The best content and discussion comes from small groups of people with similar interests who aren’t using Twitter simply to fill time or to build their personal brand. Removing everyone else doesn’t take as much work as I expected, as long as you’re not hesitant to unfollow (or even block) those who distract from your desired timeline.

The mute function is also highly useful. I often add trending topics like GameStop or Bitcoin or Tesla to my mute list simply because I don’t need to hear everyone’s take or dunk on a popular topic.

Finally, taking breaks is important. If you can’t resist checking Twitter 5, 10, or 50 times per day then maybe it’s better being removed from your routine altogether. With a curated follow list, I don’t feel like I miss much by checking every other day or not looking on weekends.

It's also not even necessarily them. Twitter is enthusiastic in assuming that, because you're engaging with one person, you must also be interested in what they're engaging with.

My efforts to have reasoned debate with one person in my life who was becoming more and more aggressively MAGA (prior to some rather extreme takes on... well, several different incidents) did not in any way equate to having even a remote interest in being flooded with content from Ben Shapiro or Turning Point USA, just because she happened to give it fake Internet points.

I gave up on her Twitter well before I gave up on her as a person for this exact reason.

Create lists and unfollow everyone. This way you only get the content you want.

on one hand it's exciting to see the thought process of another person (who often doesn't realize they're giving you an alpha-preview release of their latest brain farts). But it gets tedious quickly.

I got constantly sucked into discussions in the past simply because it's too easy to hold myself back. Now I consume twitter without an account either using nitter or directly browsing some good lists of people I used to follow.

Don't want to be that kind of person? Better make sure you are not consuming that kind of stuff. It starts to come out unconsciously if you are not careful.

I remember one case in particular where the guy was a genius at posting niche Middle Ages history and then every other tweet became political and I was so sad, because I absolutely loved his content.

As an a-political person who tried hard (but failed occasionally) at keeping my stuff a-political or othwise I’d start a new account to be political because my main one was tech stuff.

Twitters biggest failure was the lack of tagging and filtering options it provided. The History Genius could have tagged his polical tweets as #political and Twitter could have an option to follow someone except their #political ones. Just like following without retweets.

The solution is obvious to me. But clearly Twitter founders love the political stuff or something. So I just chose to avoid Twitter at all costs unless linked to it or researching a topic, with the odd time I got dragged into it.

And I think this probably is a byproduct of the "attention economy" where there has been an arms race for mindshare (I'd like to find a way to put that better but hopefully it's clear)

I think politics are work, when you're company is anything but small is nasty and taboo. And IMO a fireable offence when it gets to any level of harassing others for not sharing your opinion.

There are times and places for certain things and I strongly believe work isn't one for politics. Unless the work itself is directly political.

I've shared this opinion before on HN and had strong support, so I know I'm not alone. Especially among the introverts.

Another is that it's another moderation headache. Anyone can insert a hashtag for any reason, so anyone will. If you don't police it, it becomes useless; if you do police it, it becomes heavy.

It's not perfect, but muting key words like the names of a few popular political figures, names of political parties, and names of hotbutton issues will drastically decrease the amount of political content in your timeline.

I shouldn't have made it a hashtag.

there is no such thing

(:

Its not apolitical, just pettier politics

The sense in which people flame each other on HN about programming language opinions can be described as 'political', but it's also not directly related to e.g. current US politics.

Sometimes people like starting one with warning, I see it all the time. I don't see how Twitter can't create a simple filter like that.

I could go through all my tweets and instantly choose which category it goes in.

Judging from posts like these (and the other comments on this thread), most people have difficulty unfollowing others, which is a shame.

It is kind of how when decluttering it's not only more effort to clean than to ignore the issue, but it's also easy to fall into the mindset of "I liked/needed this thing that one time, maybe I'll like/need it again sometime in the future".

Doesn't that just leave you in an echo chamber of people who agree with you, and you don't learn anything new?

people who simply tweet too many times per day.

I'm with you on that one.

This was an interesting question. I have two thoughts here:

1. On unfollowing content that I don't disagree with: I got very tired of a lot of the dev content I was following on Twitter and how it was flooding away other stuff I follow. I unfollowed a TON of devs. It's not that I disagree with them, I just don't want to consume that content.

2. On unfollowing content that I disagree with: I don't think the issue with echo chambers is the echo chamber itself.

For example, I'm not religious. I can choose not to follow religious content and be in an "atheist echo chamber", and still, when encountering religious people talking about religious things, respect them. If I'm coming from a tolerant and accepting place, when I encounter them I can learn from them, hear them out, understand their point of view, but otherwise choose to live my life without constantly consuming religion.

Religion is very much in the social discourse, but this applies to other things too. I don't know much about Nepal. If I ever go to Nepal, meet a Nepalese person, or just get curious about it I'll respect their ways and be ready to learn a lot, in spite of not consuming Nepalese content.

I don't think its the "echo chamber" per-se that's the issue— it's the intolerance, and for some people the echo chamber just makes it worse.

If you follow an account that tweets (reliable!) information about space rockets, you will learn a lot of new things about space rockets.

Not everything on Twitter is a manifestation of a political viewpoint. There is a huge amount of worthwhile stuff that is just informative, interesting, beautiful, or fun.

Only if you choose to. "I don't want to be consuming" doesn't need to mean that you disagree with them, just you aren't getting value from reading it.

Further to your point: It's one of those paradoxes that while the marginal utility of listening to some people you disagree with is obviously high, the marginal utility of listening to any particular person you often disagree with is likely quite low. Most people are not particularly thoughtful or particularly articulate, but your best bang-for-buck will be to try and find some who are both.

Maybe google+ was right all along. Publish this to the octopus circle, publish that to the math circle, and this other thing to the politics circle.

Only if the GP does not want to consume expressions of opposing viewpoints.

The idea isn't to unfollow people you disagree with. The point is to curate your follow list to contain the type of content you want to see.

I enjoy reading different viewpoints, as long as they're presented in good faith and with a willingness to discuss them openly. I still follow a lot of people I disagree with.

I've also followed a lot of people with whom I agree, but I don't want to consume their endless Twitter dogma about the subject.

Shape the feed to the content you want to consume. If you want to consume healthy debate and alternate viewpoints, curate accordingly. The idea that the only way to break an information bubble is to let low-quality arguments from the other side flood your timeline is not true.

