I feel the same about facebook. Sometimes when I visit my mother she'll show me something on there and I'm struck by how much garbage fills the screen. Why bother? But I can see there's a small percentage of content that actually matters to her (family updates) and the other stuff doesn't upset her too much. Except when a cooking channel sneaks in pornographic advertisements in their story feed and she couldn't figure out how to get rid of it.

In the dollar auction, each immediate choice isrational, but the overall process inevitably results in you losing value once you've decided to participate. But at each step, you lose more by quitting than by keeping going.

Social media is the same, except that it's collective: if you want to keep in touch with certain people, you don't have a choice other than to use the social media site they are using, so leaving is a collective action problem.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction

Hence federated social media. No one’s pretending the current implementations are perfect, but they’re far more interesting than the existing closed platforms.

An alcoholic who can't stop going to the bar because they will lose their drinking buddies is not a dollar auction.

The feed should adapt to your tastes depending on what you like, retweet or who you follow, maybe also on what you click on. You can also add topic of interest somewhere in your profile.

For me, just following a number of "good" accounts seems to do the job.

Or you could just ignore the "For You" tab and use the "Following" tab

That's a bit of a metaphor for the current world, isn't it? Out there, it's a cultural desert with Mad Max undertones; but in our well-behaved, manicured corners of intellectualist internet, all is good and everyone agrees with each other.

You just have to:

1. Follow the accounts posting interesting content.

2. Whenever you see anything that’s not interesting to you, you click the three dots on the card and select “not interesting to me”.

You can train your feed very quickly this way, and I can say Twitter is mostly valuable for me now.

1-a post from Macron on Pavel

2-a picture of a dog

3-another post on Pavel by a weird account

4-future will be tab tab tab by Karpathy

5- a post by Yann LeCun

6- Elon ... :(

7- an animation of a Cockatoo

8- an infographic explaining that paradoxically the shape the shape of a light wave can travel faster than the speed of light itself!

9- someone happy about ETH Zurich CS curriculum

10- someone reposting an image full, of text about being underpaid

It's not perfect, Macron and Musk have no place there, but it's not the MAGA bar you got.

I am afraid to use autocomplete because it is so disgusting and distracting.

After that, the place is a pretty great with smart engineers talking engineering.

I guess it must be great to be tracked by Elon Musk's minions in exchange for some entertainment.

Once I accepted that my "For You" tab got much better.