Twitter is particularly bad. I genuinely cannot find a single positive thing about it. It just feels like a big huge bitch-fest of one complaint and antagonist after another. Doesn’t matter the agenda, it’s pure negative energy. I’m so glad to have dismissed it.

Yeah, Twitter is really bad. Every discussion, no matter how trivial, devolves into a flame fest. I've told this story on HN before, but I was reading some minor controversy about Hearthstone esports and eventually the thread devolved into people threatening to kill each other. Over someone that made a dumb mistake in one of their games. It is crazy.

I think some of us use a lot of electronic communication for work, so we kind of get the idea that there is a human at the other end of these threads. The average Twitter user has not quite made that connection yet, and see it more of public performance art than person-to-person communication. The results are not good.

(There is also some cultural thing going on right now where it's no longer OK to compromise on anything. This results in extreme polarization everywhere.)

Twitter, more so than Facebook even, is 100% dependent on who you follow. I choose academics, (good) journalists, etc. My feed is constantly enlightening, I learn something everyday, and there's no gossip or BS. Every time someone posts a selfie or some food they are eating, they are gone.

I love it.

Also: muting. You can not only mute trolls that sneak into your feed, but entire words and people. After a few weeks of customization it's almost full proof.

I came back to Twitter after a 4 year hiatus to my account which formerly had thousands of followers in my hobby niche. Wow is it horrible now. I don’t remember it being so polarizing and negative constantly. I find that to be the case for many Internet communities (e.g. Reddit).

I guess it depends on who you follow, what you mute, and who you block.

The most negative energy I get now is people begging for money, because they don't have enough and need some more. The classy ones try to sell something other than a sob story.

Maybe I should mute "Ko-Fi", "GoFundMe", and "Patreon".

I follow mostly tech, artists and gamedev people and I get very little of the negativity. Don't follow any of the big public figures etc.

Unfortunately, a few of the programmers that I'd like to follow retweet a lot of the cultural warfare crap (left vs right, white vs nonwhite etc.), and there is no feature to filter that out specifically. In the end, I decided to just unfollow them, as the agitation created by vitriol and stupidity was just not worth it.

The other kind of negativity I see is people tweeting dumb/argumentative things at the people I follow. The solution for that is to only read replies that the people I follow replied to and ignore the rest of the randos. This makes my daily Tweeter routine very quick BTW.