I also use a 3rd party client, so I'm not subjected to algorithmic chicanery in my feed. I mute widely. And I read it at most 2 or 3 times a day.

In general, I find it WAY more pleasant than FB. (I'd love to ditch FB, but for a number of logistical/community reasons that's just not feasible for me, so I try to minimize my interaction with it.)

(What I REALLY want is the old GEnie SFRT back.)

I feel kind of trapped following them :/

I tried using the "this tweet is not relevant" thingie but it doesn't do anything. I mean, this is a thing for which I would gladly have an AI-powered smart filter.

I tried this. You end up shedding a ton of follows and mostly end up with people who say nothing. Then a week later you like something that person says and refollow, then they say something again and get unfollowed.

I think fundamentally it's like the article says. twitter is just full of anger and paranoia. I can't say if it's twitter that creates this, but it certainly enhances. Twitter is the problem and quitting is your only option.

I have a politics list, a tech list and a couple more. If I want to catch up what’s going on in politics, I just check my politics list.

> The mute function is also highly useful.

This feature didn’t do anything for me. It still shows you tweets but muted (you have to click to see them). The FOMO in me makes me always want to click on them to see what I’m missing out on. I wish they would just completely hide them.

It's the difference between not watching NBA games because you're not interested in basketball, and refusing to watch the local news because "they have a (left|right) bias".

There is more content out there competing for your attention than you have time in your life to consume it. Rather than letting twitter's default algorithm feed you the most "engaging", OP is saying a more mindful approach works for them.

Moreover, communication seems less hostile and more nuanced when we aren't forced to discuss everything with everyone at once. That is why more focused communities like this one seem to be more enjoyable to use.

I follow on twitter:

- A group of museums and people who work on Roman ruins in the UK and post a lot of ancient history content

- Local news reporters in beats I care about

- A few tech journalists and “celebrities” or podcasters

- Cat and dog video accounts

- Some money people

- Baseball related stuff

I do not follow people I know on Twitter and haven’t logged into Facebook for years. The magic of Twitter is that you can purge content you don’t want to read very easily. I actually have family involved in politics... they never ever want to talk shop, ever. There is nothing more vapid and boring than yakking about political bullshit.

If you think you are in a bubble about politics because of your social media friends, seriously get new friends or mute anyone who talks about how great their guy is. It will measurably improve your life.

> not everyone who tweets agressively is toxic.

This doesn't matter.

It's about controlling what kind of energy you let into your life.

Negative energy needs to go.

The good thing about it, is that I only listen when I want to listen, and IF I want to listen.

Social media, slow and steady, absorb you into giving, increasingly, more time to them. Either by creating an echo chamber, or creating passions, promoting things you love/hate. Anything to get you hooked more.

Majority of the people do not filter/reduce the alerts on their phones. Good luck working on a project when you get 10 beeps per hour from Twitter, CNN, BBC, FB, IG, YT.

Time and Attention.

The toxicity is rough, though. It exhausts me on big subreddits, too -- it's impossible to have conversations with anyone because the focus is on "dunking" people for the benefit of other readers. Like anything else reddit, it gets better the smaller you go.

I find this is actually true on Twitter, too. I've had some positive interactions in the replies under a @patio11 tweet with 120 likes. But any moderately popular tweet is just a shitshow.

Twitter (and Reddit, and HN, etc.) are sort of pretending to be conversation-software, when really, they're tiny blogs; by and large, you don't write replies for the benefit of the person to whom you're responding, you write them for all the people who you know are going to see your reply. That's the source of so much of the toxic feeling, IMO, but it's also the entire value propositon: come see the interesting (or funny, or infuriating, or horrifying) back-and-forth of internet strangers!

Maybe the toxicity can be eliminated or mitigated somehow, but I really think it's part-and-parcel with the format of "public conversation."

God knows I'm part of the problem; I write between 1 and 10 HN/reddit comments every day. It's an addiction! External validation feels very, very good. I try not to "dunk" people, but if there's one thing the internet has, it's no shortage of idiotic comments, and it's hard for me not to take a condescending tone when someone's talking about how women don't deserve to play videogames or how Joe Biden wants to eat babies or whatever.

I guess the best you can hope for is a community spirit that encourages thoughtful conversation and discourages shit-talking. And I think that's where Twitter, by and large, really fails. Twitter culture at large is so, so based around "look at this dumb shit this idiot said! aren't they stupid?" It sucks, and it absolutely warps people like the author says.

I wonder if he still would or if the amount of spam hitting public figures from every direction is so overwhelming that they can't possibly respond to it all. And I wonder how much of the "responses" you get from blue checks on Twitter is really them and how much is a hired social media manager running their account.

I'm not sure where this leads but it can't be good.

You can see everyone else is constantly tweeting about how awful the Capulets are - your friends mostly aren't, but they're retweeting people who are. You remember one time you expressed some doubts about something the Montagues did and people you don't know turned up to tell you off. You think the Capulets might actually be right about something this one time, but you don't dare say it.

Private conversations give you more room to be wrong, to be uncertain, to be curious, to be uninterested. On Twitter you always have an audience.

To get noticed everything has to be larger than life and this tends towards hostility and partisanship.

Observations: I know longer expend energy thinking about the terrible state of discourse on twitter, the sanctimony, bad faith, etc. Also, my thought patterns seem to be changing, my brain feels like it has “spare capacity” and I find myself starting new hobbies. Just anecdata, but I am certain I am calmer and less worried about twitter destroying humanity!

I think it's super cool to be able to interact with different people doing interesting things (a little like HN, but it's easier to remember who the people are where as on HN I never remember 99% of the usernames in threads).

If you want to be extreme about it, you can put everyone in lists and then this won't happen. You can also use a third party client that doesn't do this.

My main Twitter complaint is the ads. There are so many and they suck. I'd much rather have Twitter premium that removes the ads.

There are no ads in third party clients such as Tweetbot.

Are you using the reverse chronological timeline? That's the only way to fly.

There are people that are very good friends of mine in Real Life, but their Twitter profiles show a completely toxic persona. This doesn't happen with their other social media profiles.

TikTok on the other hand shows up higher more "feel-good" content which is why it's the only social media app I have installed on my phone.

