It's also not even necessarily them. Twitter is enthusiastic in assuming that, because you're engaging with one person, you must also be interested in what they're engaging with.

My efforts to have reasoned debate with one person in my life who was becoming more and more aggressively MAGA (prior to some rather extreme takes on... well, several different incidents) did not in any way equate to having even a remote interest in being flooded with content from Ben Shapiro or Turning Point USA, just because she happened to give it fake Internet points.

I gave up on her Twitter well before I gave up on her as a person for this exact reason.

Create lists and unfollow everyone. This way you only get the content you want.

on one hand it's exciting to see the thought process of another person (who often doesn't realize they're giving you an alpha-preview release of their latest brain farts). But it gets tedious quickly.

I got constantly sucked into discussions in the past simply because it's too easy to hold myself back. Now I consume twitter without an account either using nitter or directly browsing some good lists of people I used to follow.

Don't want to be that kind of person? Better make sure you are not consuming that kind of stuff. It starts to come out unconsciously if you are not careful.

I remember one case in particular where the guy was a genius at posting niche Middle Ages history and then every other tweet became political and I was so sad, because I absolutely loved his content.

As an a-political person who tried hard (but failed occasionally) at keeping my stuff a-political or othwise I’d start a new account to be political because my main one was tech stuff.

Twitters biggest failure was the lack of tagging and filtering options it provided. The History Genius could have tagged his polical tweets as #political and Twitter could have an option to follow someone except their #political ones. Just like following without retweets.

The solution is obvious to me. But clearly Twitter founders love the political stuff or something. So I just chose to avoid Twitter at all costs unless linked to it or researching a topic, with the odd time I got dragged into it.

And I think this probably is a byproduct of the "attention economy" where there has been an arms race for mindshare (I'd like to find a way to put that better but hopefully it's clear)

I think politics are work, when you're company is anything but small is nasty and taboo. And IMO a fireable offence when it gets to any level of harassing others for not sharing your opinion.

There are times and places for certain things and I strongly believe work isn't one for politics. Unless the work itself is directly political.

I've shared this opinion before on HN and had strong support, so I know I'm not alone. Especially among the introverts.

Another is that it's another moderation headache. Anyone can insert a hashtag for any reason, so anyone will. If you don't police it, it becomes useless; if you do police it, it becomes heavy.

It's not perfect, but muting key words like the names of a few popular political figures, names of political parties, and names of hotbutton issues will drastically decrease the amount of political content in your timeline.

I shouldn't have made it a hashtag.

there is no such thing

(:

Its not apolitical, just pettier politics

The sense in which people flame each other on HN about programming language opinions can be described as 'political', but it's also not directly related to e.g. current US politics.

Sometimes people like starting one with warning, I see it all the time. I don't see how Twitter can't create a simple filter like that.

I could go through all my tweets and instantly choose which category it goes in.

Judging from posts like these (and the other comments on this thread), most people have difficulty unfollowing others, which is a shame.

It is kind of how when decluttering it's not only more effort to clean than to ignore the issue, but it's also easy to fall into the mindset of "I liked/needed this thing that one time, maybe I'll like/need it again sometime in the future".

Doesn't that just leave you in an echo chamber of people who agree with you, and you don't learn anything new?

people who simply tweet too many times per day.

I'm with you on that one.

This was an interesting question. I have two thoughts here:

1. On unfollowing content that I don't disagree with: I got very tired of a lot of the dev content I was following on Twitter and how it was flooding away other stuff I follow. I unfollowed a TON of devs. It's not that I disagree with them, I just don't want to consume that content.

2. On unfollowing content that I disagree with: I don't think the issue with echo chambers is the echo chamber itself.

For example, I'm not religious. I can choose not to follow religious content and be in an "atheist echo chamber", and still, when encountering religious people talking about religious things, respect them. If I'm coming from a tolerant and accepting place, when I encounter them I can learn from them, hear them out, understand their point of view, but otherwise choose to live my life without constantly consuming religion.

Religion is very much in the social discourse, but this applies to other things too. I don't know much about Nepal. If I ever go to Nepal, meet a Nepalese person, or just get curious about it I'll respect their ways and be ready to learn a lot, in spite of not consuming Nepalese content.

I don't think its the "echo chamber" per-se that's the issue— it's the intolerance, and for some people the echo chamber just makes it worse.

