How to remove Twitter Trends permanently, both on the site and on the mobile app:

1. Open Twitter in a desktop browser (should work the same on mobile but I did this on desktop)

2. Go to Settings -> Content Preferences -> Explore Settings

3. De-select "Show content in this location"

4. Click on "Explore locations" and select Bhutan

5. Ignore the warning informing you that Buthan's Trending section does not exist, and save.

Unfortunately someone at Twitter read my comment... The Bhutan trending section exists now. :-(

Works in the app.

Generally, there really is no point to using Twitter.

There's evidence of manipluation of threads [0], shadow-banning / blacklisting of users on the 'platform' in light of the admin tool leak [1]

Not only 'Trends' are subject to manipluation artificially, but it now matters more about 'who's tweets' actually do show up on Top or Trending sections; even with similar Likes, hearts and comments. Take this tweet [2] for example which proves that they are 'shadow-banned' on the trends section and still has similar stats like the trending tweet.

I won't be suprised to see the same in Instagram, TikTok or many others these days.

[0] https://twitter.com/ArcVRArthur/status/1282436347421171712

[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-ac...

[2] https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1287903462689103872

You can use Twitter completely fine without ever paying any attention to "Trending" or things like that. For many, it probably makes the experience better not to do so. (other recommendation: Twitter lets you mute specific people and phrases. make liberal use of that).

(semi-OT: I'm also surprised how those screenshots are paraded around as "aha! caught them!". Did anyone seriously think there wasn't any moderation of trends etc going on before?)

That's what I'm doing. The only thing I'm noticing in the dev community is the rise of many weird account of "self made developers" that tweet stupid things like "how to add 2 + 1 in JS" that are gaining a lot of followers in a short amount of time.

Looks like there's a network of these guys, doing RTs and talking with their group in order to gain followers.

Most of them sell courses and ebooks.

> Did anyone seriously think there wasn't any moderation of trends etc going on before?

I too am surprised at people who thought the trending list was organic. It's been obvious from the day it appeared that it's curated and/or paid for placements. Purely from a programming point of view, trying to keep hate speech, racism, and shock content out of it automatically would be nigh on impossible (q.v. recent AI attempts to do this sort of thing on News sites and Facebook).

Well, I assume there is equal parts organic, natural propagation, and astro-turfing. I am a curious and analytical mind, so I'd like to believe I know where the rabbit holes begin. The problem for me is informatic.

> (semi-OT: I'm also surprised how those screenshots are paraded around as "aha! caught them!". Did anyone seriously think there wasn't any moderation of trends etc going on before?)

This is pretty similar to conspiracy theorists vs normal people with regards to the US government spying on people before Snowden.

I think "anything based on arbitrary user input on a major platform has some moderation tools" is far from "conspiracy theorists".

How far? As I understand it, the conspiracy here is that Twitter uses these moderation tools to silence people with a certain political perspective. I think — assuming that is indeed the case — this does lean more on the conspiratorial side, and is not akin to moderators banning bots trying to shift cialis pills.

The reason why I liken this to Snowden is because at least anecdotally, the typically dialogue I have seen is

Conspiracy Theorist: "Twitter are shadow-banning people!"

Normal Person A: "That's a dumb conspiracy theory."

Twitter: "We are not shadow-banning people."

Normal Person B: "Here is proof that Twitter shadow-bans people."

Normal Person A: "Well yeah, obviously. It would be pretty naïve to think they weren't always doing this."

---

You can quite accurately substitute Twitter with the US government, shadow-banning with spying, and Normal Person B with Edward Snowden.

I was specifically just talking about the reaction to the trending mod tools existing, as if that was bad or surprising in itself. That there are mod tools doesn't prove that there is political targeting. And in reverse, if you claim that Twitter isn't especially targeting some group, you hopefully aren't basing that claim on a naive "they can't be doing that because they don't have moderation tools".

Yes. We can also remember that Richard Stallman called Snowden a 'Hero' [0] for revealing the PRISIM programme was his strongest evidence around the NSA mass-surveillance and backdoors in general using internet services and companies. Without this, it would still be another 'conspiracy theory' which would have lacked any concrete evidence to support Stallman's claims.

[0] https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2014/02/18/richard-stallman-calls-...

The most visible part of Web site being moderated is not a scandal.

I think that depends on the nature of the moderation. If a major platform were deliberately amplifying right-wing extremists for example, it would likely be a scandal.

Yes, the the bad thing mentioned in this thread was supposed to be existence of admin moderation tools. Nit the way they use it, but that it even exists.