I don't know toxic people on twitter behaving the same on other social networks.

Twitter is so because it is designed to encourage arguments (to generate "engagement") and you can avoid it.

They tell you when your tweets are reported even if no action is taken, just to make you mad that people are reporting you.

They tell you when someone blocks you and you can't visit their twitter anymore even though you can if you log out.

Who would build a system like this unless they wanted to fuel drama?

* assuming that Twitter is mostly toxic

* or that avoiding toxicity isn't mental work

What is it where I'm wrong, and if so, why?

Not to pick on it but compared to curated reddit / twitter, I found it very hard to find anything interesting on discord I kept jumping from server to server.

I get a lot more value out of forums about a topic, or HN, or groups of friends I already know. Facebook groups on my hobbies, etc. Joining/participating in "private" (but open to anyone) groups rather than broadcasting outwards to all and getting engagement through shock/clickbait type content.

That doesn't mean what works for me has to work for you, though, and of course it's without getting into how problematic one platform's LEADERSHIP might be versus another.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939

I don't have a solution. But it's a real problem.

Even though cancel culture is probably overreacting, I'm not sure if there is another way than to get rid of the toxic loud minority.

I'm a mod in a subreddit that has a very toxic circle jerk sister subreddit. Like "jokes about the recently died father of one of the persons the main subreddit is about" bad. Some people frequent both subreddits and while they are just behaved enough to not be straight banned in the main subreddit, their behavior in the circle jerk would well justify a perma bann.

In my experience there is no reasoning with certain persons. Even if they seem reasonable 80% of the time, the 20% completely destroy any basis for normal discussions. There's a latent sentiment that creeps into every discussion if you don't remove these persons. Even if they haven't shown their bad side in the main subreddit.

I used to run my own BBS back in the dialup days. Even then, the problems would be recognisable to a modern forum mod.

The only workable solutions I've found are that the more focused a board on a select number of topics, the easier it is to effectively moderate in a humane manner, and that it is impossible to rules-lawyer your way to success. In the end, you have to spend significant brain-time evaluating behavior on a case-by-base basis, and be willing to ban, listen, and revise in equal measures. It's hard work, and generally unappreciated.

In my special case, we have a very heterogeneous audience because we are not mono thematical. It is quite problematic if you have people coming together who have widely different expectations.

> and that it is impossible to rules-lawyer your way to success.

I agree. Never do this. The rules will always be used against you, regardless of how detailed they are. And discussions about rules take up so much time. Keep them short and concise but also make clear that they are not set in stone. You will need leeway anyway.

> In the end, you have to spend significant brain-time evaluating behavior on a case-by-base basis, and be willing to ban, listen, and revise in equal measures. It's hard work, and generally unappreciated.

The "significant brain-time" is a problem. You are outnumbered and then fighthing and debunking bullshit takes much more time than producing it (the Trump tactic).

For my case, I came to the conclusion that being nice 80% of the time is good enough. Save the 20% evilness for the notorious cases and you can cut down a lot of mod time. Educating newbies is a different matter but for regulars, I started to warn them one time and afterwards I start temporarily banning in a fibonacci like manner for every subsequent temporary bann. Most get it then or even leave before I have to perma-bann them.

Basically, you make a strawman argument: rather than arguing whatever point your opponent was claiming, you make something up and argue against that instead.

But since you're arguing on the internet, you can always find some dipshit somewhere who actually supports the insane thing you made up. So you turn to your opponent and say "look at what your side believes!"

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...

I've never been hooked on nicotine or similar, but toward the end of 2017 a game (Simcity Buildit) dug deeeeeeeeep into my soul and for the first time in my life I had to aggressively quit something like that cold turkey.

First I should say: It's a great game and really fun! (HA - I know I sound like a pusher...) I didn't spend any money on it. But man did I spend brain cycles and time on it. A few specific game dynamics really get their hooks into you - this concept of mini game-within-a-game "tournaments" which require your attention over a specific period of time (ahem weekends).

My "rock bottom" was two things: I was on a long drive from LA to SF and I had my girlfriend open up the app to complete a few time-sensitive tasks for me while I was driving. There I was explaining "ok now swipe this. Drag it there. Great. Now do the same on this other thing. Ok thanks love!".

The second was that a common strategy in the game where you start a second instance on a different device to mine certain resources (it was called a "feeder city"). So there I was on any given Friday night sitting on the couch with my iPhone AND iPad open, swiping away.

One day it struck me that there was no end to this cycle. There was no winning. There was just more building and more swiping and more hours to go down the drain, and I just realized I had to quit. So I hard-deleted the game from my phone and iPad right in the middle of a weekend mini-tournament and never looked back.

In the days following, I had very regular twitches and urges to go back. "Just one more"....I realized this was real addiction. Luckily it passed after a few days. But wow - what an eye-opener for me.

It's really well-made. My biggest knock on it is that it's a typical "milk as much money as possible out of the user" game, so you never know which mechanics are truly random or which ones are set up to hack your psychology. Some of the nags/alerts wear on you. I also wish it was a bit more optimized for aesthetics (no diagonal roads!).

But the UX is extremely good. The visuals are nice. The contests and general gameplay goals are engaging and fun. It's 4X-like, with that "one more turn" vibe and the need to balance multiple goals.

So you think “oh I just saw those!” And keep spinning the slot machine wheels of the marketplace. And then when they DO finally appear, that little dopamine hit is all the sweeter :)

I see this alleged all the time, but a part of me is convinced that it's a trick of the mind. But I don't know, and that's what's frustrating. Even if they don't pull the rug out from you, they could do so at any time and I'd never know it. Not great!

I recently blogged about that [1]. It's in spanish, but Google translate does an acceptable job with it.

[1] https://blog.jazzido.com/uncategorized/2021/02/12/mejore-su-...

HN is open discourse, focusing on respect. At least to me.

Hacker News aggressively moderates to remove the most abrasive types of shaming, but you can still shame out-groups here, provided you do it civilly. See any thread about managing developers: At least one person will go on a rant about how managers are empty suits who do nothing useful and just get in the way while extracting rents in the form of cushy compensation packages.

That kind of generalization is also out-group shaming, it just doesn't look like a bunch of misogynists complaining that there are too many women in tech demanding equity.

