Yeah, can we get the corollary that follows the people who disagree with the blocked parties but that has the same political alignment as the blocked party?
How great would it be to separate off the mediocrity who think every conversation has to be about their amazing take on CO2 and their envro cult links on Wikipedia to Jevons paradox and the precautionary principle.
Why would I want their take on the latest version of PHP? It'd be great to be in a chamber of accelerated ideas where they stick. Nothing echoes on HN for instance.
It's an interesting experiment, if people used it.
I think the unforgiveness is the problem. People should be able to make some mistakes. This might output middle ground ideas or might create a 'like'-less subculture.
> I think the unforgiveness is the problem. People should be able to make some mistakes.
Wholeheartedly agreed - the “Internet never forgets” is a related problem, although I've also seen some apparent “forgetting” over years.
Accordingly I liberally use a timed “ignore” function on some forums I participate in. So I can block people for a while, in the hope that their posting misbehaviour is lack of experience and/or just having a bad moment in life.
I'm certain I'll be fine, and survive without flat Earthers, 5G-causes-COVID, and similar ilk. That's a critical lack of, ironically, critical thinking skills in windmill-type people that this Don Quixote instance considers not worth time nor nerves fighting with nor for.
Out of curiosity, how would you be seeing that on Twitter in the first place? The blocking need seems more like addressing a symptom, where the root problem is whatever system or algorithm showed you that stuff at all.
Right? I always hear this type of whining but every time I use Twitter I find cool projects and interesting discussion. The more mainstream threads are mostly noise and I don't pay a lot of mind to them. Many of the political shitposts are funny even if I disagree.
I've been actively removing connections who comment or like posts that add no value to me. But LinkedIn is rapidly going downhill - some days my feed is just full of rubbish.
It feels like it is turning into like early to mid Facebook with all of the posts that are like "what is your favorite programming language. Like for C++, heart for Java...".
Such low effort, low value engagement posts. Pretty sad tbh...
I honestly don’t know that many people that still use LinkedIn. I have an account, and most people I know have an account, but I’m not aware of any of them actively using it.
Seems like it’s mostly there for when you need to reach out to folks if you’re looking for a job.
I actually stopped logging in and sending/accepting connections not long after I started my current job (8 years ago).
It’s used pretty commonly if you’re a hiring manager or if you regularly interview people. It’s much more convenient than looking at resumes because of its standardized format.
I use it strictly for job hunting. I receive a lot of offers there and it's a great way to contact recruiters. That was its premise, but they've been working hard to turn it into a social platform.
I have already given up on LinkedIn as a social network. My profile only exists as a public resume for recruiters and peers to see, I never interact with anything on the site except to update my profile and check my privacy settings.
It took a while, but unfollowing anyone who produced low quality content did eventually result in an interesting LinkedIn feed. I wish I had started doing it sooner.
YouTube is the worst offender. I block and thumbs down the author… which of course means please recommend me every video they ever made. Youtube seems ripe for someone else to come and take a large part of the market if video storage wasn’t so expensive to enter into.
On the recommendation (without clicking the video), click the 3 dots, click not interested, click the button to say why, click not interested in this channel.
This usually stops the channel from being recommended?
You can also go into your viewing history and remove videos that you don’t want recommendations based on.
The YouTube app on my Android has a straight up "Don't recommend this channel" button that does what it says on the tin. Honestly I use it pretty sparingly.
Im on iphone and use that all the time not that OS should matter. It doesn’t do anything. It will recommend the channel to me the next day half the time.
Ive used dozens of times on video recommendations for Louis rossman, and Fox News, the “not interested in this channel” button, and I still get recommendations. I’m not convinced that button does anything.
This doesn't work for news channels. It is impossible to watch any non-MSM channel mentioning the news without the next recommended video being one of the major American news channels.
The only solution is to use browser extensions which can actually block channels properly.
Not all of the (official) youtube clients have this feature. The AppleTV client does not. And if I load the page on my desktop client (hopping to choose "don't recommend channel" there) the thing I want to block is not recommended on that platform...
At least with a browser extension you can audit the source code yourself (and know that the source is what you're installing) - with a 3rd party OAuth app you can never be sure.
That being said I don't think this app is going to do anything malicious.
>At least with a browser extension you can audit the source code yourself
Well, often this is not easy. I've tried to audit some extensions recently but a vast majority of non-open-source extensions are minified and heavily obfuscated. Unless you invest a lot of time, it's not easy to audit the code these days.
Twitter is an outrage factory; almost everything about its design lends itself towards engagement via accelerating conflict.
I foresee that this sort of tool would encourage conflict within smaller communities that adopt its use, or cause them to evaporate in a flurry of mass blocking.
If you use this in a community, on a post that lots of people liked, you've essentially booted yourself.
If enough people boot themselves from a community that it becomes too small to be viable... I dunno, maybe the world is better off without that community.
Why even bother using Twitter at that point? This seems wrong somehow. Turn off the computer and go outside.
Usually I don't make comments like this but come on. Seriously?
If one genuinely feels as though they need this level of advanced machinery to survive the apparently harrowing experience of using Twitter, they may choose to reevaluate their habits.
You can't think of a single good use case for a tool like this? Consider receiving a bunch of hate-tweets based on some physical aspect of your appearance.
It's a natural tool in a digital world. IRL you can literally walk away from a conversation to express your disgust and disinterest in argument in a low-effort manner. On Twitter you can't make the same gesture, so an analogous low-effort measure is to stop listening. It would not be nice to block people like that IRL, but it's a different thing on the internet where millions of people and their cats can easily waste your time.
