81–90 of 132 posts
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It is just one tap, right on the top, not that hard and that the algorithm starts showing you stuff by default before new people follow enough is not that evil is it ?
I didn't say it's evil, but the site is trying to bias you into "engagement". Yes, it's one tap, one tap every time I load the site, plus the four seconds it takes for the new view to load.
So I have never really used twitter much and I don't think I even signed up for it ever. But I want to double check something -- is it the case now, as this post suggests, that if you follow somebody, you do not see their posts? Isn't that the main purpose for the follow function? Why would you do that? Why would you have a follow function and break it? And what else do you show people? I mean if your user follows so…
There are two tabs on the Twitter ios app. The first is called “For You,” and the next “Following.” The first appears to be randomised or from The Algorithm, but as I far as I can tell, it’s mostly random. The second also seems randomised but from people you follow.
That’s not true.
The following tab is only showing you who do you follow with posts in chronological order
This is the reason I really like Mastodon. No algorithm, just timesorted posts by who you follow.
The same as Twitter, following tab is literally this.
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This has a neat side effect though - people who pay for attention usually have nothing interesting to say, so it becomes a good filter of what to ignore.
Making the blue tick into a marker of "paid to be promoted, I have nothing to say" was another instantly backfiring decision.
And I do like the "For you" feed. I do want to read random people's tweets, I keep finding solid reading material that way. But that means I have to block a significant portion of all of twitter. I'd say after about 50k to 100k accounts blocked it gets better. Less for other languages.
There are browser plug-ins that block all accounts that follow a given account. Those are great. So, whenever I find a MAGA guy with Russian grammar structure, an NFT scammer, a bible quote proselytizer, or a Tesla bag holder, I just block everybody following that account.
It takes about a day or two of doing, but then it works great. Best done when sick, works well with headaches and a fever. But now my twitter experience is about as good as it was 2017.
This is the reason I really like Mastodon. No algorithm, just timesorted posts by who you follow.
While slightly better, both seem to me like an utter waste of time to me.
There is just an unsolvable, signal to noise problem when it comes to a personal optimal feed for me.
The content I will like best will not be popular. If that is true then it is hopeless for me because of the scaling properties of the assumptions of the system and incentives for users of the system.
I am better off just talking to chatGPT4o and it isn't even close.
My feed looks like this: 1) "Facebook style" post are proliferating, that is memes from last year and images/videos from 5 years ago 2) Too many "cookie cutter" posts, that is variation of formats like "100 million people are using AI but %99 are using it wrong" 3) Propaganda accounts pushing narratives, that is something like "before everything was great, now everything is bad. what changed?", then with flood of rep…
Yup, 9- is the reason (and only one) why I still use Twitter. The rest of the content is absolute garbage, as illustrated in the "for you" tab which seems to be a mix of all your other points. There is btw a browser extension called "control pannel for twitter" available for FF and Chrome which let you hide the "for you" tab (among other options). Very useful on desktop. No such option for mobile though.
Good timing... I'm building an alternative to Twitter and nearing our launch date. It's focused on devs and HN readers, even having an integration with HN.
What's your motivation for building this when alternatives like Mastodon already exist?
There's much more, that's just a few features making it a social platform I enjoy using instead of a time waste like the infinite scroll algorithm based ones.
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Same with YT. Use https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions exclusively
If you have no watch history, they don’t even show you recommended videos in the home page anymore. I see that as generally positive