9 ms·
Bouncer: Block "crypto", "rage politics", and more from your X feed using AI
- wktmeow 6mo agoWhy, when you could just not use X though?
- kelseyfrog 6mo agoThe only thing stopping me from eating shit is the smell, taste, texture, and possibly of disease. But if all those where removed I'd be the first to chow down.
- simianwords 6mo agoThis is a clear example of purity spiral groupthink.
- kelseyfrog 6mo ago[flagged]
- simianwords 6mo agoIdeological capture be like
- jasonmp85 6mo ago[dead]
- bdangubic 6mo agothis is like telling smoker not to buy smokes? :)
- unselect5917 6mo ago[flagged]
- snag 6mo agoApple has only a 15-19% market share in mobile phones globally https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/apple-iphone-market-share https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/apple-iphone-ma...
- unselect5917 6mo agoWell google doesn't publish their ranking so we go with the data we have, not the data we want. Do you have secret unpublished play store rankings?
- pixel_popping 6mo agoWhy would you stop using X if it has valuable content at times?
- jackie293746 6mo ago[dead]
- hilariously 6mo ago[flagged]
- pixel_popping 6mo agoBut you are ok with Discord? :/
- hilariously 6mo agoI do not know about the nazis owning discord yet but I do not use it, I don't think the general zeitgeist recognizes is as a distinctly similar problem yet.
- piperswe 6mo agoI personally don't use either X or Discord, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's significant overlap between those who boycott X and those who don't use Discord.
- nailer 6mo agoNobody ‘knows’ this. It’s a silly thing to say.
- pixel_popping 6mo agoAbsolute non-sense and pure generalization, my mom use X and I doubt she is a "nazi", she isn't even from the US, seems that he has fallen into the propaganda machine.
- 6mo ago
- starik36 6mo agoThis would be great for Reddit - the king of rage politics.
- antonymoose 6mo agoAny social site inclusive of this one ought to have such a feature.
- celeritascelery 6mo agoAgreed. I am getting tired of half the HN posts being about politics. I come here to get away from that stuff, but it is becoming a greater portion of the content.
- hunterpayne 6mo agoLook at the number of responses on each article to see why that happens. Also, most articles aren't about politics. But the ones with lots of responses and discussion usually are. Network effect sucks sometimes...
- mh- 6mo agoI would mind far less if the political comments were only the political posts. I just avoid clicking into those. It's when I click into an interesting topic, and it's steered into being an offtopic retread of every other thread about US politics. The upvote/downvote system simply no longer works to squelch it as it once did, because there are enough people here who believe "everything is political" and therefore it's always "on-topic". That is their prerogative, but it has dramatically lessened my enjoyment and engagement on this platform in the last 5 years. And it's gone into overdrive in the last 6 months.
- jim33442 6mo agoHN posts are mostly not about politics, at least not on the top page. Sometimes a non-politics post ends up getting politics comments though.
- 6mo ago
- tantalor 6mo agoSimpler to just delete Twitter
- patrickmay 6mo agoI find that using Control Panel for Twitter (not affiliated, just a happy customer) to see only the Following tab in reverse chronological order makes X tolerable. There is no benefit to For You.
- bombdailer 6mo agoI find not using twitter to be the best solution.
- yabutlivnWoods 6mo agoThe only winning move is not to play.
- andyjohnson0 6mo ago[flagged]
- operatingthetan 6mo agoWhat about this one?
- z3c0 6mo agoThank you for the laugh. Some probably need to be reminded of Sam Altman's roots, as much I detest what he's done to the word "open".
- andyjohnson0 6mo agoThat would be the Sam Altman who left YC back in 2019? Or some other, more recent, Sam Altman?
- 73738488484 6mo ago[flagged]
- tonetheman 6mo ago[dead]
- rootsudo 6mo agoI'm amused at thinking of the other effects this can be used for, rebrand it as a tool like that copilot recall and point it with child privacy in mind for the general internet. or you know, require it for internet/computer usage for a very dim futuristic outlook.
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoI don't think that automated filtering on conditionals like "rage politics" is a good idea. At best, you're going to end up with a confusing feed that contains reactions to the outrage without the actual outrage that's driving them; at worst, you're going to end up systematically misinformed on political topics that people find outrageous.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- hunterpayne 6mo ago"you're going to end up systematically misinformed on political topics that people find outrageous." If you spend too much time on X, that's a given. The problem is that informed, nuanced, and factual takes don't drive clicks and are hard to fit in 140 characters. Long-form Youtube is a much better place to find those types of takes anyway. Generally, the shorter the content, the worse the take.