Twitter doesn't have good platform-wide moderation. By default, you get all the notifications about people talking to you in one place. You can't see comments from friends or business contacts without wading through the strangers demanding your attention and death threats too.
You're implying Twitter is worth using at *this* point. Removing the irredeemable 20% from our collective feeds might actually make a Twitter a more positive place and worth using again.
Silicon Valley elite VCs (like Mike Solana - the guy who requested this feature) are terminally online. They have opulent wealth, but spend their day glued to a phone. I suppose that’s a sign of a true addiction. When you could be doing almost anything else, and yet you spend time on an app that embodies pure hell.
There's a lot of creatives that need twitter in order to make their second income viable (promotion for their patreon/etsy/gumroad stores, etc).
... and there's a lot of those artists who get sent death threats for the sheer crime of drawing NSFW art or even milder LGBT+ works.
I used to be on that track of indie artist promotion but swore off twitter after repeatedly seeing that level of harassment. Why post? While I was on there, this was an enormously helpful tool that at least cut down on the level of toxic messages seen.
You'll always get voices from outside the bubble... even if they come in the form of people in your bubble dunking on the dumbest takes from outside it.
I’ve seen people on Twitter brag about having 6 figures blocked. So it at least works for that many. I know Marc Andreessen notoriously has a lot of people blocked. I wonder if it’s in the millions.
If someone spent 5 hours a day on twitter, and blocked a new person every 5 minutes... then after 4.5 years of doing this every single day, they would reach 100,000 people blocked.
Once every five minutes feels quite low in this situation. I don't really block, just mute for the most part. But I can go in and mute a dozen accounts in a minute in the comments on someone big's tweets. If you are someone with a high engagement rate, and actually want to curate the comments, you could easily end up blocking a hundred in a couple minutes.
As a programmer I’d be more worried about the lookup cost. There are efficient ways to lookup a name in a list and very inefficient ways that would be fine for small lists, but struggle with large lists.
Maybe this is an ideal use case for a bloom filter. The answer to the question "is user X blocked?" is almost always going to be "no". And the "maybe" cases can consult the actual block list.
How exciting. I've waited my whole career for a bloom filter use case. Please no one tell me that there's a much more obvious solution.
This made me curious and I wondered how it might work...
The simplest approach would be to start from user id 1 and increment up blocking each one but then you'd block millions of inactive, dead, or suspended accounts which would probably get you suspended.
A better approach may be to choose a "recent" tweet id, block the author, count up from there, checking if each author is blocked and blocking if they're not. The best part is that you don't even need to know the author when you make a request. For example, tweet id 1508540042817376256 is Elon's and it resolves to him whether you use https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1508540042817376256 or https://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/1508540042817376256
This is no longer blocking "every single Twitter account" but blocking "every single active Twitter account" but may still be able to trigger whatever limits.
This happens periodically with things like "menshn", "gab", "truth social". The problem is that Twitter functions as a PVP MMO: the wolves want prey, but nobody wants to be prey, so when they get isolated off into a hardcore PVP server it stops being fun for them.
Like what? It's become a semi-public endorsement in some ways, at this point -- Twitter frequently recommends tweets in the feed because someone you follow liked it.
If you use Twitter, you probably know that. So, liking a tweet is not very similar to up-or down-voting on Reddit or HN, which is private.
I very often like/share/upvote comments just to promote stupidity of the author. My followers are fully aware that I like something stupid for the lulz, not to promote it. If author of a stupid comment thinks they're being liked, that's even better for the lulz.
I don't use twitter, but on both reddit and here I'd estimate around ten percent of my voting is misclicking. Phones make it too easy to accidentally press a button.
If you can't avoid social media entirely, avoid using it on a touchscreen device. A accidental fat-fingered like/retweet on the wrong post isn't just embarassing, these days it has the potential to have serious consequences.
Bookmarking for another platform or another time. Some twitter interfaces have a bookmark affordance and some do not (the web doesn't, at least in my cohort).
These alternative uses is why people say often in their bio that "likes" do not imply endorsement, but it's so common to say that that I didn't even mention it on my bio, though of course it's still the case.
I can't help but feel like this could really make a mess of things.
What I think would be nice is if there we tools that better allowed us to create "social gardens" on platforms like Twitter, platforms that allowed us to better cultivate the topics we care about while allowing us to keep out some stray topic from someone who we otherwise follow because of something entirely different.
There is of course the argument that this could lead to even worse echo chambers, but for me the more pressing concern is preserving my mental health and disengaging entirely from the political conversation. Doesn't matter what side of the aisle they're on, Twitter pundits are unhinged and I want to stay out of the twisted world they inhabit. Meanwhile, I find that Twitter is actually a really useful platform if you carefully curate the people you follow. There are some powerful ideas if you know where to look.
Ah, but who am I kidding, people would much rather possess a nuke than a garden.
A while ago a deleted an old profile I had that followed a number of political and/or hot-take types, which were addictive but never left me feeling happy. With my new account, I follow only makers, artists, engineers and software people.
I don't mind if those people very occasionally post something political, but if they do it too often I unfollow. Nothing personal, I just want my Twitter experience to be a happy and inspiring place.
Now, what if one of those people liked some post that I don't think people Ought to like? Should I ban them by association, even though I previously enjoyed their creative content?
(I guess this is moot -- a person who follows based on their interests rather than their political echo-chamber wouldn't use this tool.)
