1. move 99% of my follows to lists, so I get less useless, dopamine level hacking spam
2. anyone can just call me to say hi, chat or rant: https://sonnet.io/posts/hi
When it comes to making any meaningful, or at least interesting connections with people, I’ve had more success with 2. in a month, than with Twitter in the past 10 years or so.
Interesting idea. How many have taken you up on this so far, excluding people you already knew? I’d be super anxious about doing this, but it does fun.
Back in the day when blogging is still hot, many "tech bloggers" that I read exchanges "friend links" between their blogs so their readers can discover other blogs. Many high-end bloggers are quite picky on who they would exchange links with (after all the link is displayed on the home page), which resulted a high quality read list.
Maybe people should resume doing it.
PS. "back in the day" does makes it sounded old, but it was just 15 years ago or so.
Folks on HN have postulated that the reason Google search results are so terrible these days may have something to do with content being terrible. A garbage-in garbage-out problem. Maybe this lack of friend links is contributing.
Also I have a pretty slow phone, and I'm baffled by how much faster that results page is than Twitter Home. Apparently all the slowdown was from the content I didn't want to see! Amazing. Nuts.
Like, Twitter Home scrolls sluggishly and sometimes even freezes my phone. This search result across as fast as an HN comments page.
I turn off retweet for most people and use chronological feed. This achieves exactly what I was doing without the manual work of turning off retweet for each user. Thanks for sharing!
twitter's time and place has passed. Was clever and even a bit useful for a while, and like facebook, has been taken over by fake accounts, bots, scammer, shameless self-promoters and partisan hate on both sides yelling at each other
Tweeting these days is like screaming into a hurricane and hoping someone will hear it.
I've blocked twitter (and other social media) in my hosts file on my mac - can't get to it, can't follow links to it and haven't missed it a bit. May have even dropped my BP a couple of points.
The problem is that ultimately the business' incentives aren't aligned with their users' and this will be true for any subsequent platform as long as it's advertising-supported.
Advertising-supported platforms make money off "engagement" aka getting people to spend as much time on the platform as possible so they can see ads. It doesn't matter if the content people are being shown is deceptive (clickbait, fake news, etc) or outright malicious (spam, scams, etc). In fact, clickbait, deceptive or intentionally antagonistic typically generates more engagement (as people argue endlessly) than pleasant & useful content.
Solving this problem requires a different business model where the users pay the platform for access just like you pay for your phone or internet service. The problem is that it won't sustain a bloated company with lots of engineers making 6 figures endlessly building an engineering playground.
The two most significant issues I've dealt with in the last year have been Microsoft's PrintNightmare and the two rounds of 10/10 Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities. In both cases, news regarding mitigations, scanning, live exploits and efficacy of patches all came from a few people's Twitter feed.
We have several vendors selling us "threat intelligence" and nothing I received provided all the detail, and "official" information was often literally a screenshot of people's Tweets, a week after I saw them. Customers were asking us for help and were I not looking a Twitter I would have had nothing.
I'd like to block Twitter. I never actually made an account there. But I can't manage what I need to without it.
That would sort of imply that there is an alternative. Where else do you get near-real-time commentary from ongoing popular events, as well as bite-sized (potentially insightful) ramblings on assorted topics of your interest that are not curated by corporate news sources and that you previously might never have known existed?
I have a careful selection of people I follow, and I use the "block" feature a lot. Other than that, I look at what Twitter shows me and I see a relevant set of posts in the fields I'm interested in (tech, Classical Music, math). I scrupulously avoid people who talk "politics" -- maybe this is what helps my feed stay nice.
Recommendation algorithms really need to come with extensive UIs for tweaking, tuning and cleanup (less like this, more like this, don't include this, you're seeing this because of... etc...), maybe completely new 'exploration UIs' to actively find new stuff at the edge and beyond my own bubble.
For instance, having to open random YouTube links in private browsing mode just to prevent that the home page is forever "poisoned" with this specific type of crap is kinda bizarre.
IMHO recommendation algorithms could be really useful if they allowed the user to play a more active role. Give us a "power user UI".
> Recommendation algorithms really need to come with extensive UIs for tweaking, tuning and cleanup (less like this, more like this, don't include this, you're seeing this because of... etc...), maybe completely new 'exploration UIs' to actively find new stuff at the edge and beyond my own bubble.
