Was JS Twitter itself toxic? Because if not I don't see why you wouldn't just follow the relevant accounts and not see any of the stuff the article talks about.
The problem is that you can follow lists of people related to, say, VueJS (how these lists are create I don't know, but they are more or less accurate), but you don't subscribe to their VueJs posts, you subscribe to their twitters.
Google Plus got this right in reverse, in that you could organize your people into circles based on your interests and then you could choose which circles to share any post with. If they had done it so that I could subscribe to you for either everything or just things about VueJS, than they would probably still be around.
In fact if somebody is trying to start a Twitter competitor, there is a space for a copy where you must select at least one tag for your posts and where I can then subscribe to intersections of tags and people.
It doesn't even have to be anything about politics, but Cpervia tweets about cryptography and FreeBSD. I have no interest in the latter, but I have to skip over the tweets that he makes because there is no good filter for them.
Now suppose It was somebody posting about compilers and upsetting pictures of aborted fetuses. In theory I could still skip those, but it would be far harder.
Yes, even JS Twitter is extremely toxic by my definition. But more importantly there is no group of people you can follow to keep the ratio of JS related content above even 10%. It’s not a reasonable way of following a topic.
I have had a simple rule to unfollow anyone who posts off topic, and honestly it works pretty well. A lot of people have accounts just for talking about whatever topic they are interested in.
It does mean occasionally unfollowing someone who has otherwise great content, but often it’s retweeted by someone else I do follow, and anyway - it’s worth the cost.
Same. I keep my Twitter feed extremely on topic of what I enjoy/want and it's a great experience as a result. Anything proud gets culled via muting specific keywords or unfollowing.
You cant filter topics, like I followed kenji from serious eats on twitter for food stuff but kept posting about politics. I guess he eventually quit and just posts food on instagram now.
Even if you could filter topics somehow, many users would do whatever to bypass the filters to get their political messages through them.
It would reach the point where not trying very hard to bypass the filters would make you liable somehow: "you, a JavaScript developer, should've tried harder to bypass the politics filters when you posted your pro LGBT tweet. What are you, an anti-Semite?"
JS is actually okay. Horrible, horrible language, but like PHP there's some decent stuff in it. The only bad things about JS (other than JS itself) are the "write everything in four layers of frameworks" (but that's more a webdev thing than a JavaScript thing) and "four billion node dependencies that re-implement JavaScript built-ins" (bad, but not "extremely toxic").