You already likely have people in your life you just ignore the opinions of on certain subjects, or anything, because you know there's never going to be anything there. But there frequency and interjection is pretty well controlled by meatspace reality. Basic example: I will not watch any movie my brothers recommend. 10 years of trying and it turns out our tastes are pretty much exactly divergent.
This tool is basically a practical implementation of trust markets for a very large space. I'd say the one flaw in its implementation is that you might like to block only the intersecting set of users which liked 2 or more tweets - which would be a pretty good selector function in a lot of cases for "nuanced perspective or accident" versus "consistent pattern of behavior".
I did that and made a point of following only people who tweet things that are interesting or funny. I would mute any account they posted something that made me feel bad. But Twitter kept finding ways to recommend tweets that would get under my skin in some way, no matter how many accounts I mute.
Despite having used the megablock tool in the past when I was on twitter (no longer active on there), I completely agree with your idea of social gardens. It's a large part of why I moved from there and tumblr to dreamwidth which has attracted a significantly more laid back and nuanced collection of people than the other two platforms. It's nice because you can subscribe to people's journals who have a very different collection of hobbies, and yet it doesn't feel forced for engagement or anything - it's their whimsies and thoughts, hollistically, and under various privacy filters if it's a delicate topic.
The main reason I used megablock on twitter was to reduce harassment from younger folks who send death threats for the sole perceived crime of creating NSFW art. I wish I were joking. Didn't follow anybody, it was already too toxic with those messages alone ... and why post if you can't create?
> What I think would be nice is if there we tools that better allowed us to create "social gardens" on platforms like Twitter, platforms that allowed us to better cultivate the topics we care about while allowing us to keep out some stray topic from someone who we otherwise follow because of something entirely different.
> Meanwhile, I find that Twitter is actually a really useful platform if you carefully curate the people you follow.
Exactly this. If you put some effort into following and unfollowing people regularly and you're the type of person who can resist engaging with inflammatory content, Twitter can actually be quite nice.
But for the people who just can't scroll past ragebait or inflammatory Tweets, Twitter is not a good place to be. People who can't exercise self-restraint or shrug things off seem to get pulled into angry, combative bubbles. It's basically the old mailing list flamewars but with shorter content and faster pace. These people are better off staying clear of Twitter entirely.
My biggest issue with Twitter these days is that my curated social garden keeps being invaded by engagement farmers who use the thread feature to post obnoxious listicles. I’m constantly being recommended tweets like these in my feed:
“I hunted, killed, and ate a wild baboon (brains and all)…Here are the 13 things I learned about human health along the way.”
“I read all 40,000 words from Jeff Bezos' Amazon shareholder letters. Here are 9 lessons worth your time:”
“We keep seeing the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is a feature of the system, not a bug. Time for a thread”
They remind me of Buzzfeed articles back in the early 2010s and there’s no way to turn it off besides muting the word thread and its emoji.
I'm always amazed by the number of people who use the native Twitter interface. I started with third party clients pretty early and never regretted it. Being able to see a natural, unmolested timeline + the advanced filtering tools most third party clients provide make them essential (for me anyway) if you are going to screw with twitter at all.
I think that would be conflating Twitter with a different type of social tool. Because Twitter has such a critical mass of users it's not surprising that they're hitting some fundamental issues with internet communities, and users want to solve them on twitter instead of using a tool or platform better suited to the task of having a tightnit community or a space for discrete topic matters.
> There is of course the argument that this could lead to even worse echo chambers
I think it's chasing a red herring to think we can harmonize such broad points of view in the same room, so treating Twitter like a discussion platform while also trying to think of it as a broadcasted social network, you just get a lot of yelling and extremely shallow discussions. If you want in depth discussions, more than a few people is usually too many, let alone tens to hundreds to thousands. I've seen some entirely novel conversations come out of twitter, but I've seen far, far, far more shallow bullshit. It's the wrong tool.
> Ah, but who am I kidding, people would much rather possess a nuke than a garden.
I think you're very right here, people are afraid of not being part of the bigger conversation, and so they hesitate to find places to start their more discrete conversations elsewhere. I think that's made people forget how to have in depth discussions online, instead most topics circle around the same more broadcasted points as to not stray too far from the consensus, and accidentally disagree with their peers on the finer details.
social gardens, like what google+ could have been.
but greed and internal team politics led to the demise of the project. and this is an outsider's remark by the way. greed because google+ was chasing after an ever increasing monthly active users. internal team politics because of spamming. it made no sense, to me at least, that the same company that gave us gmail could not deal with spamming on google+. spamming has also become rampant on youtube as well.
so yeah, google has been there and abandoned the idea.
Sure; I'm not offering any value judgement or commenting on bubbling, I'm only pointing out that it cannot by definition be a "hellban" when it only prevents one person from seeing the blocked thing(s).
It's a little bit different, but you see what I'm saying, right? If you block scads of people by network association, you're going to stop seeing replies. You'll be shouting into the void, unable to see any response associated with your actions. That is, effectively, a hellban.
Maybe some people want a one-way street; that's fine.
I sometimes manually do this when I'm feeling petty, or when a tweet is so offensive that in real life, I'd disassociate with people who endorse it. Good to have a tool. I just tried it on a spam tweet, and only the author got blocked.
Maybe other users get put in a queue or the service is close to Twitter limits.
Probably still good to create my own block function (and hope Twitter doesn't ban the API use).
Reminder: Probably best to revoke the app's permission when done.
Endorsement/support/agreement. When applied on a tweet I consider to be vile, to me it means that the person retweeting/sharing it is amplifying that vile message.
