[sureIy]

My X feed is FUBAR.

My feed was tech-only. Real people publishing real stuff.

Last year X started occasionally showing some random content like Reddit, I'd mark them as "not interesting" and move on.

Since last month there's no tech content by tech people, there's exclusively junk worse than on Reddit's homepage. No amount of "not interesting" will fix it. Oh, there's porn now too.

I stopped opening X altogether.

[matthewdgreen]

Yup. I had a beautiful infosec feed that was incredibly useful. Sometime over the summer my "for you" devolved into wild political opinions, and many of the smartest people left the platform which turned by "Following" feed into a ghost town. Every time I used the app I came away feeling angry, and I realized I was happier not using the app than using it.

Fortunately about 1/2 of the smart people have shown up on Bluesky, and we can have technical conversations now. I'm hoping all the energy eventually comes back.

[jcims]

Infosec twitter had been self-immolating long before X. I basically solved the influx of weird stuff in one night by blocking everything that wasn’t related to my interests. The next day I was reading about rockets from my rocket peeps, radios from my radio peeps, and politics and posturing from my infosec peeps.

[sroussey]

Ug, I get tons of Alex Jones drivel all of a sudden. No thanks.

[Havoc]

That plus even the classic SV tech crowd is now so entangled in US partisan politics that you're more likely to hear about whatever outrage is happening in culture wars than a new technology. Complete write-off and I don't just mean X

[smt88]

The classic SV tech crowd wasn't worth following anyway. It was an endless stream of self-promotion and people pretending to have great wisdom because they exited one company once (or, worse, got a job as a VC).

[nobrains]

I have noticed searching for topics that interest me, ends up showing more content related to that search term in my feed. At least for some time. Just putting it out there incase someone wants to manually tweak their timeline using the search workaround.

[sunaookami]

Why not use the "Following" feed? You won't get any recommended content (besides ads without an adblocker) and only see stuff from people you follow.

Side note: It's annoying how many tech people started posting their political hot takes since ~2016. I unfollowed everyone who tweeted about politics.

[NikolaNovak]

It's tricky.

I don't post about politics on my social media feeds, but... I spend increasing amount of time feeling that I should start.

Context:

1. I come from a country that was torn into horrible civil war by populist leaders spouting exactly the same tactics and phrases as some of the North American elected leaders do now.

2. I don't believe in manifest destiny, I'm not religious, and so I don't believe that the average well being in USA and Canada is God given, inevitable, or guaranteed.

3. All it takes for evil to win is for good people to do or say nothing.

So... Is covering my head under the sand like the mythical ostrich and going LaLaLa over next 4 years the polite thing to do, lest somebody unsubscribe? Or do I have all but duty to try to encourage tolerance, bridge communication between my polarized friends and neighbours, speak of my past and hope for the future?

[sunaookami]

Posting about politics on social media changes exactly zero. In the end you will only have people with the same opinion as yours around you which distorts your world view. If you really want to get involved, you should start with your local community and make things better in your hometown. You can't change country-wide politics.

[eddd-ddde]

Well you can share the same message you just shared on social media. Suddenly many people with the same ideals can improve their community all over. Sounds like great impact to me.

[_w1tm]

> If you really want to get involved, you should start with your local community and make things better in your hometown. You can't change country-wide politics.

Isn’t that basically Russia

[bdangubic]

Care to explain what you mean here? Getting involved in local community is where you can make a difference in your and your loved ones lives. Voting in local elections is INFINITELY more important than general elections and it is not even close… Not sure what Russia has to do with that?

[aboardRat4]

https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%B5%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%...

You have to use Google Translate or something, because the page is unavailable in other languages.

The key point is that Russian activists have been trying to influence the large scale politics locally since about 1880 to zero effect.

[fl0id]

it's not about changing anything, but it can make a difference if people notice that x amount of people or people xyz they care about are not actually apolitical bots, but do have opinions and values.

[intended]

Hey, so I weirdly have an answer to this.

Based on what you've written, you are choosing between polite self interest (unsubscribes), and vocal group interest (speaking out).

Essentially a choice between helping and staying out of the way.

The real question is your values, the reason you want to speak up in the first place.

In addition, it doesnt look like you want to speak up for the sake of it, but to prevent a dangerous outcome.

For a situation like this, its safe to say you will always be conflicted if you don't speak out.