> IMHO recommendation algorithms could be really useful if they allowed the user to play a more active role. Give us a "power user UI".
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the optimization behind “the algorithm”.
They’re not optimizing for usefulness or, god forbid, life enhancing stuff. They’re optimizing for engagement. Sugar for our brains. If the user could control what they see in the platform we could self optimize for usefulness. This would go directly against their wishes.
1h week of life enhancing videos = 10$
10h week of clickbait or rage inducing videos = 100$
How about a recommendation algorithm that works like this:
- When you upvote an item, the algorithm connects you to other people who upvoted it and shows you what else they upvoted ("more like this")
- When you downvote - the algorithm disconnects you from those who upvoted it and you see less content from them ("less like this")
Some properties:
- You have an easy way to expand your connections - just upvote/submit content you liked.
- Because it is so simple, the algorithm can explain to you exactly why you are seeing a given recommendation - because it was liked by people who liked X, Y and Z (where X, Y and Z are things that you liked before).
- Since your connections are a result of your explicit content ratings - you don't have to worry about poisoning your recommendations by content you merely viewed. You have active control over your recommendations.
If that sounds interesting, check out my hobby project that works exactly this way: https://linklonk.com - it's free, no ads, no tracking.
I feel as though companies want their “smart” things (algorithms, recommendations, devices) to do stuff better than us, maybe they think that’s what we want, but I’d just like them to serve us better instead - let me tell it what to do and it do exactly that.
IMO as a hacker it's better to focus on maintaining a personal website, feed and newsletter which is under your control rather than spendeng time on a giant platform which is fully out of your control.
I deleted my twitter account a couple of years ago but started to read a couple of people on there during the us election and the pandemic. These last couple of months twitter has clearly decided to try to clamp down on people reading without an account (the way instagram did with their website a few years earlier). They have tried a couple of things.
First there was a popup blocking the screen and scrolling telling you to log in or sign up if you clicked on any post, image or other user. At first you couldn't dismiss it. Then they changed so you could dismiss it but it would move you back to the point where you clicked (essentially as a back button). You could get around it by reloading the page instead of dismissing the popup, then you got to the page you wanted. Now they're testing activating the popup after you scroll through the feed a bit with no option to dismiss.
I imagine everyone posting to twitter have no idea this behaviour have been introduced and that twitter is trying to wall their garden. This is especially depressing since there are a number of pandemic related posters (Kai Kupferschmidt among them) who have interesting feeds, but no other communication channels that I know of.
> I'm sure Twitter is well aware of how their algorithm works, and I'm sure it yields the best results for the majority of their users, but I apparently don't belong in that group.
The algorithms are optimised to crank up the engagement metrics. Though that’s certainly good for Twitter, whether that’s actually the best thing for their users is up for debate.
>>The algorithms are optimised to crank up the engagement metrics.
In other words, making sure you see a bunch of people that you agree with politically, and also throw in a handful of extremists on the other side (whichever 'other side') so that you feel compelled to fight it out back-and-forth online while twitter sells ads to the hate-fest.
People complain about how bad twitter is all the time and that just isn't my experience. Sure, I sometimes search for my shitty senator and get pissed off by the terrible things he is doing but most of the time what I see on twitter is interesting at best and boring at worst.
If twitter recommends something I don't like, I click on the three dots and click not interested in this tweet.
> So, here's where I need your help: I really want to discover more interesting people online; people who write about PHP, webdev, and programming; people who dare to challenge ideas that we take for granted; content that makes us think outside our box. But how do I find those people?
I'm subscribed to your RSS feed, that's how I follow people who write about webdev. ;)
@brentroose Have you considered either of the following?
Path A:
1. Search and find folks that you wish to follow...i think you mentioned php devs, etcx. But, look for their personal blogs, websites - not twitter.
2. When you have found the folks you might want to follow, try and follow any rss/atom feeds that they be publishing for their blogs/sites. If none, then maybe reach out to them and ask what might be a good mechanism to follow them (which ideally is not twitter).
2. Once you have established your identity on the fediverse (either stood up your own instance, or joined someone else's or whatever), then look for communities focused around the topics for the people you wish to follow...and then follow them on the fediverse (no twitter-like algorithm here on the fediverse).