The like-button was the "favorite" button, they only changed it trying to imitate Facebook in 2015. Your favorites (as in your browser) were your tweets you liked to store because you enjoyed them.
So no, the misuse doesn't come from the people but the forced/intended change by the devs.
There is no such thing as a dedicated bookmark button on twitter. At least not on my client. Twitter on the web or with their app is unusable for me. The only thing I have to find a tweet again is the star / heart button.
I have found that my right thumb, when scrolling, will be directly over top of the vertical space that the like buttons move through. As such, accidental likes have been much more common for me than when I had a smaller device.
I’m actually afraid I’m going to click like on something and it’s going to come back and haunt my career for some god awful reason. So much so that I use a script to “unlike” everything after a few weeks.
Some people will block accounts that follow accounts they don't like. I specifically follow people I don't agree with so I am exposed to the dumb things they are saying. I'm not sure how many people have blocked me even though I barely tweet much.
I'm pretty sure social media is simply a system to reinforce echo chambers and tribalism.
Twitter was nearly dead pre Trump. They really need to retrospect the correlation between how toxic communication has become over the period of their return to relevancy.
The feature to switch accounts without logging out had existed in many social services for a while now.
On a service having toxic elements; like, HN is toxic, to a lesser degree obv., and no I don't have the energy to actually expound on that.
One direct example though is that I got a downvote for noting the reality of the situation;
The problem was someone wanting to follow voices on Twitter they wouldn't normally follow but avoid being caught in an automated system like the one linked. Using another account is something people do for this.
IDK, is this something where noting a fact is taken by another party as a demand (to use the platform and engage in this way of using it), let alone a suggestion?
Having multiple persona's as a way to hack around the typical omnibus recommendation of content is a pretty good solution. Obviously it would be better if social media sites gave us a little more control.
Firefox containers could make this process pretty easy, actually. Go to twitter, right click on twitters tab, "open in container". It will switch you to your alt, just like that.
I use this for separating personal youtube from work youtube.
It's endorsement as much RT is, as Twitter puts tweets liked by people you follow on your timeline. It serves as an amplification tool, not just personal interaction.
Not all people use the Twitter interface. I used Tweetbot for years and "like" has no effect in that app, as it has no algorithmic feed. Since there is no way to bookmark a tweet from that app, that's what I used the "like" button for.
I'm not the only one either. Lots of people use Twitter this way, whether the Twitter devs intended for it to be used this way or not.
Because the "like" button causes a tweet to appear in the feeds of your followers who don't religiously use "home timeline" despite twitter's efforts to switch them to "top tweets", it is an endorsement and an amplification. It doesn't matter what your intent is, the effect is to put it in front of other people who don't want to see it.
The heart button means you liked that specific tweet, the follow button means you track that account. They shouldn't be treated as implicit endorsement. Endorsement of a specific tweet comes from a retweet; endorsement of an account comes from a tweet/retweet of yourself that explicitly states such endorsement.
Why do people have to radicalize everything?
Changing topics, megablocking seems like a really good idea to mass block bots manipulating trending topics, since Twitter won't do anything significant about them on its own.
You can value a broad perspective of the world, and follow high-quality feeds of many perspectives.
But when you find a low-quality feed, blocking the author and their entire ecosystem of promoters and sycophants is an effective method to increase your signal-to-noise ratio.
If you want a broad perspective of the world, reading negative bullshit from angry twitter trolls is not going to help. It's just going to make you angry too.
It'd be great if there was a record of how/why people were blocked on twitter.
Fingering megablock & the originating tweet would be great context to know.
Personally I also think this kind of activity should itself be an optional part of our timelines, that we should be able to publicly or privately do these actions, as we see fit. Moderation is all individual right now, blocks are private activities, and starting to stake ourselves in, make our personal moderations part of the public discourse seems like a necessary next jump.
At this point I don't think anyone ever reviews their moderations, who they block. But I want to see a path for social media to eventually become a little more redemptive, where we a couple years down the road we might possibly be willing to try again. Structurally, right now, the whole moderation system is opaque as fuck, there's no real trace of what happened, there's no ability to reconsider at all. It's weird having a big log of shared internet history where the most important factors are not logged, have no record.
I don't think twitter is an echo chamber. I think it's badass & wide ranging & we engage in huge wild globe-spanning conversation in the exact opposite of echo chambers. But I do think it's cruel & merciless & that these proprietary social networks are cold & hard structurally, & that they refuse to allow a more real story & more real engagement & accounting to happen, systematically. They keep an amazing record, but also are radical extremists blowing up some of the most important parts of the record, deny much of the most core & vital history they create. Moderation should have the option to be part of the network: right now that is blanketly denied.
Its definitely interesting to consider something like that. Stats as to why might be cool, but odds are nothing is going to change my mind. I am actually more curious about how many users on my list end up getting banned for being bots eventually.
There used to be a tool I think called something like block with me, where you could follow other users block lists. Although I can't seem to find it any more. Options like that would certainly be interesting. But Twitter isn't incentivized to do something like that.
Tempting... but then you go too far in the opposite direction and assume people only disagree with you because they're just too dumb.
I think the ideal is to take the feedback, consider it, but feel free to discard it. But at least consider that you said something dumb or didn't express it as well as you could have.
At first I thought I would just ignore people who made me want to argue.
But then twitter had to remind me what the trending hashtags were, and they were enough to make me facepalm.
It's a shame, because there's quite a few technologists who do cool shit that talk on twitter. But I'm just over being in an environment where overly sensitive people vomit their ill thought out political opinions at me.
