, everywhere else. (Including here.) Stuff that.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
there are filter plugins that will kill off 90% of the garbage if you're dedicated enough to add filter words and tags. You'll never get rid of all of it though. I personally don't tweet, but I do follow people that I admire/enjoy their thoughts. Also a few news feeds just to stay abreast of stuff.
kyrra 5y ago
100%, great take. I tried following some tech people I admire and hit the same issue and just unfollowed them. I now only use twitter for the sole-purpose of getting political/world news when I want it. But using it for anything technically interesting is dead to me.
hjanssen 5y ago
Im not sure that the apolitical stance many people believe to hold is such an apolitical stance. In fact, living in any state and taking part in any kind of society is political in and of itself. You do not get to take part in any community without having a political stance - being part of a community is communicating that you agree with the morals and values of the community and wilfully accept them - thats the basis and general agreement of a community, it's what differentiates a group of people from a community. Now, Im not sure that turning a blind eye to the consequences that this has is inherently wrong, that surely depends on what impact the concrete political/moral/ethical stance has, but I disagree with the notion that, really, anything is apolitical. In context, everything is political, and we have to live with the notion that anything we do has impact on other people, as long as the consequences of the the thing we are doing is visible to other people.
- slibhb 5y ago
  You think everything is political because you've failed to make a distinction between morality, culture, and politics. Politics doesn't have to do with "morals and values". It's not a political stance to have a birthday party for your 3 year old or pray in a church or a mosque. Your second argument is "everything affects everything else". Using that argument we can prove that we're all mass murderers for keeping our thermostats at 70 degrees. One reason this way of thinking is so useless is that it fails to single out actual murderers (i.e. the person who pulls the trigger).
  - dillondoyle 5y ago
    I think it's blurry. Morals and values are very much at the heart of politics. It's what drives engagement & wins votes. One side views abortion as a moral sin. The other thinks that access to healthcare is a value and have a moral obligation to fight for the rights of women. There are a bunch of issues like that. For me right now my LGBTQ community is being used by Republicans as an election issue. An example where one side thinks (or pretends to in order to win votes) that it's some political issue, while I and many others feel like it's a direct attack on our lives akin to racism & racist jim crow era laws.
protomyth 5y ago
For a while, I resolved "OK, if anyone retweets this stuff, I will simply unfollow them" You can also turn off retweets for those people. Twitter does seem to have some idiotic take on what I want to see.
jahewson 5y ago
> the stance that everything is political Which is itself a political stance. It’s not a universal truth but a very narrow political ideology. Never mind that “political” is not a well-defined thing to begin with. If we can’t agree to neutral territory then one of the sides is going to have to win. Because you can’t bully your way to victory. We need more meetings of the mind and fewer meetings of unfalsifiable rhetoric. Fewer crusaders and more peacemakers.
TZubiri 5y ago
It's almost as if they become infected with a bianry search parasite and the vector is any 50/50 divide
kaitai 5y ago
I think everything is political, even code.... But the conversation Twitter fosters is not useful. I see people jumping on others for small mistakes or imagined slights, searching for inconsistencies ("On March 3 you said this about apples, on March 7 you said this about oranges -- why don't you have a CONSISTENT STANCE ON FRUITS YOU HYPOCRITE"), etc. And yes, it's so easy to comment from the sidelines; I see people sitting comfortably in Minneapolis or Miami criticizing a journalist tweeting about the refugee situation in Moldova. Folks try to have nuanced discussion on Twitter but it's not possible when it's so reactionary and atomized. I no longer tweet either. I go on Twitter to find interesting people to follow in other forums, not to talk to anyone. I am a silent tweeter, heh.
yodsanklai 5y ago
I follow exactly one person on Twitter. A scientist who I consider particularly interesting. And even then, I get a lot of garbage and political ranting. I realise how it can get entertaining and addictive, but I rather spend my time in a more fulfilling way. Also, there are so many narcissists there...
Arrivest 5y ago
sethd 5y ago
Blocking the source (not those retweeting) does work, it simply takes quite awhile to see results. Ultimately most of the outrage/cancel culture/ and other political tribalism tweets originate from a relatively small fraction of users. I’ve blocked thousands of users over the last few years and it’s working out great. It almost feels like the old days of using Twitter. :)
throwaway5848 5y ago
Gareth321 5y ago
>I know a lot of folks in my field side by the stance that everything is political, even code. Conveniently, these are people who want everything to be about their political values and beliefs, and anyone who disagrees is a fascist/nazi.
zirobi 5y ago
The formation of the statement is the problem. Try: > everything can be viewed through the lens of politics You wouldn't say "everything is geographical" because that would be absurd (just as absurd as "everything is political") but you could view most topics through the lens of geography if that was the hammer turning all your concerns into nails.