Finally...Path C:
You can actually pursue both of the above paths if you wish! :-)
I wish there was an option for an algorithmic timeline but only across accounts I follow.
I use the algorithmic timeline because a lot of people I follow are in a different timezone, so chronologic means I just never see their tweets. But in the last few months, it feels like I see more tweets from accounts I don’t follow than those I do.
Like many homepages powered by recommendation algorithms, it's useful to actively dislike content you don't want to see. (e.g. YouTube)
Twitter tends to suggest trending tweets on topics it assumes I'm interested in. It tends to pick up self-promoters posting sensational headlines. I tell Twitter "See less tweets like this" and also mute that account. Doing so a few times definitely improved my experience on the timeline.
Recommendation algorithms help me find interesting content I wouldn't have found otherwise, but are not yet smart enough to filter noise on its own. Just like one tends their own garden by pruning weeds, it helps to actively maintain one's timeline.
You can only complain up to a point. Twitter cannot stand in for your own judgment about who to follow. If you blindly follow the recommendations of a free engagement machine you will get what you paid for. Twitter is big enough that there is a huge variety on there, and almost always the solution is to follow better people. You cannot do that overnight. I have a great experience on Twitter, because I follow some really excellent people. It took 5-10 years to get there, and it should, because you can't speedrun the process of figuring out who you want to listen to and what you care about.
Yes, obviously it is a political slogan and nonsense engine because the structure is not good for much else.
I do enjoy occasionally going on twitter though to randomly click through profiles and see how insane and crazy people can be. It is kind of like going to the zoo to look at the animals.
I recommend using Twitter's search if you want to find tweets on a particular topic. If someone posts several worthwhile tweets, you can follow them. Over time, you'll start getting retweets of good content. You can follow those people. Use Tweetdeck and create lists by topic. The most important thing is to take your time.
There's no way I'd let Twitter tell me which tweets I should see. You're going to end up with people that promote themselves and their friends, and that promotion gets annoying in a hurry - if I wanted that I'd watch QVC.
I mostly try to avoid accounts with more than 100K followers. A lot of them post information of questionable accuracy because that's how you generate interest in your account. Moreover, they aren't likely to interact unless you're in their inner circle, which makes for a boring experience.
I think the problem for a lot of people is that on Twitter you're not subscribing to information/topic streams but to personalities.
I follow almost only information security accounts but I'm still subjected to authors' extreme politics, conspiracy theories, and rants touting their personal morality clogging up my feeds.
I think that it's Twitter as a medium that is a flawed method of communication. Also it doesn't help that the only method of self-categorization (hashtags) penalizes the author by further reducing the limited character count.
For me, twitter home is just random. Developers should check their code, there must be bugs or something. I ve been using twitter chronologically for years now which begs the question: why did we give up on rss?
Twitter is an endless firehose of new impressions, for the users that want that and RSS just bottoms out, you can mark everything as read and "beg for more". It's too relevant and doesn't add random new stuff. The info-addicted brain (I have some of that, unfortunately) is rewarded by twitter.
But how can Twitter work if it doesn't show you (semi-randomly) people who you don't follow? How can discovery work (and especially the other side, being found)?
I still don't get Instagram. When I use it privately it just shows me accounts I followed manually, and obvious ads. I helped with a shared account some time ago and I never understood how people found our content without explicitly searching for us.
[+] [-] rpastuszak|4 years ago|reply
1. move 99% of my follows to lists, so I get less useless, dopamine level hacking spam 2. anyone can just call me to say hi, chat or rant: https://sonnet.io/posts/hi
When it comes to making any meaningful, or at least interesting connections with people, I’ve had more success with 2. in a month, than with Twitter in the past 10 years or so.
I miss forums though.
[+] [-] icy|4 years ago|reply
Interesting idea. How many have taken you up on this so far, excluding people you already knew? I’d be super anxious about doing this, but it does fun.
[+] [-] _3jh0|4 years ago|reply
I would like to see how it goes and make a post for my website too.
Here's an offer link for HN crowd: https://calendly.com/searchableguy/15min
[+] [-] petecooper|4 years ago|reply
This is great, may I use this idea – with credit – please?