Nitter is everything I wished Twitter was. Well except the upcoming support for following folks. Viewing the same profile in each is like viewing 2 completely different platforms with how different the displayed content is.
nitter is just the same censorship and rage. you still have to click Load More 100 times to read the full 3% of opinions that were not completely censored. it’s a place for stupid people to go and say things like “I support Will Smith” and pretend they are an internet celebrity
Nitter has an autoload option, it's not enabled by default because it requires JS and it doesn't want to assume JS but once ticked it works fine.
In regards to celebrity gossip and such I guess it depends who you follow. With Nitter if you only associate with people that simply don't partake in those kind of discussions you won't see such discussions. On Twitter it's hell bent on trying to show you what is popular instead of what you asked to see so the same is not true.
The only way to win is to not play the game in the first place.
Let them fight it out in their echo-chambers. They will get bored really soon and realize that there is more to life than screaming and banning each other in the blue bird site.
Some things just need to be ignored and left alone. The outrage that is happening on the blue bird site is one of them. It is not worth it.
One thing I find weird is that what seem to be prevailing ideas on Twitter are nonexistent in the real world. Did sane people just give up on the site? Or does Twitter just promote the crazies?
Social platforms seem to be largely segregated by social class. Children and young people have their own stuff, likewise different generations and socioeconomic groups have their own fora. Twitter is something like the urban-cosmopolitan-progressive-educated-professional-30+ forum, and the politics reflect that.
There was an interesting point in a different post [1] in this topic.
Essentially Twitter not only has a largely biased sample in terms of who uses it, but there's also an extreme bias in terms of who actually posts on it. About 22% of Americans (2019) use Twitter and, of that 22%, 10% are generating 80% of the posts. So Twitter is primarily driven by a bubble of 2.2% of Americans who skew younger and more liberal than the average. I would hypothesize (though it was not stated by the sources given) that the 2.2% who are posting like crazy also likely skew more radical than average as well.
It's quite dangerous because sites like Twitter can give people the imaginary perspective that they're interacting with hundreds of millions of people, when in reality they're generally communicating with an extremely unrepresentative and small sample of the world, or even of the "Western world". And now factor in the growth of tools, such as this, that add wide-range and spider-style ban/censor/muting of anybody who expresses a view you really dislike.
The thing that I dislike the most on twitter are the posts where so many people liked it twitter decides to show it to me even though I am not following the person who wrote it.
I understand why they are doing this, but most of it is noise. I feel like if I had a way to browse twitter without any posts with more than 1,000 likes, it would be a much better experience.
No this is different. The issue is not that posts get more interaction on twitter. The issue is that twitter's algorithm shows me posts by people I am not following if the post is popular. But the kind of tweets that get 50k likes are just hot one liners that I don't care about. If twitter just showed me tweets only from my friends, this would not happen. I am also on the fediverse but I want twitter to behave differently because I like the people I am following on twitter, not all the random popular tweets by people I don't follow.
Not long after twitter started showing me algorithmic recommendations, it decided to show me some comments that were so vile I couldn't help but call them out. The person responded by asking "Who are you and what are you doing in my replies?". Which was a valid question. Why was I there? I didn't want to be talking to that person. Why did I even see that content? Was I rewarding the algorithm's choice by responding? Gross.
Is that the new normal for twitter? Do I have to wade through enraging AI content as payment for following the creators I love?
No. If thats the trade, its a bad trade to make. I deleted twitter and I haven't looked back. There's some fantastic creators on twitter doing cool things. But there's too many interesting ways I could be spending my time to waste time dealing with that.
Rule #1 of any algorithmic feed is that you get more of what you interact with.
If you're the type of person who can't resist engaging with things that make you angry, algorithmic feed websites are not for you.
For people who have no problem scrolling past dumb comments and pressing the like button on things they actually want to see (a lot of people refuse to "like" on principle, to their own detriment) then Twitter is actually not a bad place.
But if you're easily triggered and you gravitate toward the things that make you angry, it's best to just stay away.
Twitter made me so angry I just stopped going there for my own mental health. The other day my partner linked me to a well liked thread featuring two people on Twitter arguing why it was or was not ethical to travel to Hawaii now given the oil spill in the aquifer by the Navy. One was arguing that visiting Hawaii in light of the spill would be unethically affecting hard-working everyday Hawaiians. The other argued that tourism dollars buoy the economy. After first 5 hot takes by both with many likes, you get to the bottom of the thread and realize than one of them is a European teenager and the other an Australian, neither having ever even visited Hawaii in their lives let alone lived there.
It's a cesspool for sure. Depending on your interest in Twitter, the crack down on BS from Russia and related areas has made some of it more tolerable.
> But then twitter had to remind me what the trending hashtags were
I use Adblock Plus to block Twitter's trending topics and it is a huge improvement; the topics are just annoying things that get engagement. Another thing that makes Twitter tolerable is to mute words with abandon, e.g. everything from "supreme court" to "wordle". Finally, I block anyone who tweets something stupid.
I haven't found any technologists on Twitter who avoid posting or interacting with political or social-issues stuff.
Everybody has an opinion on Trump, Biden, BLM, Trans Rights, Free Speech, racism, sexism, religion, immigration, abortion, war... the list goes on.
I'd actually pay money to follow technologists whose opinions on anything outside the tech in question I have no good guesses about.