This comes up a lot, and it feels like my response is the same every time. Twitter’s great, but you need to be careful who you follow.

Ruthlessly unfollow or mute those who pander to the lowest common denominator, avoid general interest politics at all costs, follow only experts in their field and keep following count below 200. Refuse to play the game of becoming internet popular - unless you have a blue check, it’s rigged against you anyway.

Also, quit Medium while you are at it.

Quit all social media and spent more time offline.

but first get on all social media to debate quitting all social media ad infinitum

As Jack Dorsey said [1] in an interview a while ago:

"I also don’t feel good about how Twitter tends to incentivize outrage, fast takes, short term thinking, echo chambers, and fragmented conversation and consideration."

I see Twitter as an almost pure outrage machine. I generally avoid it but when I do visit it and the Tweet I'm reading is about a topic that has two or more sides, most of the replies shown in response are the just the most vicious and aggressive attacks by the other side. Just punch lines or insults.

[1] https://twitter.com/jack/status/1095457906848231424

Recently I started muting people on Twitter according to a few rules: anything where they were telling people how to behave (“i don’t know who needs to hear this but it’s not ok to do X”); anything very sanctimonious; anything attacking a person rather than debating their views; anything discriminating against someone based on their skin, their background, etc.

The end result, after many weeks of muting, was fascinating: firstly, twitter became much more considered and informative. And secondly, it became far, far, less engaging! I’d read something and think “huh, that’s useful” or “seems reasonable” and with a yawn close the app.

Enragement is engagement. Twitter (the business) has failed to figure out what problem it solves, what its really _for_, and that vacuum of leadership has been filled by the emergent consequences of its algorithms.

So I deleted my old twitter, which suffered from some of the problems the author points out. After six months or so I agreed to create a new one and only post things related to software development and technology, positive things. Mostly engaging with development communities and promoting my own libraries. Likewise, the people I follow pretty much stick to tech. I don't mind if they post family photos here and there, but mostly people I follow stick to tech. That's it....

I created an anonymous account for everything else.

The person who wrote this should probably talk to a therapist about his obsession with hunting people down online instead of blaming a social network site.

I joined Twitter back in 2007. Early days. It was great as a micro-blogging platform. People mostly just logged about what was going on in their lives. Most already had a digital presence elsewhere as bloggers and such. And there was a lot of experimentation going on.

Then things picked up and there was a massive influx of people and companies. That's when things changed. In and of itself, the public debate isn't a bad thing: it's, above all, a function of a larger, more diverse audience trooping in one place. The fact of the matter is that Twitter, as a private company, never had any incentive to create the affordances to cater to the complexities and intricacies that come with hosting the public debate. On the contrary.

I just stopped using Twitter at the end of last year, for the sake of my own mental well being. That doesn't exclude me from being concerned or being reflective about the topics and current events that are on everyone's mind these days. Not being on Twitter helped me reclaim mental bandwidth to reflect on my own life, here and now, and allows me to consider the world in a critical and compassionate way without sapping my energy.

I love Twitter, it is my favorite social network and I get tremendous value out of it.

For me the keys were:

- Be fast to follow and unfollow accounts. It's hard to build a valuable feed, and requires a lot of experimentation. Some accounts I felt sure would be valuable are not (for example, info security researchers who only tweet complaints about travel rewards programs). And some accounts that seemed marginal turned out to be great, like some socialist/leftists who are also hilarious.

- Don't write tweets. Seriously, unless you are really trying to build a personal brand, there's no reason to tweet. Same with retweets.

- Remember any tweet you enjoyed and might want to see again. You can do this with the "like" button, or by bookmarking.

- Block or force-unfollow anyone following you, who you don't like. A force-unfollow is done by blocking and then immediately unblocking that account. Doing this silently knocks them off your follower list.

- Ultimately I made my account private to make it easier to focus on reading.

I happen to like Twitter. Me and Facebook have never gotten on well.

To each his own.

I love twitter. I follow great number of artists and tech guys and people I used to be friends with in Livejournal (some of them I met in person).

I always wonder how people even come across problems such as hate speech and toxic people over there. Politic threads with people who have no understanding of the topic they are talking about? Stop joining trashy and pointless discussions - problem solved.

Sometimes it's worth the effort to extend yourself into less than desirable situations because the message is more than worth its debate. I'm not saying argue ad infinitum, but inject a piece of reason in a place of disillusionment.

Let's just be clear, as companies Twitter is much better than facebook. A lot of the "toxicity" hate against twitter had to do with people on the platform not the platform itself. That said, I hope mastodon improves quite a bit more to be competitive.

