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by balaam 2142 days ago
This is the best way to use twitter.

You get a clear stream of useful, relevant content. Unfortunately this also gets framed as a "filter bubble".

I want a filter bubble.

The problem in practice is that twitter actively fights you doing this. It tries to pour raw sewage into your nice clean stream and you can't stop it. You see what other people have liked, or what's popular or lots of other things I don't want to see.

At this point in time the biggest value of twitter is it's userbase, it's critical mass, people are on twitter, they're not on mastodon.

7 comments

> The problem in practice is that twitter actively fights you doing this. It tries to pour raw sewage into your nice clean stream and you can't stop it. You see what other people have liked, or what's popular or lots of other things I don't want to see.

Even with all the barriers in place, the truth is that Twitter still works better through a third party application.

Your feed comes through relatively unmolested, with just the things you want to follow in the order you want to follow them.

> It tries to pour raw sewage into your nice clean stream and you can't stop it. You see what other people have liked, or what's popular or lots of other things I don't want to see.

Not if you use Tweetdeck.

https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

> You see what other people have liked, or what's popular or lots of other things I don't want to see.

If you use a third-party app, you won't get most of that. You'll just get a reverse-chronological timeline of people's tweets and retweets, and I think some allow you to filter out retweets.

> ... Unfortunately this also gets framed as a "filter bubble". > I want a filter bubble.

I think describing a "topic-focused, outrage-free" curation strategy as 'filter bubble' is somewhat asinine.

"Filter bubble" is a dirty term because it suggests at best an isolated, distorted view of how things actually are, at worst active exclusion of valid dissent. The point is that important details aren't being noticed in the domain of what has attention.

I understand a lot of outrage comes from righteous minds who want to make the world a better place (or prevent it from becoming a worse place). -- All the same, just excluding outrage feels more like it's (at worst) ignoring 'allegedly important, unrelated things', rather than ignoring 'important, related things'.

Relevant from my old comment here:

I have thought about this before. I believe internet lacks enough echo chambers. In real world, people automatically segregate based on their income bracket, community, values, lifestyle, job, family (kids or not?), healthcare, accessibility to various things, etc. People have all sorts of stereotypes and things they expect other people to conform to based on visible factors. This isn't possible online. There is too little information and our stereotypes will never be correct (too big number). It shocks people. In real life, oh that's a catholic person. Of course I would expect them to say this. Too much difference in opinions leads to defensiveness rather than acceptance. You cannot accept 180 degrees but you can accept 10 degrees slightly left.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23937973

> "topic-focused, outrage-free" curation strategy

In the old days this work was done by an editor and published in a periodical fashion. My recurring quip about social media is that it’s helping us collectively realize the value of good editors.

Try using List feature of Twitter. It still is free from Twitter's other crap. Besides, it helps you organize account you follow and doesn't show you any ad (at least this was the case till recently).
You can more or less remove the likes from your feed, by using the 'Not interested in this Tweet', then 'Show less likes from XXX'. Twitter will show those again in a few days, but at least your feed is cleaner for a few days. (I'm only browsing Twitter on browser, so I don't know how that works on the app)

Or maybe using lists

Twitter is a filter bubble in its entirety.