(I'm in no way saying that just because Twitter has shaming, and so does HN, that the two are equivalent. They aren't even close to equivalent, because these things are not binary. But I am trying to point out how toxicity can be hard to judge from within a community.)

She's the best paid person in her sub-orga. We're definitely lucky, but also the woman-vs-man topic isn't relevant at all here. We (as a company) are just looking at skill in all aspects, and she's good in most of them, as am I in a different subset.

She also has a twin-sister. She works in a different company, different federal state, and she earns a bit more than my wife - and she also doesn't care at all about the shenanigans happening, she's just doing what she likes and is good at. If you don't believe me I'll create an email alias you can mail me at and we'll get into touch.

Yes both of them have been humiliated, and this is what we should work against. But they have proven theirselves, and they have had support from co-workers, and instead of always putting blame on whatever, we should put focus on supporting good people, regardless of gender. This is so much lost.

I quit, and I found myself lost when I picked up my phone, like a lingering habit (I see someone mentioned it being similar to quitting smoking).

On reflection, I think the reason I felt an obligation to keep up with social issues etc, was because I was using my real name (ironic that this HN account is also my real name!). I felt like I had to show I was caring and keeping track of it. I do wonder, if I create an account without my real name, I can just use it how I like, and maybe it will be a different experience.

I don't think this is necessary. A lot of people tweet about purely "professional" subjects and never tweet about social issues. If you stick to that, your followers will know what (and what not) to expect.

Ironically enough I use uber under my real name and I'm fine, but everyone I know how uses their real name in social media has had problems.

The Daily Mail is a fairly good source of 'fury' (a term they use a lot in their headlines).

Twitter's design is extremely naive, that design leads to rampant toxicity and misinformation, and then they surprised_pikachu.jpg. For example: no matter how you interact with a post, you will boost it. So if you say something horribly toxic that incites outrage and reactions, Twitters dumb blind algorithm goes "NICE! Engagement!" and goes off to show that tweet to more people. Facebook does the same thing; every news article posted on Facebook has the most toxic comments right at the top.

These sites have designs that are not expressive enough, but they think they can get away with throwing ML algorithms at them; it does not work, and we end up with toxic cesspools.

But these features are also why it's so popular with celebrities, which is Twitter's unique selling point, so it's not like they can just change it up either.

It's been more than a year since I quit Twitter and the likes. I can't stress enough how good it feels to not have constant stream of mental hazard. I decided to rely on my whim to collect information using my own filter bubble (something I like to term as "information mindfulness"). I feel: as digital platforms are growing and evolving, with everyone inside the echo chambers [0], it's better to practice this "information mindfulness".

I am sure it depends on your own usecase for social media like Twitter; how you're going to sink in the platform. For me it didn't work. I hit my mental limit (finally after a long time).

[0] - At this stage, almost everything feels like an echo chamber.

I still use Twitter mostly as a write-only thing if I want to drop off a blog post, another place to reach me, and occasionally check my timeline. Lists are also a recommended feature.

With that said, I think Twitter has a bright future. Why? Because it’s always been a good way for celebrities to reach people. And in a world of Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, Tiktok etc there are more mini-celebrities than ever and they all use Twitter for any quick thought blurbs. So they’ve really benefited by the expansion of what constitutes a celebrity.

My mom also uses Twitter, never tweets, but just follows news outlets. And it’s the only social media she has as a privacy-oriented person which is interesting.

Like most social media apps, if you don’t use it compulsively and control how you use it, there’s usually at least some value in having a presence.

The biggest problem is viral misinformation combined with a focus on people that are "good with Twitter". Someone with a bunch of followers tweets something like "the sun rose in the north this morning" and if you respond "that didn't happen and it couldn't have happened because science" you'll either be ignored, they'll be offended and block you, or they'll start cursing at you and all their tweets will be liked and retweeted.

The reason I used Twitter back in the day was to find out what was happening in the world and to interact with others. These days there are too many that think a big follower count means they can tweet stuff that's wrong.

Then there's the other stuff where you have to see someone called out for calling women brilliant (yep, happened today).

Try as I might, I can't return my timeline to what it was, and I can now go a week without looking at it and I don't miss anything.

To them, their timeline is "curated" to remove "toxic" elements, which makes their filter bubble more pleasant. Then they blame you, even in this very thread, for finding these interactions useless. That isn't misinformation, that is a point of view.

The biggest problem is that Twitter- and Mastodon-style blocking make it impossible to engage with people who need to be engaged with, regardless of why (whether informational or emotional).

Who needs to be engaged with? On Twitter, you choose who to follow. Why in the world would you have an obligation to listen to random strangers who want to argue with you? Imagine if you were in a restaurant talking with your friends, some stranger sitting at another table overheard you, and then decided to come over and butt into the conversation? And when the stranger is told to go away, they complain "You're talking in a public place where people can hear you, what did you expect?" And somehow the stranger feels that they're wronged by that.

I don't understand your reply.

> Twitter is a public place. I don't understand your analogy.

The point is that in order to meet other people, you have to go out into the public. But that doesn't mean you want to meet with and talk with anyone and everyone out in the public. It's a terrible tradeoff if the only way you can get pleasant social interaction with others is to also suffer unpleasant social interaction with strangers who want to argue with you.

None of us designed Twitter. We have to take it as it is. Twitter is public, yes, but that's not an excuse for you personally to debate with every stranger you happen to disagree with. That's not on Twitter, that's on you.

Have you considered that the problem might be you, and "Someone is wrong on the internet" repliers are super tedious?

But I do want to thank you for a perfect demonstration of how misinformation spreads. Folks like you don't even care that the content of a tweet is factually incorrect, and in most cases, it's made up so they can get likes and retweets. The post-truth world is alive and well. And, unfortunately, profitable for some.

Which misinformation did I spread?

> Folks like you don't even care that the content of a tweet is factually incorrect

That's quite an interference.

Also, nothing sells like negativity and sadness. It's highly engaging material. In my opinion they're just selling the same old goods. The only difference is that the cost of goods is now you.

I'm using https://fraidyc.at/ in Firefox to follow any Twitter accounts I still care about and it works great, even better than Twitter honestly as all tweets are now chronological and I can segment accounts based on how often I care to view their updates, tag them to organize them, etc. Next, I need to move all my YouTube subscriptions to Fraidycat or similar, but, other than that, I'm done with modern social media (deleted Facebook in 2016). YMMV, but the less I use modern social media the more my quality of life and mental well-being have improved.