The standard refrain is "well all tech is political". Well no: it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from when you're talking about a quirk of CSS or a cool e-ink project... or at least it doesn't interest me who you are or where you come from: I'm interested in what you're learning/teaching/doing with the tech.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 369 ms ] threadHow great would it be to separate off the mediocrity who think every conversation has to be about their amazing take on CO2 and their envro cult links on Wikipedia to Jevons paradox and the precautionary principle.
Why would I want their take on the latest version of PHP? It'd be great to be in a chamber of accelerated ideas where they stick. Nothing echoes on HN for instance.
It's an interesting experiment, if people used it.
I think the unforgiveness is the problem. People should be able to make some mistakes. This might output middle ground ideas or might create a 'like'-less subculture.
Wholeheartedly agreed - the “Internet never forgets” is a related problem, although I've also seen some apparent “forgetting” over years.
Accordingly I liberally use a timed “ignore” function on some forums I participate in. So I can block people for a while, in the hope that their posting misbehaviour is lack of experience and/or just having a bad moment in life.
At least everyone is happy.
I don't think getting isolated from Rabbit breeders to dwelve in a lazy cat pictures bubble is something to lament about.
Such low effort, low value engagement posts. Pretty sad tbh...
Seems like it’s mostly there for when you need to reach out to folks if you’re looking for a job.
I actually stopped logging in and sending/accepting connections not long after I started my current job (8 years ago).
* Half the teams waste collaborative potential by not having a second standup around 2PM.
* We do things DIFFERENTLY from all others; watch our funny PR video.
* Why waste time inside when you can code on your iPad in the sun?
<super clever algorithm hack>
* What do you think 1 + 4 =?
Heart for 5, Like for Five or Comment your answer!
</super clever algorithm hack>
<insert meaningless picture of author>
This usually stops the channel from being recommended? You can also go into your viewing history and remove videos that you don’t want recommendations based on.
Disappeared off my feed. No idea what he’s doing anymore, probably still using too much flux.
The only solution is to use browser extensions which can actually block channels properly.
That being said I don't think this app is going to do anything malicious.
Well, often this is not easy. I've tried to audit some extensions recently but a vast majority of non-open-source extensions are minified and heavily obfuscated. Unless you invest a lot of time, it's not easy to audit the code these days.
I foresee that this sort of tool would encourage conflict within smaller communities that adopt its use, or cause them to evaporate in a flurry of mass blocking.
Until you get subtweeted by people who see you blocked them.
If you use this in a community, on a post that lots of people liked, you've essentially booted yourself.
If enough people boot themselves from a community that it becomes too small to be viable... I dunno, maybe the world is better off without that community.
Usually I don't make comments like this but come on. Seriously?
If one genuinely feels as though they need this level of advanced machinery to survive the apparently harrowing experience of using Twitter, they may choose to reevaluate their habits.
Twitter has its purpose, deep deep below the miles of garbage.
... and there's a lot of those artists who get sent death threats for the sheer crime of drawing NSFW art or even milder LGBT+ works.
I used to be on that track of indie artist promotion but swore off twitter after repeatedly seeing that level of harassment. Why post? While I was on there, this was an enormously helpful tool that at least cut down on the level of toxic messages seen.
Can you block every single Twitter account?
How exciting. I've waited my whole career for a bloom filter use case. Please no one tell me that there's a much more obvious solution.
The simplest approach would be to start from user id 1 and increment up blocking each one but then you'd block millions of inactive, dead, or suspended accounts which would probably get you suspended.
A better approach may be to choose a "recent" tweet id, block the author, count up from there, checking if each author is blocked and blocking if they're not. The best part is that you don't even need to know the author when you make a request. For example, tweet id 1508540042817376256 is Elon's and it resolves to him whether you use https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1508540042817376256 or https://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/1508540042817376256
This is no longer blocking "every single Twitter account" but blocking "every single active Twitter account" but may still be able to trigger whatever limits.
Will the Twitterverse split in two? Into n?
Will everyone end up in their own Twitterverse of 1?
Will Twitter implode with blocking taking all the resources away from tweeting?
This happens periodically with things like "menshn", "gab", "truth social". The problem is that Twitter functions as a PVP MMO: the wolves want prey, but nobody wants to be prey, so when they get isolated off into a hardcore PVP server it stops being fun for them.
If you use Twitter, you probably know that. So, liking a tweet is not very similar to up-or down-voting on Reddit or HN, which is private.
These alternative uses is why people say often in their bio that "likes" do not imply endorsement, but it's so common to say that that I didn't even mention it on my bio, though of course it's still the case.
What I think would be nice is if there we tools that better allowed us to create "social gardens" on platforms like Twitter, platforms that allowed us to better cultivate the topics we care about while allowing us to keep out some stray topic from someone who we otherwise follow because of something entirely different.
There is of course the argument that this could lead to even worse echo chambers, but for me the more pressing concern is preserving my mental health and disengaging entirely from the political conversation. Doesn't matter what side of the aisle they're on, Twitter pundits are unhinged and I want to stay out of the twisted world they inhabit. Meanwhile, I find that Twitter is actually a really useful platform if you carefully curate the people you follow. There are some powerful ideas if you know where to look.
Ah, but who am I kidding, people would much rather possess a nuke than a garden.
A while ago a deleted an old profile I had that followed a number of political and/or hot-take types, which were addictive but never left me feeling happy. With my new account, I follow only makers, artists, engineers and software people.
I don't mind if those people very occasionally post something political, but if they do it too often I unfollow. Nothing personal, I just want my Twitter experience to be a happy and inspiring place.
Now, what if one of those people liked some post that I don't think people Ought to like? Should I ban them by association, even though I previously enjoyed their creative content?