dheera 5y ago

I don't Tweet because Twitter never promotes my post to hashtags and people who might be interested in my content. People I respond to with questions never reply. Basically, nobody reads my stuff. It's a waste of time if you're not already famous.

spion 5y ago

I actually wonder if getting more people involved in politics (well, political activism, which is somewhat distinct from political action) is doing any good. It only works if you involve more people on your side, but it seems like this tends to result with more people getting involved on the other side as well.

madeofpalk 5y ago

For what it's worth, you can disable retweets for people (and I think your entire feed).

themanmaran 5y ago
Not for everyone unfortunately. But there is a ruby script that does it for you. https://gist.github.com/robinsloan/a045d26c513681f13680f319fbfc84d2 https://gist.github.com/robinsloan/a045d26c513681f13680f319f...

vorpalhex 5y ago

One of my pet theories for why social media is such a cesspool is that it exposes us to the whole of someone else. If I play boardgames with Sue, that's enough. We meet, enjoy a beer and play some Catan and go our separate ways. That's a fine relationship. If I follow Sue on social media, now I know her politics, religion, sex life, drug usage, opinions on every little thing.. and frankly, I don't care or want to. I'm happy just playing some Catan once in a while. Historically you didn't need to know everything about everyone. Your friends will always have opinions or lifestyles you will find disagreeable - that is the nature of human existence. Humanity either needs to "agree to disagree" on wide swaths of things we care a whole bunch about (abortion, firearms, lgbtq, etc) or we need to go back to not discussing those things in public or polite company. My $0.02 is that it's easier to fall back to rules of polite conversation than fix our compulsive need for agreement.

