Everything old is new again. Twitter is fine. It’s people who suck. Exercise your own restraint and freedom to associate. Externalizing blame is to throw up your hands and to join all the other naysayers in yelling at clouds.
As for the rest of your comment, the personal is political. Twitter is personal. HN, for example, is much more of a water cooler type beat.
FREE and natively supported and part of Twitter domain itself, on my feed?!
I'm not sure how Twitter works now, but I imagine that a system of bot generated topics rather than direct following would be better suited for people like me.
Hashtags don't work, anybody can put any hashtag they want, even when the tweet is completely unrelated to the hashtag.
And that was one of the brilliant things about Google+:
You could post under different topics so people could read my programming or local posts without having to cope with my religious or political posts (just examples, I never got around to the two last ones I think).
Another thing was - after Google lost the nym wars their ux for using pseudonym accounts became one of the best I was aware of (no, it is not the same as the multiple-logged-in-accounts ux which I find rather unsatisfactory, but I guess parts of it lives on in YouTube were I can still see my pseudonym(s) when I log in.)
I don't think that would work thesedays. If you had a political post, I'd say you'd correctly keep it in its correct circle (based on you highlighting the feature here), but since Google+ was a thing, a new generation of twitter addicts have the mantra of "everything is political, even looking at a keyboard is a political act, politics affects everything you do, even if you just sit there, so that's why my political rant is in your model train collector circle #sorrynotsorry"
So they'd abuse the circles feature with that mantra as an excuse.
I want a social network where I can choose to follow people and some tags - want to be able to follow you, when you are not talking about politics and remain 100% ignorant of any posts you make about politics.
You get a clear stream of useful, relevant content. Unfortunately this also gets framed as a "filter bubble".
I want a filter bubble.
The problem in practice is that twitter actively fights you doing this. It tries to pour raw sewage into your nice clean stream and you can't stop it. You see what other people have liked, or what's popular or lots of other things I don't want to see.
At this point in time the biggest value of twitter is it's userbase, it's critical mass, people are on twitter, they're not on mastodon.
Even with all the barriers in place, the truth is that Twitter still works better through a third party application.
Your feed comes through relatively unmolested, with just the things you want to follow in the order you want to follow them.
Not if you use Tweetdeck.
If you use a third-party app, you won't get most of that. You'll just get a reverse-chronological timeline of people's tweets and retweets, and I think some allow you to filter out retweets.
I think describing a "topic-focused, outrage-free" curation strategy as 'filter bubble' is somewhat asinine.
"Filter bubble" is a dirty term because it suggests at best an isolated, distorted view of how things actually are, at worst active exclusion of valid dissent. The point is that important details aren't being noticed in the domain of what has attention.
I understand a lot of outrage comes from righteous minds who want to make the world a better place (or prevent it from becoming a worse place). -- All the same, just excluding outrage feels more like it's (at worst) ignoring 'allegedly important, unrelated things', rather than ignoring 'important, related things'.
I have thought about this before. I believe internet lacks enough echo chambers. In real world, people automatically segregate based on their income bracket, community, values, lifestyle, job, family (kids or not?), healthcare, accessibility to various things, etc. People have all sorts of stereotypes and things they expect other people to conform to based on visible factors. This isn't possible online. There is too little information and our stereotypes will never be correct (too big number). It shocks people. In real life, oh that's a catholic person. Of course I would expect them to say this. Too much difference in opinions leads to defensiveness rather than acceptance. You cannot accept 180 degrees but you can accept 10 degrees slightly left.
In the old days this work was done by an editor and published in a periodical fashion. My recurring quip about social media is that it’s helping us collectively realize the value of good editors.
Or maybe using lists
I bet you still see politics trending every day in the "Whats Happening" Section. It feels like Engineers at Twitter are working overtime to promote their political agendas, and don't care that some people may not be interested in politics, or their opinions. I deleted my twitter for this reason.
Also, check gopher too. You can check out HN thru gopher://hngopher.com and avoid commenting, just lurking out the post and the comments. Use lynx, or better, sacc. That way youl'll avoid all the attention traps.
This is the best way to use Twitter, especially your decision to not post or reply to anyone.
We're all prone to say something stupid on online, and if we attach our real identities to those statements, like many people on Twitter, someone somewhere will weaponize it. And, if you have enough "clout" on Twitter, something you tweeted yesterday, or a decade ago, can end your career. This is the world we live in.
Your normal feed forces you into a much more "all or nothing" approach. Someone who often tweets useful stuff but also lots of noise, you either have to put up with the noise or miss their good stuff. In Tweetdeck, just their good stuff shows up.
One thing I noticed in my own time on Twitter was that this is easier said than done. It's very difficult to accurately gauge whether something is 'without any hidden connotations'. I'm not a historian or a biologist or a sociologist. I'm not a scholar of constitutional law.
There may not be an agenda there, perhaps not even an agenda consciously realised by the author, but it's hard to accept the idea that we can escape 'connotations'. Very much like how the best propaganda appears as fact, or how ideology must first present itself as non-ideological, this gets extremely tricky when it comes to something like history, or even biology.
Similarly, the mere presence of a plurality of ideas is insufficient to overcome this.