(I guess this is moot -- a person who follows based on their interests rather than their political echo-chamber wouldn't use this tool.)
This tool is basically a practical implementation of trust markets for a very large space. I'd say the one flaw in its implementation is that you might like to block only the intersecting set of users which liked 2 or more tweets - which would be a pretty good selector function in a lot of cases for "nuanced perspective or accident" versus "consistent pattern of behavior".
The main reason I used megablock on twitter was to reduce harassment from younger folks who send death threats for the sole perceived crime of creating NSFW art. I wish I were joking. Didn't follow anybody, it was already too toxic with those messages alone ... and why post if you can't create?
You can already make Twitter work this way: https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/
I mostly see relevant information and never anything promoted by Twitter, because I never look at my timeline.
isn't this essentially what mastodon is?
Exactly this. If you put some effort into following and unfollowing people regularly and you're the type of person who can resist engaging with inflammatory content, Twitter can actually be quite nice.
But for the people who just can't scroll past ragebait or inflammatory Tweets, Twitter is not a good place to be. People who can't exercise self-restraint or shrug things off seem to get pulled into angry, combative bubbles. It's basically the old mailing list flamewars but with shorter content and faster pace. These people are better off staying clear of Twitter entirely.
“I hunted, killed, and ate a wild baboon (brains and all)…Here are the 13 things I learned about human health along the way.”
“I read all 40,000 words from Jeff Bezos' Amazon shareholder letters. Here are 9 lessons worth your time:”
“We keep seeing the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is a feature of the system, not a bug. Time for a thread”
They remind me of Buzzfeed articles back in the early 2010s and there’s no way to turn it off besides muting the word thread and its emoji.
> There is of course the argument that this could lead to even worse echo chambers
I think it's chasing a red herring to think we can harmonize such broad points of view in the same room, so treating Twitter like a discussion platform while also trying to think of it as a broadcasted social network, you just get a lot of yelling and extremely shallow discussions. If you want in depth discussions, more than a few people is usually too many, let alone tens to hundreds to thousands. I've seen some entirely novel conversations come out of twitter, but I've seen far, far, far more shallow bullshit. It's the wrong tool.
> Ah, but who am I kidding, people would much rather possess a nuke than a garden.
I think you're very right here, people are afraid of not being part of the bigger conversation, and so they hesitate to find places to start their more discrete conversations elsewhere. I think that's made people forget how to have in depth discussions online, instead most topics circle around the same more broadcasted points as to not stray too far from the consensus, and accidentally disagree with their peers on the finer details.
but greed and internal team politics led to the demise of the project. and this is an outsider's remark by the way. greed because google+ was chasing after an ever increasing monthly active users. internal team politics because of spamming. it made no sense, to me at least, that the same company that gave us gmail could not deal with spamming on google+. spamming has also become rampant on youtube as well.
so yeah, google has been there and abandoned the idea.
Not passing judgement on the project. I, like others here, just think there are limited benefits at that level.
Maybe some people want a one-way street; that's fine.
Maybe other users get put in a queue or the service is close to Twitter limits. Probably still good to create my own block function (and hope Twitter doesn't ban the API use).
Reminder: Probably best to revoke the app's permission when done.
There's already a dedicated bookmark button.
The Like-button maybe is one of the most misused features of twitter. People don't always use software the way some developers think it should be.
So no, the misuse doesn't come from the people but the forced/intended change by the devs.
Edit: nevermind, I see it hidden in the site's share menu.
I have for years been using the like button as a bookmark tool, and I probably will keep doing so. Old habits are hard to break.
I'm pretty sure social media is simply a system to reinforce echo chambers and tribalism.
Twitter was nearly dead pre Trump. They really need to retrospect the correlation between how toxic communication has become over the period of their return to relevancy.
The feature to switch accounts without logging out had existed in many social services for a while now.
On a service having toxic elements; like, HN is toxic, to a lesser degree obv., and no I don't have the energy to actually expound on that.
One direct example though is that I got a downvote for noting the reality of the situation;
The problem was someone wanting to follow voices on Twitter they wouldn't normally follow but avoid being caught in an automated system like the one linked. Using another account is something people do for this.
IDK, is this something where noting a fact is taken by another party as a demand (to use the platform and engage in this way of using it), let alone a suggestion?
HN is still far better since you really need to be down voted for the moment to get hidden.
But I’m inclined to think that more accounts is ultimately a bad solution since you’re forced to pretend you’re part of the in group.
Having multiple persona's as a way to hack around the typical omnibus recommendation of content is a pretty good solution. Obviously it would be better if social media sites gave us a little more control.
Firefox containers could make this process pretty easy, actually. Go to twitter, right click on twitters tab, "open in container". It will switch you to your alt, just like that.
I use this for separating personal youtube from work youtube.
I'm not the only one either. Lots of people use Twitter this way, whether the Twitter devs intended for it to be used this way or not.
If I had to make a guess, I'd say the overwhelming majority does, and the number of third-party client users is negligible.
One of twitter's terrible design decisions.
Because the "like" button causes a tweet to appear in the feeds of your followers who don't religiously use "home timeline" despite twitter's efforts to switch them to "top tweets", it is an endorsement and an amplification. It doesn't matter what your intent is, the effect is to put it in front of other people who don't want to see it.
Why do people have to radicalize everything?
Changing topics, megablocking seems like a really good idea to mass block bots manipulating trending topics, since Twitter won't do anything significant about them on its own.
But when you find a low-quality feed, blocking the author and their entire ecosystem of promoters and sycophants is an effective method to increase your signal-to-noise ratio.