I say "modern" since social media has really been around since email and it's really only the more recent incarnations that have gotten so toxic. Communities like HN and some sub-Reddits are actually still quite enjoyable.

I’d really like to find something similar for Instagram. I want to consume that without creating an account, but haven’t figure out how.

And FYI, per its website, Fraidycat says it does support Instagram, although I can't vouch for the experience as it's not a platform I use.

To quote WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play."

For the odd occasion when I do log on to Twitter, my rule is simple - if I see a tweet that annoys me or I just don't like, then I block them. I have no wish to spend any time or energy even allowing that stuff around me.

It can also be a toxic place that puts you in a bad head space and wastes time. A ticking time bomb that can blow up your productivity at any moment.

I recommend aggressively muting / unfollowing to keep your feed clean. Anything offensive / negative deserves an unfollow. Irrelevant stuff deserves a mute.

For me, ratio of programming posts / other posts should be 10:1. Also mute people that retweet too much.

Having a follower strategy is also important. For me, Twitter is a part time job, similar to open source work. It's not "fun".

yeah, sure, it can be gotten around, but

misinformation or sensationionalist crap shared so easily, so cheaply, has a lot of unintended consequences.

Well, that's a quote tweet.

And, crucially, while it feels nearly as bad when this happens to you on twitter as when it happens in real life [0], it doesn't feel as bad to the perpetrator as it does in real life.

It's baked right into the UI.

[0] In fact, it actually feels worse, often, because if an account with a lot of followers does this to you, then the website will be unusable for you for at least a day, as hordes of people fill up your mentions with vitriol.

"Someone I don't like did something I don't like and I'm so angry and you need to know about my anger because that will make a big difference to absolutely no one."

I've kept my profile/account up, but I've stopped participating and nuked all but a handful of tweets that I thought may be a reference for folks, and didn't want to turn them into dead ends. It's too hard (or requires too much effort) to avoid the toxic stuff that makes Twitter a hellscape. I'd like to go back to the days when people didn't think everyone else was interested in them airing their bullshit to the world.

it leaves it to the most radical.

and why is that a problem?

because there is a pipeline from Twitter into the real world, especially via journalists and politicians who live on there.

what's the answer?

I'd love to hear ideas! but I think either we need many, many more reasonable voices on Twitter (an uphill battle, given the platform rewards and optimizes for outrage) or the pipeline needs to be severed or replaced. the latter is probably the way to go, but how?

But instead, we will suffer through algorithmic and legislative harrassment because the user is always the problem, not the corporate marketeers.

One approach is to leave twitter to the addicts manipulated into rage and just waiting. Either people will “develop antibodies” to twitter (PG) or it will destroy itself.

As others have pointed out, the real world institutions can solve the problem by breaking the connection between ML-induced outrage and their policy decisions. You shouldn’t feel like you have to take that on yourself, but I guess if you liked that idea then you could campaign for it.

If you stay on twitter you might improve the average level of discourse, but don’t overestimate your ability to resist the feedback loop that will constantly be trying to find new ways to trick you into engagement (and most of the time, enragement). You’re only human and it’s relentless. It doesn’t seem very sophisticated but even a random search algorithm will work given enough tries. You’ll also be legitimising twitter, which is questionable because they are knowingly creating this problem (disclaimer: I’m on twitter).

Regulation of social networks is on the way, twitter probably peaked with Trump, and I think you also have to think about opportunity cost, eg arguing on twitter vs building something that improves the world.

It's been done. For example, app.net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net I deleted my Twitter account and joined ADN. But not many followed that example. Most people stuck with Twitter, ADN never reached "critical mass", and it eventually shut down.

I don't think this is a technological problem. You could say it's a marketing problem. The critical mass is essential to a social network. ADN didn't get it. Mastodon hasn't got it. Twitter has it, Facebook has it, and it's just hard to compete with that.

Yes I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. Perhaps App.net really was better, that's great - it means we know how to solve the problems of twitter (given I haven't heard exactly how it was better, that makes me sceptical).

But I think what you mean is _replace_ twitter, which is not what I was getting at. That is not just a tech or marketing problem but a business problem. I believe that's possible too. But the skillset required is probably outside of the average HN member, so I was tailoring my comment for a tech person.

Another way tech people can contribute is making chrome add-ons that improve twitter, demonstrating how it can be better.

Again, that's separate from launching a company.

ADN was a subscription service. The common expression is always true: if you're not the customer, you're the product.

There's a false implication here that ADN was better than Twitter but failed only because Twitter's business model is worse but lucrative. I think that's really not true. If you could build a product that people liked more, even if you made less money you'd still win.

I want to be able to choose which facet of a person I'm interested in, and which not. Instead, Twitter proposes the "all or nothing" approach. Either you follow everything, or nothing. No wonder we have strong social polarization and social bubbles.

I tried to follow experts in a field, but the content was 90% about things NOT in their field that I don't care about. The algorithm drives toxicity in a way that is ALSO true about (say) Facebook news article comments; however, my usage of Facebook is not to consume THAT content, but to consume the ACTUAL content of my ACTUAL friends. I'm not "important" enough on Twitter to get any engagement, which I don't really care about, because I'm not trying to be a personality or an influencer, or overuse hashtags for attention and clicks. But then on those rare occasions when you WOULD get value from a large circle, you don't have it.

Facebook's drive to require "real names" some years ago, for what it's worth today, has also made it more "familiar. And I'm seeing my friends' content, and, at worse, their off-color or vaguely toxic friends. Some of that stuff sucks to see, but it's far better than the algo-driven firehouse of content from random people I get on Twitter.

And on Twitter and IG, the people who I DO know that I follow, are generally a subset of IRL friends, and I'll probably see their content on FB. And anyway, half of them are using generic made-up monikers that change each week and I can't keep track of, or don't care to.

Twitter has posting tools for that which could be better, but they exist, are simple, and are widely used) with hashtags and mentions.

What it doesn't do is surface a UI that makes it convenient to set up a list of such channels to view and to set one as your default channel instead of the basic feed.

That is, as I understand, a common tool of third-party clients, though.

