[ivanhoe]

I don't get why people keep using the default recommendations? The whole point of twitter was that you manually pick who to follow and see just that. And you still can do that, use the Following tab and it'll work just the same as the day 1. For extra points you can create lists so that you can group people and fine-tune your timeline...

[pembrook]

Social platforms are entirely driven by 1 primary, habit-forming action — the slot machine scroll.

They call it doom scrolling for a reason. The other parts of the UI might as well not exist.

Even on Reddit and HN, there’s an absolutely devastating drop off between homepage visitors and subreddit visitors (or /ask /show visitors). You would be amazed how many Reddit users have never left the home tab.

[mrkeen]

I don't know who's right here, but the article did address it

> One of the main ways I was using Twitter is to find people doing interesting things and then follow them to see what they're up to. This no longer works since you no longer see tweets from the people you follow unless they go viral.

[ivanhoe]

I don't want to sound arrogant, but they really need to rtfm.

There's a tab Following in the top and it shows people that you follow and their activity. I use it daily and haven't noticed anything of what they describe.

Now, there are other problems obviously: one is how aggressively Twitter was pushing their "recommendations", so for a while the app used to switch back to recommendations without asking for permission, which was really a douchebag move, but you just switch it back to Following tab and timeline again works fine. I haven't noticed this lately, so it could have also been just a bug they've fixed. Another issue is that they mix notifications from "friends of friends" (in Facebook lingo), which also can suck as sometimes ppl you follow happen to follow idiots (¯\_(ツ)_/¯), but you can just block annoying people and after some time trash filters out.

So it's far from perfect, but on the other hand it's not that big drama as some ppl try to present it, honestly. At least for my needs and my circle of online friends and interests...

[ivanhoe]

Can't edit the above post anymore, so let me write it here: After writing all this in the post above I've went to check the twitter (as I usually do) and it's set back to For you recommendations... so yeah, now I get why ppl say it's broken... though it's not really broken, it's just evil and really annoying...

[nasir]

The chronological order is quite subobtimal. You still want to discover new content/ideas/conversation. It's easy to miss out on a lot of what your followers have been tweeting if you don't check it 24/7. On the other hand, when you sit for an hour to check twitter, the following tab will dry-out immediately and you can't discover anything new unless you go to the For You tab which is basically a mix of stuff.

Indeed if you're active, and like stuff, the algo improves and shows you lots of relevant content. But mostly from the prominent accounts and only viral ones. So the point of the post stands.

[ivanhoe]

My experience is different, perhaps because I follow people from both Europe and US (and some in Australia and Asia), so around the clock I always have 10-20 new tweets to go through, which is just as much of social noise that I have time for anyway... but it's still the most reliable source of information for my home country daily politics (because local media is censored heavily) and also gives me a good bird-view on what's going on with web-dev and AI industries (my primary professional interest). I have accounts on all alternative platforms, but none is giving me even nearly that good signal/noise ratio...

[Crusoe123]

> On the other hand, when you sit for an hour to check twitter, the following tab will dry-out immediately

That sounds great to me!

[rasz]

Same with YT. Use https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions exclusively

[panosfilianos]

I have put some thought into this and my stack includes an assortment of Chrome extensions to observe the behavior I like.

- Hide Youtube Shorts

- Hide Youtube Watched

- uBlock Filter to remove Upcoming videos from the subscription page

- Unhook with most options turned on

I do the same for Twitter with the Just Arrived extension tweaked from gh.

[coldtrait]

> Just Arrived extension tweaked

This one? https://github.com/tecoholic/Just-Arrived

What about mobile? I find myself scrolling on my phone a lot and I use a modded app because Android, thankfully. I feel like the best solution is to just delete the app, ultimately.

[panosfilianos]

Yes, this one. No solution for mobile.

[thaumasiotes]

> Hide Youtube Shorts

Interestingly, this is a non-hidden feature of YouTube itself; you can just close the shorts section of the page. Except that the setting automatically expires after some period of time, maybe ~1 month.

> Hide Youtube Watched

This doesn't seem to make a lot of sense; would you hide "heard" songs on Spotify?

[panosfilianos]

> This doesn't seem to make a lot of sense; would you hide "heard" songs on Spotify?

The content I consume it's better one off (podcasts, informational videos etc.). If I need to keep anything on them, I store them elsewhere.

[_lvbh]

If you have no watch history, they don’t even show you recommended videos in the home page anymore. I see that as generally positive

[nialse]

This. Disabled history with a subscription makes YouTube a good boy.

[krapp]

That's just how people are, they put in the least amount of effort they can, and tend not to be curious or want to bother with change. Even on Hacker News people stumble across features hidden in plain sight all the time because they just never bothered to alter their initial routine.

[stavros]

"I don't get why people keep using the default recommendations? Just go against everything the site wants you to do and that's it!"

[mgoetzke]

It is just one tap, right on the top, not that hard and that the algorithm starts showing you stuff by default before new people follow enough is not that evil is it ?

[stavros]

I didn't say it's evil, but the site is trying to bias you into "engagement". Yes, it's one tap, one tap every time I load the site, plus the four seconds it takes for the new view to load.

[__warlord__]

Pass.