[rconti]

Agreed. And I think this is one reason I love FB and can't stand Twitter. I kept buying into the "follow important people on Twitter" and it's just crap. I don't care what a noted Icelandic volcanologist retweeted about canaries. I don't care what my favorite F1 driver retweeted about english football. I don't care. I don't follow "influencers" because I don't care what they think, but I thought at least getting things from the horse's mouth, as it were, would be interesting, but it's just not.

I follow friend and family on facebook. If they post crap, it's because they have stupid things to say. I don't have many friends who I think are stupid.

Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for.

[dvtrn]

Obviously you can follow celebrities on facebook and only follow friends on twitter but it doesn't feel like they're made for that use case, the 'reverse' of what I use it for.

Someone here not long ago on HN opened my eyes to the 'lists' feature of Twitter, it's been a remarkable improvement for me with the platform. "IRL" friends in one list, "Net" friends in another, sports commentary (because that's a thing I'm into), etc. etc. Crap is more or less 'siloed'.

I wish twitter promoted the feature more, to be honest, I think it can help with some of the gripes you have, if not for you maybe for others as it did with my experience on the platform.

[hesk]

You can turn retweets off for the people you follow. I follow maybe 100 people who post regularly but only allow retweets from a handful of them. Since I've done so, the quality of my feed has improved dramatically. Usually, when I follow a new person I leave retweets on initially but turn them off after two or three retweets because I'm only interested in what they say originally.

Incidentally, the iOS Twitter client also shows tweets in your feed which your followers liked. And you can't turn that off. I don't understand that feature at all and it made me switch to a third-party client.

[rconti]

Thanks! I didn't realize that, good advice. Didn't notice the 'likes' .. I mean, I'm sure it's bothered me, I just didn't realize why it was happening, just closed twitter every time i saw too much junk.

[zf00002]

I feel the same way about twitter. The only time I ever visit is when some service I use isn't working and I want to see if they've said anything about it being down (or it's just me).

[Retric]

Following interesting people generally has nothing to do with following celebrities.

People could post the same stuff on FB, Twitter, or email lists the hard part is finding stuff worth subscribing to. It’s really more about what platform creators use, and Twitter’s lightweight nature means a lot of interesting things end up on it.

[rconti]

TBH, twitter's UI is so atrocious and takes up so much real estate, it's less information-dense than FB, somehow. Neither one is good, though.