I would love to see this list updated with example screenshots of what each one actually mutes.
Either way, I had no idea Twitter muting worked like this, where you could actually mute TYPES of tweets, and not just content IN the tweets. I don't think they go over this in their docs: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-m... - I wonder if they will block this or break this if it picks up steam since it would lower their engagement numbers some (half the reason they stuff all this extra junk in your timeline, to begin with).
I can't imagine this is something that's intended or expected, but I could be wrong. I'm guessing OP is going to end up regretting posting this awesome little "hack" once they change it so it no longer works. haha
Would would hope that a big service like Twitter has checks and balances in place so no "lower level dev" can add whatever they feel like to the production service.
That's definitely correct^. In addition, I expect that this feature is intentional, as most requests will use well-typed thrift structs or graphql to perform backend requests (I think) and I would be surprised if the mute word filters were ever applied accidentally.
Those pro union messages were informing employees of their rights, and part of the dev's responsibilities were informing employees of their rights. Wasn't the message also only shown on relevant pages?
No, informing employees about labor was not part of the dev’s responsibilities. This employee was not in the HR department and the tool was not for HR-related messages. It was for security warnings.
Now I have worked at any FANG company, or even larger than 200+ employees, but I've never heard "lower level dev" to mean they have "low level access". Is this a common label to give people who have access to production database for example?
We're so quick to climb onto the corporate hierarchy even as we scorn the 'suits' and their corner offices
Every dev has low level access at some point be it writing or approving production code where do you think the concept of Easter eggs comes from which these clearly fit the description
It seems however we've gone so far up the ass of the corporate machine that we have become synonymous with it
I read a funny excerpt the other day in a book -- when Rome was full of slaves everyone started adopting a slave mindset because it was everywhere pretty soon you can't distinguish slave from master and so it is here when we as devs put ourselves into comfortable stereotypes but what do I know I'm just a low level dev
Every time Twitter comes up on HN people complain about missing reverse chronological order and hating on the liked by tweets feature. The old classic mode is one click away. Or am I in a weird long running A/B testing group still having access to this feature? I know the default mode is not what most people here like but is it really that hard to switch the display mode?
Twitter regularly switches you back to garbage mode without telling you, and you have to mute all the words in this submission to make classic mode work. muting all these words does nothing if you are in garbage mode.
> Twitter regularly switches you back to garbage mode
Right. The other problem is that garbage mode is two-way.
I don't want to see other people's likes etc, and I don't want to have my own garbage jammed into anyone else's feed either. Short of going private there's no fix for this.
On my intentionally not updated install of iOS twitter, it doesn’t have the garbage mode (still has some inserted garbage, but is otherwise chronological)
Except the list doesn't show more than 200 tweets (unless there's some trick to avoid this). If there's a sudden spike of activity, or you check it only once a week, it's easy to miss something important.
If you are scrolling more than 200 texts you need to break the list into two. Or examine who you are following. If you miss something is it that important?
and it doesn't update automatically, and it doesn't update when you click the header, and it's just basically a static list of the tweets from the last time you refreshed.
It's a very common HN trope! "I don't even own a television" on threads about cable TV, or "I don't have a Facebook account" on threads about Facebook. These 10x hipsters never want to do anything fun and easy that "the masses" do -- and they have a compulsion to let everyone else know they're special. I think it comes from parents that made a mediocre kid believe he's special and gifted and that all his ideas are profound.
i don't have a twitter either but i follow important people there. (it works on the web version at least).
john carmack for example often updates on his twitter. a couple of programmers & artists i like too. also the trends column is the most accurate "mood indicator" ever.
Seems perfectly reasonable. Here are some reasons:
1. The fraction of people on the world on Twitter is very small. Either most people in the world are missing important information, or not being on Twitter doesn’t cause one to miss important information.
2. If something important does occur on Twitter, it will be repeated on other news sources. It seems like half the news stories these days are just a bunch of tweets surrounded by boilerplate.
