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by spriggan3 3585 days ago
I wish Twitter really had a way to filter subscriptions by "channels". If you tweet about databases and I subscribe because you did, I don't want to get photos of your daughter's birthday, your wedding, your favorite gang-star rap music, or your opinion about Hillary or Trump. I ended up un-following a lot of prominent devs because of this.

If Twitter had a way to filter followed people messages by keyword or hashtag It would lead to a healthier environment on that platform. Unfortunately since Twitter basically locked access to its API, writing a fully featured client with that capability isn't even a viable alternative for the terrible UX ...
2 comments
kiesel 3585 days ago
This is an unsolved problem; some people work around it by managing multiple twitter accounts, one for each "channel". It doesn't scale by topics, though.

OTOH if I have to think about which channel / user I tweet to, I think people would tweet less. A bit of noise is ok, I guess.

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SyneRyder 3585 days ago
Not a complete solution, but if you use a third-party client like Tweetbot (on iOS & Mac) or Fenix (Android) you should be able to setup a variety of mute filters, for example by keyword or hashtag. Putting Trump & Hillary as mute filters is one of the quickest ways to make your tweetstream more sane.

I still tweet sometimes about Eurovision, which I know must annoy many of my followers, so I try to use the hashtag on every Eurovision related post so that others can mute it if they're not interested. (I guess I should do the same for infosec & coding, so Eurovision fans who aren't into the tech stuff can mute those too.)

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spriggan3 3585 days ago
Nice idea, I didn't find a good client on PC that does it.

But it shouldn't be up to you or your followers to sort the tweets, I don't understand why Twitter doesn't implement this basic feature. The hell it could be something done in the front-end with no server-side code involved at all.

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