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Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

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Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#71

Post by flotzam »

alkonaut wrote: post #38

There are two reasonable ways of using twitter 1) on a third party client like Tweetbot which just shows exactly the tweets of those you follow, in order, and nothing else. Nothing promoted, no ads, no trending keywords 2) Not at all I have no idea why anyone would want to use the official Twitter app or the twitter dot com web site. Once you have used a third party client (which behaves like the original Twitter!) y…

> Granted, you need an account to use a third party client

You don't: https://fritter.cc ("A privacy-friendly Twitter frontend for mobile devices")

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#73

Post by syshum »

toyg wrote: post #29
cloutchaser wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's truly amazing how despite all this twitter is as successful as it is. Something about _very important people_ sharing their thoughts in 140/280 characters really is the addictive nicotine of the human attention span.

It is suffering though. Hollywood has largely moved to Instagram. What is left on Twitter is musicians and politicians, with their toxic communities. If musicians manage to find a better outlet, Twitter will become unable to escape the stigma of being the cesspool of humanity.

I see mainly propagandists that call themselves "journalists" all in a extremely sad feedback loop of ever recursive propaganda cycle...

All using each other as a "source" to create a false picture of reality

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#74

Post by voldacar »

ltfey wrote: post #49
kybernetyk wrote: post #27

On my machines twitter got blocked. That's what happened to twitter. At least for me. It's a terrible website. Character limit leads to terribly shallow discussions that still need to be split into multiple posts. It's a dumb medium of exchange.

As bad as Twitter is, blogging is essentially dead. Wordpress's free product is garbage that now runs block ads, breaking the flow of content, and Substack is Y Combinator, which to a lot of people is a turn-off given the incubator's historical association with DVFs (domestic violence founders). Ultimately, the greatest danger to the written word is that, because it is so easily indexed, fascistic employers (pardon t…

>Substack is Y Combinator

wait till you find out about hacker news

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#75

Post by sudopluto »

voldacar wrote: post #74
ltfey wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As bad as Twitter is, blogging is essentially dead. Wordpress's free product is garbage that now runs block ads, breaking the flow of content, and Substack is Y Combinator, which to a lot of people is a turn-off given the incubator's historical association with DVFs (domestic violence founders). Ultimately, the greatest danger to the written word is that, because it is so easily indexed, fascistic employers (pardon t…

>Substack is Y Combinator wait till you find out about hacker news

or reddit

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#76

Post by tentacleuno »

flotzam wrote: post #71
alkonaut wrote: post #38

There are two reasonable ways of using twitter 1) on a third party client like Tweetbot which just shows exactly the tweets of those you follow, in order, and nothing else. Nothing promoted, no ads, no trending keywords 2) Not at all I have no idea why anyone would want to use the official Twitter app or the twitter dot com web site. Once you have used a third party client (which behaves like the original Twitter!) y…

> Granted, you need an account to use a third party client You don't: https://fritter.cc ("A privacy-friendly Twitter frontend for mobile devices")

This is one I use. Very good. It even lets you subscribe to people so their posts show up on the home feed (like what NewPipe does!)

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#77

Post by rst »

alkonaut wrote: post #38

There are two reasonable ways of using twitter 1) on a third party client like Tweetbot which just shows exactly the tweets of those you follow, in order, and nothing else. Nothing promoted, no ads, no trending keywords 2) Not at all I have no idea why anyone would want to use the official Twitter app or the twitter dot com web site. Once you have used a third party client (which behaves like the original Twitter!) y…

Twitter does have a "latest tweets" option in the standard client which spares you from most algorithmic manipulation (reshuffling, trends, showing stuff someone else "like"d), though not paid promotion. Putting all of your "follow"s into a large Twitter list is another way to get similar behavior (which I've used on the mercifully rare occasions where I'm opted into an experiment that messes with "latest tweets").

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#78

Post by rst »

mootzville wrote: post #39

Twitter...official government communications? You would be better served accessing official government communications via .gov sites. This is their purpose. If you want official bot communications from troll farms, then Twitter is the best!

Lots of government agencies have "alert" twitter feeds which aren't as readily available on their own web sites; there certainly isn't an easy way to get a comparable aggregation of all of them.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#79

Post by 3pt14159 »

I fixed my twitter feed by unfollowing anyone the first time something they did resulted in me being upset. Even if it was a like. It's just not worth it. For about a year or two my feed was great.

Then the topics started coming in. First it was infosec and cybersecurity and they were fine for a bit so I tolerated it. But then it turned into just a bunch of hot women saying basically nothing. If before it was some random person talking about finding a bug in X with a fuzzer, next it was someone talking about completely non-technical things like graduating from a university and starting a career in cybersecurity. Later it of course turned into culture war nonsense. So I unsubscribed. I could reasonably see this being a foreign influence campaign it was such an obvious slide from sometimes useful to total nonsense.

Then Twitter started flooding my account with topics and "based on your interests" and of course the feed turned to garbage again and I had to manually unsubscribe from all of them.

Twitter. Please. I'm begging you. I follow arms control people, software people, and government accounts. I've got this figured out. Please leave me alone I was happy.

Edit:

I forgot about the inability to turn of "[Somebody you follow] follows" tweets. Can I disable these? Doesn't appear like I can.

Re: Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

#80

Post by dsissitka »

blueflow wrote: post #16
greenyoda wrote: post #7

The "uBlock Origin" browser extension blocks Twitter's login prompt and enables you to read posts without logging in.

The default rules don't do it for me. Does it need some custom rules?

The annoyances lists only partially work for me. The following rules seem to catch everything:

    twitter.com##div[role=group]:has(div:has-text(/See more Tweets from/))
    twitter.com##div[role=group]:has(div:has-text(/See what’s happening/))
    twitter.com##html:style(overflow: visible !important)
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