[+] [-] tannr|4 years ago|reply
Was it worth it for you?
[+] [-] nirui|4 years ago|reply
Maybe people should resume doing it.
PS. "back in the day" does makes it sounded old, but it was just 15 years ago or so.
[+] [-] notreallyserio|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iruoy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvtrn|4 years ago|reply
Check out http://indieweb.xyz
The premise of the IndieWeb aligns closely with what you just described I think.
[+] [-] maccard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrebbel|4 years ago|reply
Also I have a pretty slow phone, and I'm baffled by how much faster that results page is than Twitter Home. Apparently all the slowdown was from the content I didn't want to see! Amazing. Nuts.
Like, Twitter Home scrolls sluggishly and sometimes even freezes my phone. This search result across as fast as an HN comments page.
Lean TL for the win, thanks!
[+] [-] charleshan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ejb999|4 years ago|reply
Tweeting these days is like screaming into a hurricane and hoping someone will hear it.
I've blocked twitter (and other social media) in my hosts file on my mac - can't get to it, can't follow links to it and haven't missed it a bit. May have even dropped my BP a couple of points.
[+] [-] Nextgrid|4 years ago|reply
Advertising-supported platforms make money off "engagement" aka getting people to spend as much time on the platform as possible so they can see ads. It doesn't matter if the content people are being shown is deceptive (clickbait, fake news, etc) or outright malicious (spam, scams, etc). In fact, clickbait, deceptive or intentionally antagonistic typically generates more engagement (as people argue endlessly) than pleasant & useful content.
Solving this problem requires a different business model where the users pay the platform for access just like you pay for your phone or internet service. The problem is that it won't sustain a bloated company with lots of engineers making 6 figures endlessly building an engineering playground.
[+] [-] technion|4 years ago|reply
We have several vendors selling us "threat intelligence" and nothing I received provided all the detail, and "official" information was often literally a screenshot of people's Tweets, a week after I saw them. Customers were asking us for help and were I not looking a Twitter I would have had nothing.
I'd like to block Twitter. I never actually made an account there. But I can't manage what I need to without it.
[+] [-] TuringTest|4 years ago|reply
That would sort of imply that there is an alternative. Where else do you get near-real-time commentary from ongoing popular events, as well as bite-sized (potentially insightful) ramblings on assorted topics of your interest that are not curated by corporate news sources and that you previously might never have known existed?
[+] [-] justsomehnguy|4 years ago|reply
also by people who use it as a full fledged blog platform for publishing lengthy articles.
If you post 20/x thread, why do you even bother with Twitter in the first place? Twitter's abysmal site UI doesn't help it either.
[+] [-] fortran77|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flohofwoe|4 years ago|reply
For instance, having to open random YouTube links in private browsing mode just to prevent that the home page is forever "poisoned" with this specific type of crap is kinda bizarre.
IMHO recommendation algorithms could be really useful if they allowed the user to play a more active role. Give us a "power user UI".
[+] [-] arepublicadoceu|4 years ago|reply
> IMHO recommendation algorithms could be really useful if they allowed the user to play a more active role. Give us a "power user UI".
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the optimization behind “the algorithm”.
They’re not optimizing for usefulness or, god forbid, life enhancing stuff. They’re optimizing for engagement. Sugar for our brains. If the user could control what they see in the platform we could self optimize for usefulness. This would go directly against their wishes.
1h week of life enhancing videos = 10$
10h week of clickbait or rage inducing videos = 100$
Yeap, user control, never gonna happen.
[+] [-] lonk11|4 years ago|reply
- When you upvote an item, the algorithm connects you to other people who upvoted it and shows you what else they upvoted ("more like this")
- When you downvote - the algorithm disconnects you from those who upvoted it and you see less content from them ("less like this")
Some properties:
- You have an easy way to expand your connections - just upvote/submit content you liked.
- Because it is so simple, the algorithm can explain to you exactly why you are seeing a given recommendation - because it was liked by people who liked X, Y and Z (where X, Y and Z are things that you liked before).
- Since your connections are a result of your explicit content ratings - you don't have to worry about poisoning your recommendations by content you merely viewed. You have active control over your recommendations.
If that sounds interesting, check out my hobby project that works exactly this way: https://linklonk.com - it's free, no ads, no tracking.