I suspect that many who would follow your advice will find themselves still trapped in very similar bubbles of ideology, but this time without the knowledge that it really is ideology. This is a more insidious kind of politicisation, because it primes the user to put down their critical guard in the fact of a lack of 'hidden agenda or connotations'.
From what I understand he wants to avoid the "professionally outraged", not necessarily to scrub his feed of anything remotely "ideologically-charged".
I don't often go on Twitter anymore, but from what I saw and from what other people report, there seem to be some "wars" going on where people are just shouting random stuff at each other without even so much as attempting to have an actual debate. I can see how following such exchanges can feel tiring and a waste of time. However, most tweets I used to see from people I follow are mostly matter of fact and technology-related.
Of course, they sometime stray from strictly IT talk to more personal things. For example there's a woman who would sometimes tweet about her daughter / being a mom. Could this possibly be a vehicle of some sort of ideology, such as feminism / women in tech / whatever? Sure. But it only comes in once in a while, I can jump over it, and it has never devolved in any kind of screaming match.
Having said that, I think it's far more interesting to look at the medium itself. Marshall McLuhan, after all, did say "the medium is the message" or "the medium is the massage".
Twitter was first conceived as a micro-blogging service. You simply gave status updates about what was going on in your life, or a part of your life, or whatever. Then @ replies, # tags and re-tweets were introduced. Re-tweets weren't even invented by Twitter, it was something users started to do, and then Twitter implemented it as a button:
https://www.annehelmond.nl/2013/01/19/on-retweet-analysis-an...
The same is true for the # tag which was introduced by early user @chrismessina.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Messina_(open-source_adv...
Then there's the history of Twitter itself which is mired in strife between the original founders, and changing different strategic visions as things suddenly - and rather unexpectedly - took off, thanks to the mobile revolution. Twitter is, after all a business, and not a very successful one at at that: it only turned it first annual profit in... 2018.
Why this backdrop? Because if you use Twitter, the feed of tweets you see is inherently distorted by this historic context. Twitter is used as channel for direct conversation between individuals... but it was originally never intended to become that. Twitter is used for marketing purposes to wide audiences... but it was never originally intended to be that.
The same is true with most social media. They were conceived by a few founders on a very limited premise - which was indeed rooted in their own personal context of affluence - and everything else became improvisation along the way as users took the concept and then started using those tools in novel, unexpected ways.
None that implies that these platforms don't carry value, are unusable or a lost cause. And neither does it excuse how the strategies and the visions of the past 15 years didn't result in affordances that curb discrimination, polarization and intolerance, but sometimes even reinforced them.
What this means to your average user, then, is that social media present a particular biased representation of reality; just as much as you would find in mainstream media. It's up to the user/reader then to be critical and understand that these continuous feeds of disparate thoughts are only presenting you with so much truth about the world.
Historians are taught that true objective historiography doesn't really exist and a pure fact based overview of history isn't informative. The interpretative nature of historiography doesn't make history any less valuable. As the famous French historian Marc Bloch wrote:
"The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings."
Marc Bloch was the founder of the Annales School together with other famous historians: their work informed contemporary historiography up until this day. Beyond academics, Bloch saw active combat in World War I, joined the resistance in World War II and was arrested and executed 3 weeks after D-Day. He was also Jewish. Context matters, and Bloch was acutely aware that he wasn't just writing history, he was also very much being part of it's making.
In the same vain, in actively using Twitter, users are shaping it and forming it's history.
As you get older, you just don't have all this free time to sit there and scroll through garbage.
If you are tweeting about programming in a robotic manner while black people are being murdered by police, or while we rush towards a blue ocean event, you do have a hidden agenda.
Pretending that you can talk about the programming in a 'neutral' way is a radically political opinion. I get it, you actively and loudly don't want to discuss anything that isn't immediately interesting to you without making you have to question anything. But at the very least you have to concede that that itself is a strongly political statement.
What do you mean by “in a robotic manner”?
> ...you do have a hidden agenda.
What agenda? Why is it hidden?
> Pretending that you can talk about the programming in a 'neutral' way is a radically political opinion.
Why do you think that’s a political opinion? Why do you think it’s “radical”? What is it radical in relation to?
> I get it, you actively and loudly...
What do you mean by “actively and loudly” here?
> you... don't want to discuss anything that isn't immediately interesting to you
How do you know that? Do you know the GP?
> that itself is a strongly political statement.
What is?
However, later on I realized that Twitter is actually a "outrage generating machine". Everyone is outraging over every trivial, even wrong, thing at every chance. This was very toxic. And since I was addicted to Twitter, it was affecting my mental sanity in very subtle ways.
Later on I unfollowed 90% accounts and stuck to those accounts which strictly tweets only about programming, math, history and other such stuffs in robotic manner (I.e. without any hidden agenda or connotations). I unfollowed everyone who have even a slightest chance of tweeting about politics. Also I stopped tweeting and replying to anybody.
Suddenly Twitter became a bit nicer place and now I only spend may be 5-10 min there.
If you can discipline yourself and carefully choose whom to follow, Twitter is great, otherwise it is a toxic hell.Just don't follow any political figure or any people who outrages on daily basis. And don't even try to debate there. It is not a debate plateform. It is broadcasting platform.