What you will rue, is speaking out ineffectively. So speaking out without a plan, alienating people - NOT achieving the goal that motivated you in the first place.

At this point, i typically try and come up with a diagnostic question. Something that puts two values a persons holds in conflict.

Eg: If someone gave you a clear set of topics that would prevent this outcome, would you immediately speak up on them, even if you may not agree with the words? (I guarantee that these words prevent the outcome you foresee, and have no hidden knock on effects)

This asks how far you would go to achieve your outcome. Would you be willing to say things you dont like, to prevent populism?

If no, then there are conditions to your goal, or your goal is slightly different.

Knowing your motivations (just want to speak, want to achieve a goal, want to achieve a specific outcome, want someone else to handle it), helps you figure out what you want, and the limits of how far you are willing to engage.

[jcims]

I'm confident there are examples but I've yet to see anyone artfully navigate this.

A few years ago a bunch of folks I followed started adding politics to the list of things they would regularly talk about, which I fully support. But I don't owe them my attention and when the topics start to just become a steady stream of undifferentiated ranting about political topics I'm out. Then they would invariably take a self-righteous position to explain the drop in their numbers as people that 'can't handle the truth' and that they are better off without them, when the reality is that they mostly just spammed themselves out of an audience.

Do what you like of course, but for me unless the person is bringing new information or context to the conversation I'm out.

[matthewdgreen]

Because a lot of the smartest and most interesting people just stopped posting. And frankly I don't blame them. A good chunk of the reason is that the replies are recently much more angry and toxic, which makes the entire platform stressful to use.

[2024user]

Examples of those people?

[sroussey]

Well, I did. Thinking about writing on bsky.

X prefers randos with checkmarks donating money to Elon over people with interesting opinions.

[sureIy]

I tried but I don't follow enough people I suppose (~100) and many probably left. This resulted in my "Following" feed being completely taken over by really prolific CSS guy.

[calmworm]

“It's annoying how many people started posting their political hot takes…” ftfy

[cosmic_cheese]

Discover feeds, if they try to be actually relevant to the user, can be a great tool for finding new people to follow and help keep the following feed fresh. I primarily follow artists on Twit-alikes and it’s how I once upon a time used it on Twitter and now use it on Bluesky.

A discover feed that’s not adversarial isn’t strictly necessary but it’s a significant selling point.

[Yeul]

My brother is an artist and he's looking into an alternative to Insta.

With the US going full into homophobia, Christianity and xenophobia it's time to divest from American social media.

[sunaookami]

>I primarily follow artists on Twit-alikes and it’s how I once upon a time used it on Twitter and now use it on Bluesky.

I still do this on Twitter and the "For You" feed works great.

[vanrohan]

Also make sure to remove bots from your followers. Having them in your social graph impacts your feed for sure. I made the "x bot remover" Chrome extension that automates removal based on simple rules. It's free.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/x-bot-remover/aohkh...

[vborovikov]

Thanks for the extension. By the way it only started working after I switched the X display language to English.

[vanrohan]

Thanks for letting me now, I need to fix this, or atleast mention it in the extension description.

[Kye]

Most of the tech people I recognize are on Bluesky now. If you follow enough of the same people, even the "Following" timeline won't help because they're just not there.

[greatgib]

What is infuriating is the fucked algorithm that is now showing in priority the tweets of Elon, even if you don't subscribe, follow or care about him.

That is the real problem nowadays, he destroyed the system to make it a self promotion tool first. I'm quite sure that always on feed tweets of him can easily brain wash hundreds of millions of people.

[PartiallyTyped]

I had him blocked and last I used xitter I still saw his stuff.

[sroussey]

Block him is the only way. The algorithm gives him 1000x over everything

[hoseja]

Weird, I'm not getting nearly enough Elon tweets as I would like. Each day there is news about another wacky thing he tweeted and I only learn about it afterwards.

[QuarterReptile]

At the risk coming off as pedantic, it ceases to be a self-promotion tool if the system is destroyed.

[numpad0]

I don't get why people would be so kind as to use the "not interested" button, on Twitter or anywhere. Just block them all. Content creators are same thing as 10x engineers, they can't be manufactured and supply is limited. There should be only so many of them that are capable of writing passable spams that can be force pushed without mentally destabilizing the team that does it.

Not that anyone should go back to a dead website, just that not blocking is too nice.