- jjfoooo4 6mo ago> you're going to end up systematically misinformed on political topics that people find outrageous. That sounds... fine?
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoI would emphasize misinformed, not uninformed. If Policy X has 30% of people politely supportive, 20% of people politely opposed, and 50% of people incandescently furious about it, you're going to mistakenly think it has majority support.
- unselect5917 6mo agoThis is exactly the reason I used to be almost exclusively an r/all browser back when reddit was worth using. I didn't want a curated feed tailored to my beliefs. I wanted to know what was going on. Then in ~2015 free speech was killed, and it seemed like every new feature added was one that increased censorship. Like post locking wasn't a thing the petty tyrants could do. Now they lock posts and sticky their midwit opinion at the top of the thread, and ban whole communities with racist biases. So I strived to be less of a redditor and quit completely when they killed Apollo & third party apps. No use for the site anymore. /rant
- Philpax 6mo agoAdding to the chorus: if you need to apply a solution like this, it's probably time to walk away from the platform. (Well, the right time to walk away would have been years ago, but...)
- api 6mo agoNetwork effects are stronger than we are. People are there because people are there.
- daveguy 6mo agoI know a bunch of people and companies who happily dumped the twitter cesspool. It has to be > 50% scammers and ragebots at this point.
- BadBadJellyBean 6mo agoAnd when you are not there you are not there. We are way too obsessed with missing a thing. May it be a popular figure or someone we know in person. The reality is that it's actually not too bad to miss things and most information still gets through. Especially the one that's important. You might even miss out on a lot of crap that is filtered out when it gets to you. I am happy on my personal Mastodon instance and occasional visits to HN. You might be too if you allow yourself to be.
- hunterpayne 6mo agoThe problem is that your definition of "crap" is probably a bit different from others. Everyone probably has a slightly different definition. Also, your feed is probably mostly stuff that was posted on X first and replicated over somehow. Network effect is real. That being said, there are clearly multiple active automated influence operations happening on X all the time. If Elon wants X to stick around, it would be in his interest to put a stop to those. The default feed is full of posts from those bots; that's also a big problem they (X) needs to fix.
- 6mo ago
- culi 6mo agoIs there a tool to undo the extra weight added to paying subscribers? Analysis shows premium subscribers end up with 10x as much reach on average than people not paying. Pay2Play was toxic enough on gaming, why would we want it in our social media?
- bytecauldron 6mo agoI feel like regex and curated blocklists would get you pretty far before needing an LLM to continuously read your feed. I'm wondering how successful the local options are, because sending your social media feed to an API that is also being used to serve you low quality posts your blocking is a pretty depressing ouroboros.
- pawelduda 6mo agoYou can also use "muted words" feature built right into X
- klntsky 6mo agoIt should also click "see less often" on every detected bait post. Heals the algo really well if you do that persistently
- ceejayoz 6mo agoOn Facebook, at least, the click seems to outweigh the feedback. I say "not interested" to a reel and get more just like it.
- Spooky23 6mo agoI get the ads about Warren Buffet’s (or other money celebrities) investment group or whatever. They are usually WhatsApp based pump and dump schemes for Chinese stocks. Facebook somehow can’t detect these obvious scams, but somehow they have no problem pushing them to me after I looked into it when a fried almost got taken.
- trog 6mo agoExactly my experience a few years ago (it not working is directly related to how little I use Facebook today). You might stop getting stuff from that specific page or account or whatever but you certainly continue to get related stuff.
- BLKNSLVR 6mo agoThe fact that you use the word 'persistently' seems to somewhat (or completely) undermine what your point.
- hgoel 6mo agoI'd like to just quit twitter, but unfortunately the other places devoted to discussing some of the hobbies I go to twitter for, are much more toxic (Reddit, 4chan etc). Simply being able to filter out everything unrelated to the hobbies I'm there for would be sufficient.
- none2585 6mo agoCould you expand on this a bit? I'm deeply interested in how one could make a not terrible social network and I'm curious what gets people so unable to walk away
- hgoel 6mo agoI'm into niche VTubers and other anime stuff. Twitter is pretty much the primary platform for keeping up with Vtubers (besides wherever they stream). The other platforms don't let you interact with or keep up with the vtubers directly, and often involve just mindlessly repeating the same joke, or they go the opposite route and take things so seriously that all discussion is stifled. With other anime stuff, Twitter is the easiest way to keep up with the Japanese side of things. Lately I've learned about tildes and while I haven't looked around much, it has me wondering if maybe invite-only forums with low barriers to entry (and low barriers to being banned) are the way to go.