wanda 5y ago
Yes, social media is essentially a wall of noise. It's someone throwing their ego into sharp relief. Instead of a handshake and an opportunity to judge a book by its cover, you're greeted by a literal and loud book cover of the person along with blurb. Except... is it their ego? Or is it some surrogate persona? It has always struck me as more of a performance. And that's the problem with social media. Rather than encouraging an individual to be themselves and arrive at their own values independently, it on the contrary encourages inauthenticity -- perhaps not intentionally by the developers of the websites in the beginning, but it emerges through behaviour of the users. Rather than accepting of all people, people with deviant-discourse views are vilified very publicly, and either remove themselves from the platform or instead surround themselves with supporters from the deviant side. Social media does bring people together, but it doesn't bring everyone together, it just promotes the formation of ideological tribes. This effect of uniting and dividing people into tribes isn't constrained to social media. Marketing, advertising, indeed many aspects of how capitalist society has evolved has a similar effect of forming tribes. Adverts and marketing tell people that they should do a thing, and then those who agree gravitate to that product, and those who disagree gravitate toward an opposing product or a steadfast disapproval of any product in the space, and they come to define themselves by that approval or disapproval. Ask a person to define who they are. They will tell their name, their age, their occupation, where they were born and/or live, and then they'll most likely move on to what they like and dislike, what they believe and don't believe. They define themselves according to details they think are important to others and in relation to other things, usually things made by corporations or governments/bodies of power. - A name doesn't define a person, it's simply how you refer to them in conversation or get their attention without ambiguity in the presence of other humans. - Age also doesn't define a person. People look older and younger than they actually are all the time, and in my experience it has little bearing on the person's wisdom or intrigue. - Occupation matters not. All you need is the understanding that your occupation is what you do to pay for food, water, shelter and your hobbies/downtime. It can also be what you actually want to achieve with your life, but this isn't essential as long as you have awareness. - What a person likes and dislikes is not a defining feature, it's at best an expression of a person's taste. It is a description of a relation between a person and other things. Tastes are easily feigned to please others, easily changed and highly likely to change over time, and while they can be used to stereotype people, I'm pretty sure stereotyping people is considered a bad thing to do. - Belief and disbelief aren't defining and also don't make a great deal of sense, since to believe is to hold that something is true without data -- holding that something is true OR false without data is nonsensical, and thus pointless to communicate to others, because they'll either have the same nonsensical belief or an opposing one, and probably won't be very amenable to having their belief(s) changed since there is no data to argue from. Ultimately, people don't know who they are, they know what their profile page(s) should say, and these "defining" characteristics are most likely things for which they are a willing standard bearer, things that they want to shine out like a lighthouse to attract or ward off the types of people they will get along with and not get along with. There are people that do have a notion of who they are, but I suspect they are likely too scared to reveal it, precisely because people are polarised, capricious, and unforgiving. Perhaps that's what it is, social media actually encourages people to both fall in line with a stereotype and to stereotype others. Certainly, I think social media also distorts the personality of the user as well. I avoid social media like the plague, primarily because the content social media sites generate is of little interest to me. I have absolutely no understanding of why anyone would want to do social media stuff -- so I cannot speak from any personal experience. I've created a profile on some of them for the sake of communicating with someone who refused to communicate by other means, but never have I felt inclined to use the platforms because... it's just not for me, I don't understand it. I prefer to toil in the shadows and live my life, without sharing it. Anyway, something I have observed throughout my life is that the personality is performative, i.e. most people will act differently if they have an audience. It either causes them to withdraw and hide features of who they are, or it will encourage them to reveal as much of themselves as possible and even to fabricate features of their persona that aren't authentic. This kind of behaviour is easy enough to observe in work contexts, and my intuition tells me that social media must surely have a similar effect on people. With thousands of people watching out for what banal thought you share next. The result is that not only are you exposed to the whole of the other, but you're exposed to the super-other that forms (depending on the subject type) through audience demand and expectations, or through the subject's desire to provoke a certain reaction in their audience, or indeed to attract a certain audience to serve their agenda. Much of the social media landscape is essentially just memetic. Probably quite fascinating to study if you're interested in how utterly twisted and inauthentic people can become by living an observed and performed life, rather than simply living according to their own principles, resolute and only subject to observation when necessary to achieve, say, professional or academic goals. * * * I'd like to bring up something Douglas Adams wrote about in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. He imagined an alien race called the Belcerabons, who enjoyed peace and success, no doubt in part thanks to their being a wholly quiet civilization. A Galactic Tribunal of other races, envious of their success and perceived smugness, infected them with a disease that gave them the curse of forced telepathy -- every thought would be broadcast from each Belcerabon to the rest of their kind. The only way that they could silence the artillery of communicating their every thought to each other was to constantly talk to each other instead, probably preferable just to retain some control over communicating private or awkward thoughts and instead talking about the weather etc. While Adams was undoubtedly poking fun at the sorry state of the human race when it comes to those nauseating conversations about the local weather conditions and what was eaten for lunch on a previous day, I do find it amusing that constantly bombarding one another with banalities ought to be considered a curse, and yet we have somehow managed to develop our civilization around technological platforms for that very purpose.

delecti 5y ago

You can turn off seeing retweets from accounts you follow on a per-account basis, and more people (including yourself, if you're ever curious to go back to Twitter) should more aggressively use the option to make the site far more enjoyable. Lots of accounts are fine to follow on their own, but complete spam-fests if your feed is full of everything they retweet. Just go to their profile, hit the three dots, and then click "Turn off retweets".

dvtrn 5y ago
Does Twitter respect this toggled option and persist the state? I’m a little burned out fighting over user preferences across social media that seem to always toggle themselves back to whatever default the platform wants that day.
- delecti 5y ago
  I'm not going to promise it never forgets that option, but I've never noticed it forgetting across dozens of accounts I follow, and several years and multiple logins/devices/browsers. It's not like the usual per-device/session timeline options, it's more along the lines and persistence of a mute/block toggle.

sbierwagen 5y ago

Tweetdeck. It's the "pro" Twitter client that has strict chrono ordering and won't show likes or trending items. You can also set it to not show any retweets, at all.