If you follow an account that tweets (reliable!) information about space rockets, you will learn a lot of new things about space rockets.

Not everything on Twitter is a manifestation of a political viewpoint. There is a huge amount of worthwhile stuff that is just informative, interesting, beautiful, or fun.

Only if you choose to. "I don't want to be consuming" doesn't need to mean that you disagree with them, just you aren't getting value from reading it.

Further to your point: It's one of those paradoxes that while the marginal utility of listening to some people you disagree with is obviously high, the marginal utility of listening to any particular person you often disagree with is likely quite low. Most people are not particularly thoughtful or particularly articulate, but your best bang-for-buck will be to try and find some who are both.

Maybe google+ was right all along. Publish this to the octopus circle, publish that to the math circle, and this other thing to the politics circle.

Only if the GP does not want to consume expressions of opposing viewpoints.

The idea isn't to unfollow people you disagree with. The point is to curate your follow list to contain the type of content you want to see.

I enjoy reading different viewpoints, as long as they're presented in good faith and with a willingness to discuss them openly. I still follow a lot of people I disagree with.

I've also followed a lot of people with whom I agree, but I don't want to consume their endless Twitter dogma about the subject.

Shape the feed to the content you want to consume. If you want to consume healthy debate and alternate viewpoints, curate accordingly. The idea that the only way to break an information bubble is to let low-quality arguments from the other side flood your timeline is not true.

I also use a 3rd party client, so I'm not subjected to algorithmic chicanery in my feed. I mute widely. And I read it at most 2 or 3 times a day.

In general, I find it WAY more pleasant than FB. (I'd love to ditch FB, but for a number of logistical/community reasons that's just not feasible for me, so I try to minimize my interaction with it.)

(What I REALLY want is the old GEnie SFRT back.)

I feel kind of trapped following them :/

I tried using the "this tweet is not relevant" thingie but it doesn't do anything. I mean, this is a thing for which I would gladly have an AI-powered smart filter.

I tried this. You end up shedding a ton of follows and mostly end up with people who say nothing. Then a week later you like something that person says and refollow, then they say something again and get unfollowed.

I think fundamentally it's like the article says. twitter is just full of anger and paranoia. I can't say if it's twitter that creates this, but it certainly enhances. Twitter is the problem and quitting is your only option.

I have a politics list, a tech list and a couple more. If I want to catch up what’s going on in politics, I just check my politics list.

> The mute function is also highly useful.

This feature didn’t do anything for me. It still shows you tweets but muted (you have to click to see them). The FOMO in me makes me always want to click on them to see what I’m missing out on. I wish they would just completely hide them.

It's the difference between not watching NBA games because you're not interested in basketball, and refusing to watch the local news because "they have a (left|right) bias".

There is more content out there competing for your attention than you have time in your life to consume it. Rather than letting twitter's default algorithm feed you the most "engaging", OP is saying a more mindful approach works for them.

Moreover, communication seems less hostile and more nuanced when we aren't forced to discuss everything with everyone at once. That is why more focused communities like this one seem to be more enjoyable to use.

I follow on twitter:

- A group of museums and people who work on Roman ruins in the UK and post a lot of ancient history content

- Local news reporters in beats I care about

- A few tech journalists and “celebrities” or podcasters

- Cat and dog video accounts

- Some money people

- Baseball related stuff

I do not follow people I know on Twitter and haven’t logged into Facebook for years. The magic of Twitter is that you can purge content you don’t want to read very easily. I actually have family involved in politics... they never ever want to talk shop, ever. There is nothing more vapid and boring than yakking about political bullshit.

If you think you are in a bubble about politics because of your social media friends, seriously get new friends or mute anyone who talks about how great their guy is. It will measurably improve your life.

> not everyone who tweets agressively is toxic.

This doesn't matter.

It's about controlling what kind of energy you let into your life.

Negative energy needs to go.

The good thing about it, is that I only listen when I want to listen, and IF I want to listen.

Social media, slow and steady, absorb you into giving, increasingly, more time to them. Either by creating an echo chamber, or creating passions, promoting things you love/hate. Anything to get you hooked more.

Majority of the people do not filter/reduce the alerts on their phones. Good luck working on a project when you get 10 beeps per hour from Twitter, CNN, BBC, FB, IG, YT.

Time and Attention.