- tonymet 6mo agoXtwitter’s own mute words feature is very good . And mute words supports TTL. LLM will have precision / recall issues too – no filtering system will be perfect. Cleaning up 90% for free is better than burning tons of tokens / GPU / battery to clean 95% (and suffer from false positives).
- camillomiller 6mo agoThen what shall remain?
- jim33442 6mo agoAI
- Uptrenda 6mo agoI get the idea but honestly asking: if you filter out stuff like this will you end up with a completely blank feed on x? To me it kind of just seems like we're all going to need to curate our own RSS feeds in the future. eg: real people who are insightful, rather than rely on any kind of algorithm.
- mh- 6mo agoNo, there's approximately just as much technical and interesting content on Twitter as there used to be. Lots of people left, lots of different people joined. It's just that this content is outnumbered some 100,000:1 now instead of the mere 1000:1 it used to be (ratios made up, but directionally correct.) From my point of view, HN is trending in that same direction. It's just that the ratios aren't nearly as dramatic.
- BLKNSLVR 6mo agoIt's the ratio that counts the most. You seem to be implying TwiX is getting an increasingly bad ratio. That would imply, to me, an increasingly limited lifespan for encouraging quality.
- jmyeet 6mo agoWhat I don't understand how difficult it seems to be for some people to simply ignore topics or people they don't like. If an algorithmic feed keeps presenting you with certain topics, it's largely because you're engaging with them. Isn't that on you? I don't use Twitter but I use Tiktok and you know what I do when I see something I'm not interested in? I scroll up. If it's someone who never has anything interesting to say, I just block them. And I never think about them ever again. I rarely see anything about crypto. I don't even think about it really. Go back ~4 years and everything on HN was about crypto this and blockchain that but that's how it goes. There are fads and, more importantly, there are people just trying to get their bag with their latest "acquire me please" startups. Actually, crypto just had a bunch of straight rug pulls too. And then there was NFTs... Anyway, I've worked for my Tiktok fyp. It's a constant moving target for the platform too, like these bot accounts that somehow get to 10K followers and then appear on your fyp with audio over a movie or TV show to get around copyright detection. I honestly don't know how they haven't solved that problem yet. All these platforms, particularly Twitter, put their thumbs on the scales about what gets distribution but for any platform with a block feature, this seems like a "you" problem if your feed isn't what you want. Also, "rage politics" in general just means "things I disagree with" whenever anyone talks about what they see on any social media platform. Block and move on.
- farfatched 6mo agoWhen I was on Mastodon, I followed a bunch of people for their tech expertise: FOSS, security, networking, Linux. They also posted about other topics where I wasn't interested in their commentary. Even when I agreed, I still didn't want to see it, because I went to Mastodon solely for tech. I had other sources for other topics. So I added a bunch of filters to exclude those posts. It worked well!
- 8593376393 6mo ago[dead]
- panstromek 6mo agoI will join the others and say you should just leave twitter: https://yoyo-code.com/you-should-delete-twitter/ https://yoyo-code.com/you-should-delete-twitter/
- xgulfie 6mo agoOh thank God I can still give Elon Musk more money and power but don't have to read about politics
- johnwhitman 6mo ago[dead]
- Animats 6mo agoDon't you have to pay Twitter to get programmatic access to a X feed? [1] The documentation mentions using the "Twitter adapter", which uses a paid API.[1] Using an unofficial client has been a TOS violation for many years now, since Twitter killed off TweetDeck.[2] I used to have an ad filter for Twitter, but gave it up a decade ago when they changed the TOS. [1] https://docs.x.com/overview https://docs.x.com/overview [2] https://cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com/content/dam/legal-twitter/site-assets/terms-of-service-2025-05-08/en/x-terms-of-service-2025-05-08.pdf https://cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com/content/dam/legal-twitte...
- hundson2020 6mo ago[dead]
- rchaud 6mo agoHasn't everybody already figured out how to do this with a Mute Word list? The topics and names that trend on Twitter are not exactly a mystery. Every post of that nature follows a predictable pattern of key phrases/terms plus stupid emojis in order to "go viral", and can be filtered out easily.