Pxtl 5y ago
Even vanilla Twitter allows you to get strict chrono order by switching your home-page. It does not show "likes" and reduces the use of "trending" iirc. It does show retweets, though.
- fotta 5y ago
  I switched to this view a few days ago and it’s infinitely better. Originally when Twitter rolled out the toggle I figured I’d give the algorithmic feed a chance but eventually it got to the point where 80% of my feed was algorithmically recommended tweets from people I wasn’t following and I got fed up.

datavirtue 5y ago

I'm only a douchebag if I'm anon. No idea where people are getting that it's OK to be authentic while attached to your real name.

wpietri 5y ago

civilized 5y ago
> "my life as a member of group X should be better than that of other groups" is a political position. This isn't at all what the GP said, and that fact is one of the biggest reasons we don't like engaging in these types of conversations: a hostile stranger is liable to stop in and hammer you with a comment that reeks of contempt and disdain, and egregiously distorts what you said. "I don't want to experience all the worst experiences that anyone on the planet is having" is an extremely different statement from "my life should be better than anyone who is less fortunate than me". If you fail to distinguish these two, you're definitely just as guilty of the latter as anyone else. So, sorry, we're not here for it. And if you want to persuade us into being here for it, distortion-loaded shaming definitely isn't the way to accomplish that.
- throwaway1492 5y ago
  > distortion-loaded shaming definitely isn't the way to accomplish that. I'd go further and say the poster you're responding to is non charitable and down right hateful, violating at least two community guidelines: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
- wpietri 5y ago
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    It isn't what he said, but it's apparently what he meant. Again with the mind-reading. Maybe people don't want to talk politics because so many people debate in bad faith and not only put words in peoples mouths, but thoughts into their heads.

onion2k 5y ago

I know a lot of folks in my field side by the stance that everything is political, even code. Twitter isn't code. Why would you expect someone to limit what they publish to code topics just because you want to limit what you read to just code things? Their Twitter account is their domain. There's no reason why someone shouldn't tweet about code and other stuff if they want to. I honestly have no idea why people think they should have any say over what someone tweets, and even suggest that people are wrong to tweet the way they do. That level of entitlement is baffling. Please don't follow me on Twitter. You'll hate my account.

CRConrad 5y ago
> Please don't follow me on Twitter. You'll hate my account. Followed, of course, just for that. Hey, an old retweet of yours already got me blocked by some fuckwit who, like Mike Pence, can't trust himself to be alone with women other than his wife, so that's a win all around! :-D
fleddr 5y ago
Nobody said that people can't tweet about any and all aspects of their lives. The point was that some followers may only be interested in one particular part. This would dramatically cut the noise from Twitter, as well as its divisiveness and general unpleasantness. You can still tweet whatever you want, but Twitter would be more usable for many people if you could cherry pick the signal and get rid of the noise.

Uhhrrr 5y ago

>I realized even they will pollute my feed with politically divisive topics, whether it be from them retweeting something, or liking a tweet, or even entering into the fray themselves Sorting by "Latest" rather than "Home" makes it so you don't see their likes and replies. I would recommend it to anyone.

CameronNemo 5y ago
And you can disable retweets. I don't use twitter anymore but when I did I used these features to make it less toxic.

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dwighttk 5y ago

One thing that helps (a tiny bit) is to go to newest tweets first instead of the algorithm. This cuts out all of the likes (which are 99% noise for me… I wish I could make it so people didn’t see my likes, that is what retweets are for!) Still gonna get the retweets, but you won’t get the most “engaging” stuff brought to your attention which tends to be the worst.

ripper1138 5y ago
Predictably, when I changed my feed back to newest tweets, I spent wayyyy less time on Twitter. Which is great.

partisan 5y ago

Excellent points and completely agreed. Social media has turned the private into the public. The old adage, don’t talk politics and don’t throw stones has been completely abandoned. We used to discuss these divisive topics within the contexts in which it was appropriate to do so. Now, it’s literally everywhere. I am not sure what the solution is. It’s a societal pandora’s box and it’s open.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

Yeah. A few years ago I revisited a Twitter account I had registered and not used. And I posted for a while. And then I realised I hated the trajectory I was on, and I deleted every single post and the account. I now have an account and, like the article says, I don't post. Twitter is a bonfire of nastiness. You either give in to it or you have to commit to spending an awful lot of time ignoring the cesspit of general awfulness, and pretending bad faith is good faith for the purposes of dialogue with sealions who learned their chops through Gamergate. If you tire of all that (or if you are a woman and tire of the astonishing, violent sexualised nastiness that you disproportionately attract) and make use of the conversation controls so you can continue to peacefully discuss things only with people you want to, everyone else accuses you of being "aFrAiD oF dEbAtE" or censorship, everywhere else. (Including here.) Stuff that.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

there are filter plugins that will kill off 90% of the garbage if you're dedicated enough to add filter words and tags. You'll never get rid of all of it though. I personally don't tweet, but I do follow people that I admire/enjoy their thoughts. Also a few news feeds just to stay abreast of stuff.