I think that listening to emergency radio is a good model for Twitter. It might provide you with information earlier than relying on conventional sources, and it might provide you with more blips of information, but not all of that information is necessarily correct, and you will spend a lot of time and not gain much of value over traditional sources.
I don't think the emergency radio analogy makes much sense since Twitter's value is more than just reading tweets. It can be used for initiating and participating in discussions.
Fair point. Maybe radio in general is a better model. Some people use it to have conversations with friends, and some people use it to listen to the emergency channel.
It still means that cutting it out of your life won’t doom you to missing important information.
I could live without Twitter obviously, but I could say that for pretty much every Internet service other than maybe email. What's great about Twitter is the serendipity; I've been able to follow people with perspectives that I just don't have in my professional or personal circle, and reading/chatting with them over the years has profoundly expanded my worldview. It's not much different in that sense than HN – I could never call any thread or single day of browsing "important", but I know that what I've learned cumulatively over time has been very important.
Actually they don't do that, and neither would I if I could run 50 mph, was huge, and preferred breathing air, but anyway: Importance (which is import, meaning) is mostly subjective. If there's such a thing as objective importance, attention is probably orthogonal to it. And to subjective importance too, at least at first, but then extended attention probably increases perceived/subjective importance just as protracted inattention decreases it.
I dunno, it's a tool, you can use it how you'd like to use it.
Twitter is kinda weird in that there are some blindly obvious UX improvements everyone is aware of that Twitter refrains from because the poor UX is subsidizing their business model.
This has improved quite a bit on recent versions of the official mobile clients. If you go to your lists, you can "pin" a list, which has the effect of making it an alternate timeline from the app's home screen.
It's a little subtle, but on home you'll now have "Home" and your list's name at the top of the screen, with the active one getting a blue underline. Swipe left or right to select one or the other.
I think they couldn't care less about lists. They are super annoying to access and ever since the last update which brought the mobile layout to desktop you can't even create a new list from the "add to list" screen anymore.
Sadly the entire update still feels half-baked and not thought-through and given that it's been months I don't feel too optimistic. There's so many small things that worked fine before and are just missing completely or broken now. It's a shame because I've been using Twitter for a decade but it's hardly useable now.
Thank you for writing that and mentioning it. I used it 3x without regenerating credentials the last two times. When Twitter stopped processing, I just waited 15 minutes and ran it again.
Unfortunately, you cannot turn off retweets in lists, at least on the Twitter website or iOS app. I disable retweets for most of the people I follow. Fortunately, in Tweetdeck you can filter retweets for each list individually.
Similar to what I do (lists are public, not private). One recent change has annoyed me, though - won’t let me view my public lists unless I am logged in.
> Hi Ian, muting these keywords won't actually change the number of suggested Tweets in your timeline. We are exploring ways to improve suggestions to allow you to further customize your timeline. More to come!
I don't use twitter and I don't really know what this is, but it's at the top of the hn. I mean, I obviously know what twitter is and have read tweets, but otherwise this is kind of foreign. Can someone explain what these are used for?
As Twitter grows, they stray further and further from just showing you tweets from people you follow, and start showing all sorts of other crap you didn't ask for in your feed, such as "person X liked this tweet" or "here's a tweet from someone you may like", and so on.
There is no "official" way to disable these annoying entries in your feed, but over time people have found secret "tags" that if you put in your mute list, will achieve what you want.
This here is a list of all those available tags. There's no real description of what "kinds" of tweets each block other than the vague name though.
Same for web and iOS. To my amazement, not only is this something that Twitter did on purpose (3 times, once for each client), but their designers have defended it vigorously. Because metrics obviously are more important than users saying what they want.
I'm not following this account. Nobody I follow is, and nobody I followed interacted with this tweet in any way. Twitter's "reason" for showing it to me was "Bernie Sanders (Parody) received a reply", which is a bizarre justification for adding it to my feed.
For a moment I 100% thought this was a real tweet because I usually look at the user's handle rather than their display name. Anyway, this encounter has made me decide to take a break from Twitter this election season.