[+] [-] ssss11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mehdix|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Erikun|4 years ago|reply
First there was a popup blocking the screen and scrolling telling you to log in or sign up if you clicked on any post, image or other user. At first you couldn't dismiss it. Then they changed so you could dismiss it but it would move you back to the point where you clicked (essentially as a back button). You could get around it by reloading the page instead of dismissing the popup, then you got to the page you wanted. Now they're testing activating the popup after you scroll through the feed a bit with no option to dismiss.
I imagine everyone posting to twitter have no idea this behaviour have been introduced and that twitter is trying to wall their garden. This is especially depressing since there are a number of pandemic related posters (Kai Kupferschmidt among them) who have interesting feeds, but no other communication channels that I know of.
[+] [-] mg|4 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1482303273352769543
[+] [-] Raed667|4 years ago|reply
I would like to see an algorithm that is tuned for my happiness and not some product manager's metrics and KPIs
[+] [-] pomber|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daenney|4 years ago|reply
The algorithms are optimised to crank up the engagement metrics. Though that’s certainly good for Twitter, whether that’s actually the best thing for their users is up for debate.
[+] [-] ejb999|4 years ago|reply
In other words, making sure you see a bunch of people that you agree with politically, and also throw in a handful of extremists on the other side (whichever 'other side') so that you feel compelled to fight it out back-and-forth online while twitter sells ads to the hate-fest.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rambambram|4 years ago|reply
I'm subscribed to your RSS feed, that's how I follow people who write about webdev. ;)
[+] [-] mxuribe|4 years ago|reply
Path A:
1. Search and find folks that you wish to follow...i think you mentioned php devs, etcx. But, look for their personal blogs, websites - not twitter.
2. When you have found the folks you might want to follow, try and follow any rss/atom feeds that they be publishing for their blogs/sites. If none, then maybe reach out to them and ask what might be a good mechanism to follow them (which ideally is not twitter).
Path B:
1. Research the Fediverse (https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse)...for platforms, communities on mastodon, pleroma, etc.
2. Once you have established your identity on the fediverse (either stood up your own instance, or joined someone else's or whatever), then look for communities focused around the topics for the people you wish to follow...and then follow them on the fediverse (no twitter-like algorithm here on the fediverse).
Finally...Path C:
You can actually pursue both of the above paths if you wish! :-)
[+] [-] deergomoo|4 years ago|reply
I use the algorithmic timeline because a lot of people I follow are in a different timezone, so chronologic means I just never see their tweets. But in the last few months, it feels like I see more tweets from accounts I don’t follow than those I do.
[+] [-] coolandsmartrr|4 years ago|reply
Twitter tends to suggest trending tweets on topics it assumes I'm interested in. It tends to pick up self-promoters posting sensational headlines. I tell Twitter "See less tweets like this" and also mute that account. Doing so a few times definitely improved my experience on the timeline.
Recommendation algorithms help me find interesting content I wouldn't have found otherwise, but are not yet smart enough to filter noise on its own. Just like one tends their own garden by pruning weeds, it helps to actively maintain one's timeline.
[+] [-] cormacrelf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arpa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] telxosser|4 years ago|reply
I do enjoy occasionally going on twitter though to randomly click through profiles and see how insane and crazy people can be. It is kind of like going to the zoo to look at the animals.
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bachmeier|4 years ago|reply
There's no way I'd let Twitter tell me which tweets I should see. You're going to end up with people that promote themselves and their friends, and that promotion gets annoying in a hurry - if I wanted that I'd watch QVC.
I mostly try to avoid accounts with more than 100K followers. A lot of them post information of questionable accuracy because that's how you generate interest in your account. Moreover, they aren't likely to interact unless you're in their inner circle, which makes for a boring experience.
[+] [-] BlueGh0st|4 years ago|reply
I follow almost only information security accounts but I'm still subjected to authors' extreme politics, conspiracy theories, and rants touting their personal morality clogging up my feeds.
I think that it's Twitter as a medium that is a flawed method of communication. Also it doesn't help that the only method of self-categorization (hashtags) penalizes the author by further reducing the limited character count.
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kzrdude|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ratherbefuddled|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] retrac98|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Marazan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captainmuon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frouge|4 years ago|reply