kyrra 5y ago

100%, great take. I tried following some tech people I admire and hit the same issue and just unfollowed them. I now only use twitter for the sole-purpose of getting political/world news when I want it. But using it for anything technically interesting is dead to me.

hjanssen 5y ago

Im not sure that the apolitical stance many people believe to hold is such an apolitical stance. In fact, living in any state and taking part in any kind of society is political in and of itself. You do not get to take part in any community without having a political stance - being part of a community is communicating that you agree with the morals and values of the community and wilfully accept them - thats the basis and general agreement of a community, it's what differentiates a group of people from a community. Now, Im not sure that turning a blind eye to the consequences that this has is inherently wrong, that surely depends on what impact the concrete political/moral/ethical stance has, but I disagree with the notion that, really, anything is apolitical. In context, everything is political, and we have to live with the notion that anything we do has impact on other people, as long as the consequences of the the thing we are doing is visible to other people.

slibhb 5y ago
You think everything is political because you've failed to make a distinction between morality, culture, and politics. Politics doesn't have to do with "morals and values". It's not a political stance to have a birthday party for your 3 year old or pray in a church or a mosque. Your second argument is "everything affects everything else". Using that argument we can prove that we're all mass murderers for keeping our thermostats at 70 degrees. One reason this way of thinking is so useless is that it fails to single out actual murderers (i.e. the person who pulls the trigger).
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  I think it's blurry. Morals and values are very much at the heart of politics. It's what drives engagement & wins votes. One side views abortion as a moral sin. The other thinks that access to healthcare is a value and have a moral obligation to fight for the rights of women. There are a bunch of issues like that. For me right now my LGBTQ community is being used by Republicans as an election issue. An example where one side thinks (or pretends to in order to win votes) that it's some political issue, while I and many others feel like it's a direct attack on our lives akin to racism & racist jim crow era laws.

protomyth 5y ago

For a while, I resolved "OK, if anyone retweets this stuff, I will simply unfollow them" You can also turn off retweets for those people. Twitter does seem to have some idiotic take on what I want to see.

jahewson 5y ago

> the stance that everything is political Which is itself a political stance. It’s not a universal truth but a very narrow political ideology. Never mind that “political” is not a well-defined thing to begin with. If we can’t agree to neutral territory then one of the sides is going to have to win. Because you can’t bully your way to victory. We need more meetings of the mind and fewer meetings of unfalsifiable rhetoric. Fewer crusaders and more peacemakers.

TZubiri 5y ago

It's almost as if they become infected with a bianry search parasite and the vector is any 50/50 divide

kaitai 5y ago

I think everything is political, even code.... But the conversation Twitter fosters is not useful. I see people jumping on others for small mistakes or imagined slights, searching for inconsistencies ("On March 3 you said this about apples, on March 7 you said this about oranges -- why don't you have a CONSISTENT STANCE ON FRUITS YOU HYPOCRITE"), etc. And yes, it's so easy to comment from the sidelines; I see people sitting comfortably in Minneapolis or Miami criticizing a journalist tweeting about the refugee situation in Moldova. Folks try to have nuanced discussion on Twitter but it's not possible when it's so reactionary and atomized. I no longer tweet either. I go on Twitter to find interesting people to follow in other forums, not to talk to anyone. I am a silent tweeter, heh.

yodsanklai 5y ago

I follow exactly one person on Twitter. A scientist who I consider particularly interesting. And even then, I get a lot of garbage and political ranting. I realise how it can get entertaining and addictive, but I rather spend my time in a more fulfilling way. Also, there are so many narcissists there...

Arrivest 5y ago

sethd 5y ago

Blocking the source (not those retweeting) does work, it simply takes quite awhile to see results. Ultimately most of the outrage/cancel culture/ and other political tribalism tweets originate from a relatively small fraction of users. I’ve blocked thousands of users over the last few years and it’s working out great. It almost feels like the old days of using Twitter. :)

throwaway5848 5y ago

Gareth321 5y ago

>I know a lot of folks in my field side by the stance that everything is political, even code. Conveniently, these are people who want everything to be about their political values and beliefs, and anyone who disagrees is a fascist/nazi.

zirobi 5y ago

The formation of the statement is the problem. Try: > everything can be viewed through the lens of politics You wouldn't say "everything is geographical" because that would be absurd (just as absurd as "everything is political") but you could view most topics through the lens of geography if that was the hammer turning all your concerns into nails.