[sureIy]

Good point. Unfortunately blocking people often takes more taps and achieves less. The platform definitely won't show you the creator, but can still show others exactly like them.

[kbos87]

My X experience has become scrolling through the 2/3 of posts I never asked for, including: 1) Elon's posts, though I never interact with him as a subject, 2) Ads from Trump-supporting PACs seeking donations, 3) Ads for hunting games with graphic depictions of animals being shot. Everything else is insultingly basic clickbait. These aren't topics I interact with, they are just representative of baseline content on X right now.

[BeFlatXIII]

> My feed was tech-only. Real people publishing real stuff.

My Twitter feed got similarly FUBAR from organic causes in 2017. Everyone started tweeting politics all day.

[sureIy]

My repair for that was to unfollow anyone posting BS I was uninterested in.

[BeFlatXIII]

I tried that, then all I got were crickets.

[miki123211]

Use "latest", not "for you."

"Latest" is still exclusively people you follow, in chronological order (and content explicitly marked as sponsored if you don't have premium.)

X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this. You don't like the algorithm? Don't use it, and use X just like everybody else for the first 10 years of its life.

[SketchySeaBeast]

> X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this.

Why would you emphasize that point when it's clearly wrong? Is it ignorance? Is it to push a particular narrative? I'm confused.

[shkkmo]

Your comment would be more productive if you provided a counter example or any argument to support your claim.

[SketchySeaBeast]

I didn't provide an example because there's already a ton of other responders with examples. The claim is clearly false, but it was presented as emphatically true and I was wondering why.

[t-writescode]

I have found my mental health substantially better from downvoting and moving on in those cases, especially if there’s other people already responding with what you would want to say.

[SketchySeaBeast]

Yeah, I should do that instead. I'm just so tired of people uncritically and emphatically spreading falsehoods, especially in cases like these, when it's not a function of philosophy or viewpoint, and can be found to be objectively wrong, despite initial insistence. But yeah, downvote, move on.

[tanaros]

> X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this. You don't like the algorithm? Don't use it, and use X just like everybody else for the first 10 years of its life.

Speaking as a non-X user, doesn’t YouTube offer essentially the same thing with the “subscriptions” tab?

[sitharus]

Yep, it absolutely does. YouTube would be unusable without it for me

[shkkmo]

I don't know that I'd consider YouTube to be social media, though there are similarities.

[drdeca]

Tumblr also has this?

(Not counting the ads and specifically-paid-to-be-promoted posts, but those are clearly marked, and I’m pretty sure twitter has as many in-line ads)

[gammarator]

… Bluesky offers a clean, strictly chronological following feed as well as your choice of algorithmic feeds.

[louthy]

> X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this

Facebook has this: menu -> feeds -> friends

[threeseed]

> X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this

Threads and BlueSky both offer this.

And so there is no literally zero reason now why anyone should stay on X.

[romaniitedomum]

> And so there is no literally zero reason now why anyone should stay on X.

Unless the people you're interested in hearing from are mostly or exclusively there.

[sroussey]

I’ve found… that I’m not missing much.

Even from people I admire that are exclusively there.

The push to generate a constant stream of content means that their good stuff is long past anyways.

[StefanBatory]

I was using X for fanart of games I was playing.

I ended up getting constant alt-right posts no matter how much I marked them as not interesting.

[dustingetz]

i turned off the images, it’s under bandwidth saving settings but makes x much better and helps keep the alg away from memes also

[pjmlp]

Same experience over here, I was already on Mastadon, and finally joined the Bluesky crowd.

It has finally become the kind of content Elon Musk fans love so much.

[wortelefant]

I am using lists and have pinned them, it gives me a custom feed as before

[jalapenos]

The "not interesting" barely does anything. I've probably pressed it on the various angry bullshit US politics shit-slurry posts over a hundred times and they still sneak in.

Who the hell is "Vivek" and why do I care at all? And since when did I ever express interest in "confirmation hearings"? And does Musk have his account hard coded to be every 3rd post? Jesus

[aboardRat4]

https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Vivec

[cchance]

Same here its all trash, i stopped logging into X a couple months ago, its all political and hate speech now its nuts, i used to have funny meme's and general tech news and gaming news, nope not 1 of those things anymore its all political shit and people complaining at each other about random shit, oh and insane amounts of crypto

[bdavbdav]

YouTube seems to be doing this to me too

[mikae1]

Follow selected channels via RSS in your feed reader.