Excuse my outburst, but I'm wondering when these social network algorithms are going to realize: I don't follow "interests", I follow PEOPLE . If you want to show users random news and gossip, then make a fucking news website already. It's like if you build a chatroom, except instead of simply showing things that people in the current room are saying as they say it, it mostly pulls in vaguely similar stuff that peopl…
Having said that, I do agree with another comment I saw here in that, if I am following someone in the software architecture space, I care 0% about their political tweets, and if I follow someone in the Formula 1/motorsports space, I really don't need to see their thoughts on golf.
Facebook worked initially because you were 'following' people you knew in real life, but having users siloed into very small groups according to real-life personal connections makes it hard to sell targeted ads. Hence all the expansions we've seen there (not to mention, of course, the tracking they do extra-facebook). Twitter meanwhile has always been in sort of a weird spot. You end up "following" people you have zero real-world connection to, based solely on their knowledge on a certain topic. But you end up also having to wade through everything they post -- what they eat, their bad memes, their product endorsements, whatever.
It works great for celebrity fetishism, okay for news and reporters (who tend to mostly stay out of non-job-related posts on official accounts), and fair to poor for everything else in my opinion. It's definitely the social network whose appeal I understand least. It just feels like a warehouse of people all talking very loudly at each other about random topics.