I think this is one of the bigger factors when people choose to quit social networks, even if they don't realize it explicitly. There's such a "hustle culture" to get likes and favorites that it really warps what you can post. You can't really be vulnerable on a social network because it either gets ignored or interpreted as another hustle ("You got this!!!") because the surrounding content from everyone else is "Look at how great I am!". YouTube creators have to explicitly say "Please like and subscribe!" but that's implicit and pervasive on Twitter and Facebook by their very nature.

They censor you from your own opt-in audience unless your content is clickbaity enough and benefits the platform's own advertising metrics. You can only ever be a sharecropper on censorship platforms, no matter how successful you become.

I had >20k followers after more than a decade on Twitter, and I deleted. Now I use an email mailing list, and 100% of the people who want to see 100% of the things I send.

Fuck censorship.

There's a whole thing around censorship not applying to private platforms, but even if you argue that the word "censorship" applies to a private entity moderating the content it publishes with its own money (like Hacker News: It definitely moderates content), the thing you describe is still not that kind of "censorship."

Showing or not showing your tweets based on Twitter optimizing for engagement and advertising is not like a government deciding that nobody is allowed to criticize the Dear Leader.

It's actually like a grocery store that promises to stock your product for free, but you aren't Coca-Cola, so you get shitty shelf space and positioning, until you either pay up for shelf space, or build enough demand for your product that the store decides it can make more money giving you better positioning.

Twitter also moderates content in a way that has nothing to do with engagement and making them money. But if you give someone free content, you have to accept them deciding how they feel like monetizing that content.

If you don't like it, write a blog.

Twitter misleads you into believing following someone will deliver you 100% of their content (and similarly, that someone who follows you will see 100% of your content) while that's not actually the case.

It might not be censorship, but it's still a terrible move, and frankly a sign of a defective product. The whole point of Twitter is to "follow" accounts you're interested in - if the tool can't do this with 100% reliability it should be considered as broken.

As a user, I don't care for it much, but in no way is it "defective." It does what it does, and if we don't like it, it's our obligation to make sure the door doesn't hit us in the ass on our way out.

The thing we have to understand is that we who want a microblogging platform aren't their market. They're not interested in people with 500-5,000 followers using Twitter to publish things that every one of their followers will see.

Likewise, they're not interested in people who want to just follow certain people and see 100% of their tweets. That's not their business model. Do I like that? No. But I'm not their customer, I'm the product they sell to their customers.

———

One thing I find very interesting about discussions like this is how closely they resemble discussions from the 1970s and 1980s about what computers were for. It seems quaint now, but people once said computers were for business, not games.

Then a younger generation came along and when all the old fogies died off or retired, gaming became a gajillion-dollar industry.

Now we get pronouncements like "That's not what Twitter's for." Obviously it is what Twitter's for, because millions of people are using it that way and are "Happy as Larry," oblivious to the fact that it used to be a microblogging platform, and if we ask 100 randomly chosen Twitter employees, exactly zero of them will say Twitter is defective and they're working hard to restore its value as a way to subscribe to everything people tweet.

I kind of feel like those of us who miss its microblogging origin are metaphorically members of an older generation than those who are happily Tweeting, TikToking, SnapChatting, &c.

They are not being transparent about your experience being manipulated for the purposes of generating engagement either. Most non-technical people don't immediately associate "contains ads" with "will use all kinds of nasty tricks to make you spend more time looking at said ads".

---

> are "Happy as Larry,"

Are they? The amounts of arguments and toxicity on that despicable website (enough to prompt highly-upvoted posts about quitting the website every so often) suggests they aren't?

> exactly zero of them will say Twitter is defective

They profit from the fact that it's defective, so of course to them it is not a defect, just like a printer manufacturer will tell you that ink cartridge DRM is not a defect, or some smart juice press manufacturer will tell you that its online-only requirement and juice pack DRM is also not a defect.

You have something there that applies to all of social media (and just because others do it doesn't make it ok). Algorithms are black boxes. Even if you make 100% sure I read a disclaimer explaining that the timeline is curated and algorithmic, I still will never know what I'm getting and what I'm missing.

The lack of control and transparency is abhorrent to a certain type of person, and you and I are probably those kind of people. But there's a vast world out there that simply. doesn't. care. Even after we explain why they ought to care.

Compare and contrast to walled gardens like iOS. There's a certain type of HNer who talks about iOS the way we're talking about Twitter. And yet... Many, many people are happy with an opaque system deciding which apps they can install, which apps appear on the front page of the app store, &c.

It can be very frustrating, but there it is. People like Twitter, and no amount of explaining why they shouldn't like it will change their minds.

There's a phrase for this: "Defective by design." Meaning, what we the observer consider to be a harmful quality of the product is not an accident or oversight, but a deliberate choice.

I say similar things about Slack's iPad client. It's defective by design.

Likewise, web sites that choose not to be accessible are defective-by-design. If you ask their product manager, the response will be, "Accessibility is not a priority, and we can live with people who need accessible web sites doing business with someone else."

Of course, it's implicit in the phrase "defective by design" that this kind of defective is not exactly the same kind of "defective" as the product not doing the thing its creators designed it to do, or not doing the thing that their target market expect it to do.

This is a very interesting point, to which I will say that people who complain or praise any product are always the vocal minority.

As I alluded to in another reply, we regularly get impassioned posts and comments about what's wrong with iOS on HN, and yet we know for a fact that many, many, MANY people are happy with their iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches.

Most people are fine not having any privacy, because they believe that they have nothing to hide.

The danger comes from making it impossible to publish unpopular things or publish anonymously, or making privacy impossible. There is a percentage of people for whom these things are not only important but essential, and when we close off those options then we lose the important aspects of society facilitated by those people. Those aspects benefit everyone.

We should pay very close attention to the complaints of those people, even if (or perhaps especially because) they are a minority of users.

And when my blog host starts hiding my posts? What then? Will you tell me the same thing?

I did write a blog. On Twitter.

I totally agree that you should have a direct channel (email) to your internet friends.

I think what Twitter can offer is to let new people discover you. Email lists don't grow that way on their own (people won't really forward your email to their friends, but they retweet your tweets and so their friends find you).

I got to 25% of my Twitter numbers (after 12 years on Twitter) within only a year or two of writing consistently on my own site. By those figures, I am discovered and followed more and faster on my own site than I ever was on Twitter.

