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by fsloth 1530 days ago
"but what exactly is Twitter?"

It's like a watercooler around which a huge bunch of people with interesting takes and things to say on lots of different interesting things have gathered. It takes a while to find the information streams as they are not made obvious, but at least for me I got much better first hand information of both Covid and Ukrainian war from the people I follow before media.
1 comments
hammyhavoc 1530 days ago
Simultaneously, Twitter is an algorithmic echo chamber. I had the opposite experience: fear porn scaremongering throughout the pandemic with microchips in the vaccines, 5G nonsense, graphene in the vaccines, the evils of Bill Gates, and far more. My interest in Twitter has declined massively year-on-year. I used to use it as an IRC replacement with hashtags in TweetDeck in place of channels. Now all the fun stuff is happening on Matrix protocol in Matrix Spaces.
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fsloth 1530 days ago
"fear porn scaremongering throughout the pandemic with microchips in the vaccines,"

Any of the algorithmic timelines are generally horrible, agreed.

I follow only people who tweet and retweet reasonable things. I use the timeline with content only from the people I choose to follow ("Latest"), and don't follow lunatics. This is a fairly nice experience, but needs a curated list of people to follow, building of which needs a while.

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hammyhavoc 1530 days ago
The only way I can stomach Twitter is using a browser extension that removes retweets and likes from others, and recommended stuff from Twitter. Also removed the Trending/News area, and the Explore tab. Added a chronological timeline back too, but really don't use it much, and feel a lot better for it.

I don't think it's even necessarily about who you follow, there's a lot of pushing celebrities who are into this rubbish.

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chiggsy 1529 days ago
You should consider this approach with some caution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

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