- dmix 6mo agoYou could also just be careful who you follow and constantly curate.
- rchaud 6mo agoThat doesn't work, regular people who aren't the audience for ragebait don't realize that quoting ragebait tweets with a sardonic reply is a positive signal for the algorithm to circulate that tweet even further. Mute is the only way to go.
- stevage 6mo agoThat's a ton of effort. And often I do want to follow someone for their tech content, I just don't want their politics.
- deafpolygon 6mo agoThen don’t follow them. That’s just encouraging their politics. I mean, vote with your follow.
- stevage 6mo agoI'm not saying I disagree with their politics, I just don't want to read it. But the same would apply even if I did disagree - you're just promoting further division.
- angoragoats 6mo ago"Promoting further division" sounds like a reasonable thing to strive to prevent, but I think the paradox of tolerance applies here. For example, DHH was a brilliant programmer who created Rails. I say was, because now he is a self-admitted white nationalist. I no longer care about his technical work or opinions, because if he has ventured so off-course so as to convince himself that white nationalism is worth supporting, I must necessarily question his judgment on technical matters as well. To tolerate his white nationalism and continue to promote and condone his work would be helping to further the spread of white nationalism, which I find abhorrent and unacceptable in any form. Trying to prevent further division is completely reasonable when you're talking about opinions like "we should have lower taxes" or "we should spend more money on schools." It is not reasonable when your political opponent literally wants to do genocide.
- errantmind 6mo agoYou can also get excellent results with User Scripts that connect to a local language model. 1. Run LM Studio (download the Gemma 4 model), which has a 'local server' w/ API. 2. Use a more powerful LLM to write User Scripts (Greasemonkey, etc) to do whatever you want on any website you go to. Instruct it to connect to LM Studio. 3. Classify and highlight posts / comments based on any criteria that suits you. Summarize, delete from the DOM, etc., Just have fun.
- budududuroiu 6mo agoThis might get me back to using X. I only want ML content, nothing else.
- bowserbrowser 6mo agoThere would be absolutely nothing of substance left on X without crypto and rage politics
- unselect5917 6mo agoAmerica and Japan have been discussing BBQ for about a week and. And the Japanese have just discovered ranch dressing. It's hilarious to watch. Russians recently joined in and, they're fuckin' hilarious in a way that only Russians could be: https://imgur.com/GaTnQk7.jpg https://imgur.com/GaTnQk7.jpg The people who hate Musk/X always out themselves by flagrantly lying about it/him.
- dwroberts 6mo agoIs this the X marketing team or something? You’ve posted about discussing BBQ with different nations twice in the comments here
- unselect5917 6mo agoIt completely took over twitter for like a week and it was endearing. I made this myself (with grok's help) to celebrate: https://i.imgur.com/MG9mUxW.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/MG9mUxW.jpeg If you're rejecting X out of hate for Musk, you're simply missing out on some really cool stuff happening. The BBQ thing a huge international thing. I learned that the Japanese have a term that translates as "food terrorism": pictures of mouthwatering food that you only get to look at, not eat. It was a bigger deal than even I'm conveying and honestly heartwarming.
- jackie293746 6mo ago[dead]
- HanClinto 6mo agoThis sounds delightful and wholesome. :D I think it's easy to lose sight of these pockets of mundane goodness, and I appreciate you highlighting them.
- sciencesama 6mo agoAI moderation / adblock is the future !
- steveharing1 6mo agoyea it could be the future
- ch_fr 6mo agoI would also recommend Control Panel for Twitter, easy to install on PC, and you can also have it for your phone if you use twitter via the Firefox mobile browser. If all you can see is the following tab, then any ragebait that gets in your way is much more actionable, simply unfollow or mute whoever got it on your feed.
- fortran77 6mo agoWhat makes X usable for me is the keyword blocking. You can also block posts that contain certain Emojis, including in user profile. This _really_ helps get rid of a lot of crap.
- QuadmasterXLII 6mo agohere I vibecoded an app to fix your twitter experience sudo cat 0.0.0.0 x.com >> /etc/hosts
- msarrel 6mo agoTIL: there are still people out there who find value in x even though when I log in my feed is just hatred and false info.
- deafpolygon 6mo agoI have an easier solution: just don’t use X. It does not have anything worth following, and useful content is minimal.
- ddtaylor 6mo agoX as a platform is dead. It's all bots and engagement farming. Just disengage.