YMMV, of course.

I had seen that claim before but I never noticed it. I subscribe to about 250 YouTube channels. They seem to appear in my subscriptions, in chronological order, as they're released. Are you referring to the homepage rather than subscriptions?

I'm not joking. I think the pathology that exists on Twitter has always been with us. But, years ago, there was only a "select" group of individuals who had their pathology amplified by Internet forums. Now, people who have no idea what a flame war even is — much less vi or emacs — go to war day after day. And there are millions of them, from every walk of life.

So, we've demonstrated flame wars are scalable. Hooray.

I use https://fraidyc.at/ Seriously, it's a thing. You can still follow public social media streams that you're interested in. It does RSS, Twitter, as well as the usual social media suspects. It's fast and perfect for avoiding getting suckered into a fight over nothing important.

If you really have to, you can fire up the real thing but this is a good way to get some of your time back.

And then I felt increasingly disconnected from everyone because of being stuck at home in a pandemic. And I started tweeting a little more, and getting pretty much nothing back. And then I had a bad interaction (nothing abusive, just confrontational), and I uninstalled the app from my phone.

I basically agree with everything in TFA. There is fun, interesting and sometimes even insightful stuff on Twitter. But people become warped. It's incredibly difficult to actually have a two-way communication on Twitter; people will misinterpret and assume the worst about everything you write.

And I was not immune to this effect either - I realised when I went back over the back-and-forth that had felt so emotionally charged at the time, that I had also been assuming the worst and replying without the open mind that might have led to a better interaction.

Problem 2 appears but I've noticed that muting works well enough to avoid it.

Problem 3 does not seem to be Twitter-specific but again blocking and muting seems to work for me as well.

My personal take is that something brings value to you or not depending on how you use it. Here is a quote from (https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/) that resonates with me: "The Explore Tab on Twitter is the most important newspaper in the world. It’s littered with celebrity gossip and exaggerated political drama — both of which yield a wide reach but incentivize empty content. And yet, as the Paradox of Abundance predicts, Twitter is also one of the world’s top intellectual communities. It’s the bedrock of my social and intellectual life. It’s a place to make friends, raise your ambitions, and connect directly with people at the top of their fields. And yet, most people use Twitter to consume information with no nutritional value."

1. Don't engage with or comment on political / social issues.

2. Don't install the app, set a time limit on twitter for all devices.

3. Follow other scientists with few exceptions.

4. Flag posts as irrelevant to me that express anger or controversial political opinions (I especially don't need to know anyones take on the Corona situation).

So far it has worked pretty well, I've got invited to give talks based on initial visibility I generated on Twitter. The open source software project I'm working on came to the attention / got engagement / retweets from relevant people. I reconnected with people that I met a few years ago and it even generated a few leads for job opportunities.

It is also really useful to keep track of scientific progress in a field and seminars / workshops I might want to attend.

The algorithm basically works against you though, even if you follow a few people that post / retweet a lot, they can come to dominate your newsfeed. I also came very close to engage with social / political content, simply because popular content that gets shown to you is often the most controversial. I ended up banning a few mainstream politicians, whose tweets kept getting retweeted by people I wanted to follow and that has solved the problem for the most part.

Overall so far twitter seems to create more opportunities than issues for me, but I notice that I spend way more time there than I initially planned.

The most recent head-scratcher was a SDE who has less than a year experience and nothing particularly interesting to offer the community (that I could tell) but has 16k followers and pretty high engagement (lots of comments, retweets etc...).

I'd love to know how people think about this.

I have written mistakes and apologized for them. It seems most of you accept that. Or maybe it's so heavily moderated i only see the stuff i'm allowed to see. I don't know.

I've tried Twitter a few days and decided it's not for me. Same with Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, forums, irc, etc. Some parts of them are quite useful, but for the most they are a very stressful environment to participate in.

In my experience getting followers is different than getting upvotes on reddit or hackernews. I think it's relatively rare for someone to see a single tweet which they think is so clever or informative that they must follow the tweeter, whereas it's common to upvotes (or like/favorite) such a comment.

The author's examples of accounts he follows "Patrick McKenzie, Zach Weinersmith, John Carmack" aren't famous for their tweets, but for blogging/start up advice, comics, and video games. In other words, if you're a notable famous person you can probably build a following on Twitter more or less as a product of your existing accomplishments.

I quit twitter years ago for some of the same reasons mentioned in this blog post, and I 100% agree with this quote. I would love a way to get at the good content from twitter without all the constant rage.

Does anyone know a good tool or way to get a much more curated Twitter experience?

> only shows retweets from people you follow

yes, but only shows you _select_ retweets from people you follow. You don't control that. Anything in your timeline that is curated can be used to manipulate you. And those retweets and likes are enough. Just wait until you see a retweet or like and think "but that's wrong / I disagree / waat" and try to catch yourself - you've been shown it for a reason.

Which reminds me, I need to clean up and publish my Huginn agent for posting to Mastodon/Pleroma. :)

(Nitter supports RSS, so you could probably use a regular RSS reader instead of Huginn/Pleroma. But I also configured some other, non-RSS, content in my feed.)

[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [1] https://github.com/huginn/huginn [2] https://pleroma.social/

Edit: The other big thing for me is just unfollowing/blocking people who post garbage, with no remorse. It doesn't matter if your feed is 95% gold, the 5% that isn't makes you not worth it.

The amount of your self you open up to public is the amount you lose from it and the more you put in the more you depend on and are addicted to the feelings that rise from using the service. You liked the feeling of being acknowledged by total strangers? Here, some more tweets for you strangers! You want to argue with me on this trivial subject? I'll prove you wrong!

On the flip side, you can still both use Twitter and keep your sanity, but to me, it just isn't worth it. Life is too short to pay attention to every little thing that one comes across to.

I don't really understand that kind of use of Twitter. For me, it is always a personal echo chamber that I hang out with a couple of like-minded people. I've never followed "famous" people, and I tweet in the same way as I post on HN... it's mostly just a monologue or "note to self" that is aimed at pretty much no one but myself. Naturally I don't have any addiction problem with Twitter or HN.

It definitely warps your view of the world because it's biased towards certain types of posts. It's terrible for any nuanced discussion.