It'd be interesting to know what's the percentage of HN users that use Twitter actively.

I started using Twitter a few months ago and it's been a pretty universally positive experience for me. I'm more connected than ever with the Elixir community, am able to stay on top of new libraries and developments more effectively than I ever have in the past, and am able to ask questions of experts in fields I'm still new to.

This has directly led to me being more involved in open source, submitting talks to conferences I'd previously felt are out of my league, and has demystified hard topics like formal methods.

Twitter, like all social media, seems to be what you make of it.

I use it to follow a bunch of academics. They share papers and ideas. It is nice as long as you avoid politics.

What would you define as active?

I've never made a Twitter or Facebook account. Many people pressured me over the years and even one company tried to force me into a Facebook account, but later relented. Seeing what a dumpster fire they are today, I'm happy that I resisted making accounts.

Just wanted to mention https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ in case someone did not know it. No 3rd party, no trends, tweets in order, etc..

RT what you’d upvote, quote URL for what you’d downvote, reply if there’s something to be said, and just keep posting ideas and arts in general(and don’t repost)

Quitting it is arguably better tho

I would actually be curious if one were to start charging for each social media, which of them most people would be willing to pay vs which ones would disappear.

Out of:

Snapchat

TikTok

Facebook

Instagram

Whatsapp

Twitter

Reddit

Quora

HN

If I had to pay on a subscription basis, I would ditch every single one of them. WhatsApp is basically glorified SMS. I can live very well without the occassional "look at this funny video" shit. The only value I get out of Facebook is its event calendar. Since most of the type of events I used to love to go to are banned since Covid, I don't see a reason to continue using FB anyway. Twitter is pretty US-centric and basically just a journalist tool in my area. Reddit used to be fun until it wasn't. And HN is a nice to have, but I wouldn't pay for a subscription. But I might be the wrong person to ask, I find subscription models scammy. I had NetFlix and Audible, and am very happy to have jumped off the train. I never had Spotify, and I felt majorly pissed when Apple started to push its Apple Music pop ups in the Music app. In fact, my dislike of subscription models is so strong that you will likely alienate me as a customer if you ever inform me about the ability to subscribe more then once.

HN/bookface only. Reddit once used to be good for real reviews/opinions. But now it's full of shills/manipulation bots who do not disclose themselves. The conversation and comments do not feel organic either and highly manipulated on international/news/geopolitical/political/sensitive things. It's like someone wants to force us to change our views.

Reddit is still the best for specific topics imho, I wouldn't mind switching to a forum but if I want to read about and discuss football (soccer), news about my country, old school runescape, and stuff like /r/IdiotsInCars there's really no alternative for me (since I haven't used FB in years).

> news about my country

I would recommend that if you're from the U.S., just subscribe to the Reuters RSS feed and one Chinese state public broadcast channel (globaltimes.cn). That's it. You'd know what both sides say and form an independent opinion after that.

If you're Chinese, follow one of the reputable American media (not CNN, Fox, New York Times etc they're low quality entertainment sources, not news) but something like AP or Reuters in addition to your own. Never believe one side.

Do you think reddit can be reborn to make it better and not have those problems?

Do you think HN not having pictures plays a role in keeping it cleaner than Reddit?

HN is good because of the moderation and 'niche' audience I think. Any place with a relatively specific topic and passionate userbase can either shift to very good or very bad, the decider is moderation.

private forums would continue to outshine all of them

Private forums only compete with Reddit and HN on that list. Quora already seems like Xenforo with a highly custom skin.

Forums were basically never used for socializing with people you met irl. Nor could I imagine a scenario where I'm using a forum to stay in contact with irl friends except the rare case where my squad somehow set one up in 2006.

What type of private forum? Any examples?

They wouldn't be very private if examples of them were discussed on HN, would they?

without giving examples, I enjoy one that revolves around webdev, biz and programming, with a fair amount of hazing between longterm members.

Twitter trends are manipulated. Do not take them seriously. They're a tool of social engineering.

It's worth studying the trends.

I am getting a dejavu from this thread.

Arguments used to justify twitter always rely on certain users of the platform. I am not sure how that makes twitter good as a platform. By staying on the platform, you are forcing other developers and people to use it to announce their projects and keep you up-to-date aka networks effect.

I follow people on Twitter because they post on Twitter. If they'd post somewhere else, I'd probably follow them there (within some limits). That doesn't mean I post updates about my stuff there - if others want to follow my updates, they can go where those are.