Twitter would explode. Either from the blocklist explosion, or the outrage whiplash.
Fingering megablock & the originating tweet would be great context to know.
Personally I also think this kind of activity should itself be an optional part of our timelines, that we should be able to publicly or privately do these actions, as we see fit. Moderation is all individual right now, blocks are private activities, and starting to stake ourselves in, make our personal moderations part of the public discourse seems like a necessary next jump.
At this point I don't think anyone ever reviews their moderations, who they block. But I want to see a path for social media to eventually become a little more redemptive, where we a couple years down the road we might possibly be willing to try again. Structurally, right now, the whole moderation system is opaque as fuck, there's no real trace of what happened, there's no ability to reconsider at all. It's weird having a big log of shared internet history where the most important factors are not logged, have no record.
I don't think twitter is an echo chamber. I think it's badass & wide ranging & we engage in huge wild globe-spanning conversation in the exact opposite of echo chambers. But I do think it's cruel & merciless & that these proprietary social networks are cold & hard structurally, & that they refuse to allow a more real story & more real engagement & accounting to happen, systematically. They keep an amazing record, but also are radical extremists blowing up some of the most important parts of the record, deny much of the most core & vital history they create. Moderation should have the option to be part of the network: right now that is blanketly denied.
There used to be a tool I think called something like block with me, where you could follow other users block lists. Although I can't seem to find it any more. Options like that would certainly be interesting. But Twitter isn't incentivized to do something like that.
Furthermore, when this happens, you must always edit your comment to complain about downvotes! It's tradition.
Working as intended?
Hmm I wonder if that is healthy....
I think the ideal is to take the feedback, consider it, but feel free to discard it. But at least consider that you said something dumb or didn't express it as well as you could have.
/S
At first I thought I would just ignore people who made me want to argue.
But then twitter had to remind me what the trending hashtags were, and they were enough to make me facepalm.
It's a shame, because there's quite a few technologists who do cool shit that talk on twitter. But I'm just over being in an environment where overly sensitive people vomit their ill thought out political opinions at me.
In regards to celebrity gossip and such I guess it depends who you follow. With Nitter if you only associate with people that simply don't partake in those kind of discussions you won't see such discussions. On Twitter it's hell bent on trying to show you what is popular instead of what you asked to see so the same is not true.
The only way to win is to not play the game in the first place.
Let them fight it out in their echo-chambers. They will get bored really soon and realize that there is more to life than screaming and banning each other in the blue bird site.
Some things just need to be ignored and left alone. The outrage that is happening on the blue bird site is one of them. It is not worth it.
Essentially Twitter not only has a largely biased sample in terms of who uses it, but there's also an extreme bias in terms of who actually posts on it. About 22% of Americans (2019) use Twitter and, of that 22%, 10% are generating 80% of the posts. So Twitter is primarily driven by a bubble of 2.2% of Americans who skew younger and more liberal than the average. I would hypothesize (though it was not stated by the sources given) that the 2.2% who are posting like crazy also likely skew more radical than average as well.
It's quite dangerous because sites like Twitter can give people the imaginary perspective that they're interacting with hundreds of millions of people, when in reality they're generally communicating with an extremely unrepresentative and small sample of the world, or even of the "Western world". And now factor in the growth of tools, such as this, that add wide-range and spider-style ban/censor/muting of anybody who expresses a view you really dislike.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30838517
The stuff inserted into my timeline is the usual.
I understand why they are doing this, but most of it is noise. I feel like if I had a way to browse twitter without any posts with more than 1,000 likes, it would be a much better experience.
Not long after twitter started showing me algorithmic recommendations, it decided to show me some comments that were so vile I couldn't help but call them out. The person responded by asking "Who are you and what are you doing in my replies?". Which was a valid question. Why was I there? I didn't want to be talking to that person. Why did I even see that content? Was I rewarding the algorithm's choice by responding? Gross.
Is that the new normal for twitter? Do I have to wade through enraging AI content as payment for following the creators I love?
No. If thats the trade, its a bad trade to make. I deleted twitter and I haven't looked back. There's some fantastic creators on twitter doing cool things. But there's too many interesting ways I could be spending my time to waste time dealing with that.
Rule #1 of any algorithmic feed is that you get more of what you interact with.
If you're the type of person who can't resist engaging with things that make you angry, algorithmic feed websites are not for you.
For people who have no problem scrolling past dumb comments and pressing the like button on things they actually want to see (a lot of people refuse to "like" on principle, to their own detriment) then Twitter is actually not a bad place.
But if you're easily triggered and you gravitate toward the things that make you angry, it's best to just stay away.
I think I am that kind of guy, to an extent. I don't always indulge - but it is always a constant temptation.
Probably why I exiled myself from FB and Twitter.
I use Adblock Plus to block Twitter's trending topics and it is a huge improvement; the topics are just annoying things that get engagement. Another thing that makes Twitter tolerable is to mute words with abandon, e.g. everything from "supreme court" to "wordle". Finally, I block anyone who tweets something stupid.
Everybody has an opinion on Trump, Biden, BLM, Trans Rights, Free Speech, racism, sexism, religion, immigration, abortion, war... the list goes on.
I'd actually pay money to follow technologists whose opinions on anything outside the tech in question I have no good guesses about.
The standard refrain is "well all tech is political". Well no: it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from when you're talking about a quirk of CSS or a cool e-ink project... or at least it doesn't interest me who you are or where you come from: I'm interested in what you're learning/teaching/doing with the tech.