For me, I just got sick of people getting upset over everything and feeling they had to retweet or share everything that was upsetting. I get it that the world is an awful place, but it's draining to just keep seeing negative post after negative post. Even not engaging in the hot topic of the day can make you seem out of touch. And yes, you can choose not to care to engage in those things, but you get addicted to the engagement of twitter, trying to get more followers, more comments, more retweets, more likes, and on and on.

After about a week, I realized something else: with lists only, Twitter is a lot less addictive. The contents are still interesting and useful, but the rage-building contents ("That's outrageous! I have to find out more!") that I'd get from the "normal" Twitter flow are gone.

I ended up checking Twitter multiple times a day to once every few days. I think I'm better off now, but I can't help but feel something is missing--and I do realize it's probably withdrawal symptoms.

I understand why lists aren't more widespread: it's way worse at feeding your outrage addiction.

That doesn't stop the inbound (or outbound!) barbs, complaining, and other garbage though. I've experimented with special tweets with replies disabled, deleting often, and leaving Twitter altogether. The last option of course is best for mental health but really impacted my ability to keep up with important developments in the Windows community.

(I explored going private, but that'd require I get 15k people to unfollow me as they are automatically grandfathered in. Or perform the block-unblock everyone trick via API. Gee thanks Twitter.)

I know several people that are glued to twitter, 50k+ tweets and more (for some reason they have mostly niche interests) thinking they belong and have friends, not realizing how toxic it actually is for their mental health. Something about twitters formula works very well for certain kinds of personalities, but what is it?

Other social media can be used in a similar way but the power of the @mention makes the "R value" particularly high on Twitter. If you say something in a podcast, a YouTube video, on a mailing list, or even in a HN comment, it's more likely to pass on by, even if it's something genuinely contemptible, than an innocuous but misinterpretable tweet.

You have to be kidding! It takes me months to earn a few points that I flush down the toilet the next day with some insensitive comment.

If worthy enough, you could even share the link to any one of them on Twitter. ;)

fwiw, Twitter actually has an awesome offline archive of your data available, so you can download that before deactivating your account and have a perfect replica of the interface to browse through it all.

I'm at a point in my life where I only care about major, materially-significant news events that could impact my health/safety and the safety of people I care about. I treat all other content as ignorable, nice-to-have at best.

Online participation needs changes to be more worthwhile:

1. Micropayments to participate.

2. Names, verified identities, and pictures. 37signals did a whole article about how people treated each other when there was too much anonymity.

3. Elimination of karma and other gamification. Promotion based on anonymous interest of others.

4. Automatic recognition of insults, crybullying, hate speech, dog whistles, and personal attacks.

5. 7 random people moderation.

6. Less deplatforming, more civil debating.

It seems to tackle the main concerns people have and really focus on the aspect of reaching hard to find niches.

[1] https://twitter.com/legaladvice_txt/status/11630943816389304...

I have tried to "reboot" my Twitter account several times during this decade, but my timeline eventually gets full of random political diatribes, passive aggressive tweets, and cliquey inside jokes. It's as if Twitter's algorithms were designed to amplify toxic content and hide thoughtful, assertive stuff.

How hard would it be to create a TikTok version of Twitter? (that is, a Twitter feed that generated without following anyone)?

Is this simply a matter of nobody having tried this? Or are the signals for text posts insufficient (vs. short form videos)?

Will no doubt end up in situations where people are complaining about _other peoples_ filter bubbles though.

I never understand why so many people in the tech field are fond of it, it's nearly impossible to have any meaningful conversions or real connections.

I’ve quit multiple times, for years at a time.

Returning is always completely jarring - like learning a language that’s 100% slang.

Nobody cares if you’re not there and you’re not going to be quizzed about it later.

The first time I quit, it was a year before even 1 of my followers even reached out to say, “hey haven’t seen you on Twitter in a while, let’s grab a beer”.

What you write in twitter only matters to your legacy.

It's a semi protocol now after all.

It all changed when Trump announced his candidacy for president. As a staunchly apolitical person, I found it painful to watch my corner of Twitter lose its mind. Formerly engaging and technically curious folks reverted to feverishly decrying each new political development and news story. Outrage became a badge of honor among techies.

I did what I’ve always done before: fell back on curation as a means of keeping order. At first I shunted specific individuals into a separate Twitter list. This worked for a while until it turned out that each visit to the “special” list caused me aggravation and disgust. After a few more attempts at re-shuffling my follows, I gave up and unfollowed everyone, renamed my account, and deleted the mobile app.

That was in late 2015. I haven’t looked back since then, although in the early weeks of my Twitter abstinence I found it difficult to keep away. But I persevered and never came back.

I believe I’m better off. I still have no IRL friends, and there isn’t a social platform on which I’m active. This may not be ideal, but it’s better than watching supposedly intelligent people descend into madness. I won’t have any part of that.

There is a genuine reason why they feel the way they do. We are at a critical point in world history whereby the global monetary system is deteriorating and the monetary policies which are currently in place are making life extremely easy for some people and extremely difficult for others. This bifurcation of society is an expected result of that.

If you don't feel that there are any problems in society, then you're probably on the 'easy side' because believe me, it's unmistakable when you find yourself on the 'hard side'; things change very quickly.

It kind of feels like big companies are using big data to shape people's online experience in radical ways. I literally went from getting tons of upvotes everywhere I posted to getting only downvotes. The content I produce is pretty much the same as it always was but it feels like the online algorithms must have put me in the 'contrarian' bucket and started manipulating my online experience in a negative way.

Also it's frustrating career-wise because I became much better as a developer over time but I'm getting less attention than I ever did. It also became impossible to get any funding nowadays; you literally feel like a social pariah even though you never did anything wrong.

Next sentence:

Some guy with 14k followers said something. [proceeds to "dunk" on dunkee not mentioned]

Never understood why would anyone want to hang out or even work there…

But recently I noticed, it is really important to tell people about your projects. No one else you get that much visibility. Thus, I have now started using it more

However, I have barely any followers, so I am not getting any visibility

If you think you are just on there to get news then you have already been duped. "News" is the pretty wrapper on the candy bar full of razors.

No good comes from crowd rage on tap.

The site's tagline should be "Meet your heroes!"

No matter what the topic, it turns peer groups into toxic waste.