A proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world

Re:A proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world by russellbeattie on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @02:34PM (#16531359)

I read Twitter almost exclusively via my custom personal news reader that I developed like 5 years ago. It allows me to do a variety of things to increase the signal/noise ratio of tweets. For example, it aggregates tweets by person in chronological order [1] - making the daily aggregate of a person's tweets into a single post akin to David Winer's original blog. What I also did is stop following non-humans except for rare instances. Both helped me cut through the noise by quite a lot.

Then recently, I excluded all retweets. It's quite amazing how little actual new thoughts and opinions are shared on Twitter - getting rid of retweets cut out easily 80% of the tweets I'd see. And I'm OK with that - I think too many people retweet reflexively, without real thought and it ends up being a waste of time.

1. https://photos.app.goo.gl/kdQyqzWXDIvV0VfR2

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Re:A proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world by rahul003 on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @05:41PM (#16532754)

How bad of a job the UX people at Twitter are doing, that we have to come up with apps like this to read the feed!

This looks really cool. I wish they were flexible about organizing our feed.

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Re:A proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world by Skunkleton on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @06:48PM (#16533205)

Twitter's goal with their UX is probably to maximize "engagement" rather than "usefulness".

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Re:A proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world by yoz-y on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @07:51AM (#16536004)

Twitter has probably too many users now to be able to create a single UI that would please everyone. It is sad that they have crippled the API for newcomers and forced the look and feel on the old indie clients.

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Re:A proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world by atomi on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @03:20PM (#16531766)

I use twirssi with regex highlights and just read the highlights. All I ever read are posts caught by the regex.

I think adding links to user profiles might be a good addition if I wanted to see a all of a specific users tweets but I rarely do.

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Re:A proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world by ksrm on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @03:09PM (#16531644)

This looks great. How does it work - are you scraping this data or using an API?

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Re:A proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world by russellbeattie on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @03:54PM (#16532028)

I use the official API to fetch the tweets every 15 minutes, then it filters and saves each tweet individually into a flat database table. This view gets the tweets via JSON using a simple SQL query that groups and sorts by user, filtering for the past x hours.

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Re:A proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world by pythonaut_16 on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @03:20PM (#16531769)

Is that a picture of the custom news reader itself, or is the custom part just producing the ATOM stream and you're using a standard news reader?

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Re:A proposal to improve Twitter and perhaps the world by russellbeattie on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @04:00PM (#16532086)

This is an image of my news reader's Twitter view, sorry if that wasn't clear. I use a separate table to store tweets so I can create a custom view just for them. I tried making them into more of 'feed' with specific time periods (aka tweets per calendar date) and thread them into my normal news feed, but I didn't like the results. Most people tweet in bursts, and I follow people all over the world, so I'd inevitably cut someone's thoughts in half. Also, tweets are generally links, so I treat their content more like I would when browsing Hacker News or Reddit (skimming), which is different from how I view my feeds (reading).

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