Same story, but wasn't this just a trending post? Like it popped up for you long before it had 200k+ likes? I remember seeing it and nobody I know follow it but I don't recall thinking anything of it (I also thought it was Bernies account).
I barely know how to use twitter in all honesty. I'm worried I'm liking too many things and shoving stuff in peoples faces. That's a big turn off on me using social apps.
Yeah, it popped up for me as it was rising (I couldn't tell you how many likes it had). I thought "wow, I didn't expect Bernie to address this issue in that way." Then I saw the username, felt a little duped but hey, this is the web, I'm used to it. Then I felt very duped when I realized that nobody I followed had followed the account, let alone liked or retweeted it. It wasn't Promoted. It ended up on my feed because it was popular and related to my interests, I guess? What made me feel uneasy was that I follow the real Bernie Sanders, and a website showed me something that I legitimately thought he had said for a moment, and I didn't even set myself up to be in that position.
These are used to block various categories of “fake tweets” that tend to appear in your Twitter timeline. They are mostly growth features / edge stories such as “account you follow liked this tweet from an account you don’t follow”.
Can't decide if you are being sarcastic or not. But I'll reply assuming its a serious question.
Tweetdeck was created by a third-party developer in 2008. It was and is so popular that Twitter acquired it in 2011 for £25 million.
And then Twitter started slowly shutting down its apps, all the mobile versions of Tweetdeck (Desktop, iOS and Android) were suspended and removed from respective app stores. Only keeping the web version alive altered and modified by Twitter. Tweetdeck also had Facebook, LinkedIn and some other social networking service integration, those were removed too. Tweetdeck is pretty much the best Twitter app for advanced users. Now its alive but we never know what Twitter plans to do with it.
Yesterday Twitter started showing me "someone you don't follow replied to another person you don't follow" types of conversations and it's gotten really absurd at this point.
This happened to me yesterday as well, only it was "liked" instead of "replied". In my confusion I clicked on the account, since I didn't recognize it. Only to mistakenly click the Follow button, as my brain didn't manage to correctly derive the current status of it. Because I actually thought I had accidentally followed them or something similar.
I actually enjoy these "retweeted by xxx", "xxx liked this" and other suggestions options. That's how I discover other people (mainly artists) on Twitter.
Also I don't stay on Twitter all the time, so a curated timeline is more useful than a chronological one (yes, I'm going to miss some tweets, but I will miss some anyway even if I use the reverse chronological order because I won't scroll down that far.)
Yah, I agree. I don't necessarily think chronological ordering is the perfect curation system either. But the problem is that whatever criteria Twitter uses isn't aligning with what I think it should be.
Now of course, I'm not special, I shouldn't expect it WOULD be aligned with what I consider good curation. But I can't imagine the choices they ARE making are anywhere near the mean users preference. So lots of people reject that curation and choose to curate for themselves as if it was an RSS feed.
But I think the thing that these people (and I count myself among them) really want is for companies like twitter and youtube to let us make our own choices about curation.
"I really like this person and want to see everything they release."
"I like this persons tastes and want their feed added to mine"
"This person isn't that interesting, just show me stuff they make that gets popular"
"I only want to see tweets from this person about certain subjects. I don't care about their views on woodworking."
My only complaint is the autorefresh. Sometimes I'm reading something and boom the feed is refreshed and I have to scroll down to find the thing I was interested in. This has also happened when I was about to click on something. so annoying.
I don’t mind the reordered list, specially if I’ve been away for a while, but the density of suggestions is ridiculous. I’ve seen stretches of twenty tweets in my TL where not one of them was an actual public tweet by somebody I follow.
Just so others don't have to discover this: even if you block Threadreader, they will still harvest your tweets. You have to do "@ThreadReaderApp BLOCK ME".
Why would you do that? Why do people have an issue with Threadreader? A portion of Twitter users seems to really like it. So why not let them read your tweet storms that way?
If I wanted to publish a blog post, I'd do that. When I put something on Twitter, it's for a reason. I also dislike Threadreader's assumption that they get to monetize my content for free and without permission. If somebody would like to build a business on my work, they can start by asking.
Exactly. In some interfaces you'll be eventually switched back to "Home" automatically. You can tell this has happened because Twitter becomes less awesome. When I find myself thinking, "Why does Twitter suck today?" I scroll up and find that I'm back on "Home".
I don't use twitter much but it does feel cleaner with these in place.
I'm assuming though that this is a technicality of implementation. Since it changes their preferred experience, I can't imagine these keywords will remain available to block.
honestly i dont know why more people dont use tweetdeck. i have my timeline, it's not controlled by an algorithm, it's always chronological, i'm not constantly being suggested stuff, i can split out topics into columns that i'm interested in, i can filter the columns to show exactly what i want.
also can i suggest that filter:follows is super useful if you want to search a term exclusively among your follow list.
Funnily enough recently I've started using tweetdeck on my phone too. I use Firefox and an addon called better tweetdeck to adjust the column width to the same width as my phone screen. There's some jank, but the value of having a Twitter client on mobile that's not the official mobile app, and not crippled like many third party apps are now, it's enough to compensate for that jank.
I would say as a heavy Twitter user my needs are probably not typical, but imo tweetdeck with its live updating columns is the true nature of the firehose that Twitter is, and I love it.
In classic fashion, some people decided to write a script to automate entering the mute list, something that took me maybe 2 minutes in total to do manually.
Topics worked so well until they decided to reinvent them few months ago. Now:
* Some key topics missing
* The ones that are not missing, miss key people
* They keep adding me to new topics that I have 0 interest in
Also, Topics were always in Explore tab that showed all sort of shit that I don't care about. Should be a separate tab for topics (though useless now, so don't bother I guess).
Perhaps, although I'm not so sure. The muting feature as documented is clearly intended to apply to the actual content of tweets. The keywords in this list clearly seem to be things that would appear in, say, a JSON representation of a tweet, but wouldn't be part of the actual textual content of a tweet. Of course it's possible that they deliberately implemented this as an undocumented power user feature.
I think you're right. As an example, I have the word/name of a certain political figure 'muted', however will continue to see tweets involving that figure if a friend retweets a tweet that has an embedded 'card' linking to a news article featuring said political figure.
I've noticed that muted words don't mute ads. I've muted words like "blockchain", "bitcoin", and "Ethereum" and yet I still see ads for blockchain startups. Shouldn't the fact that I went out of my way to mute a word be a strong signal that I am not a good match for an ad??
> Shouldn't the fact that I went out of my way to mute a word be a strong signal that I am not a good match for an ad?
That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is as a strong signal that you're not already invested in a competing service so acquisition should be much cheaper.
Reason is none of these words actually appear in the tweet body. It is not 'mute meta data about tweets' it is 'mute words' which presumably only are in the tweet body.
You can't mute tweets 'Sent from Android' why would you be able to mute tweets based on Twitters internal meta data?
Direct quote from Twitter "Hi Ian, muting these keywords won't actually change the number of suggested Tweets in your timeline. We are exploring ways to improve suggestions to allow you to further customize your timeline. More to come!" source - https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/122087242860531712
Twitter was the most useful social network for me personally, depending on who you follow you can come across some interesting ideas there.
Yet, after a few months “sober” I wonder if I might be missing out. Is the signal to noise ratio high enough to justify using Twitter these days if you are not a major celebrity and don’t intend to promote something?
The way I see it is that there are actually two Twitters:
* Bad Twitter: is run by Twitter Inc. and tries everything to mess with your feed, turning it into a toxic mess that's designed to clickbait and outrage you. It is disrespectful and domineering in the way the UI is designed and every now and then it slaps you around by introducing a change in the UI that increases the noise in your feed.
* Good Twitter: this is the amazing people you know and don't know who use the social network to connect, create and have fun. It's creative af and makes it easy to discover new minds all around the planet. It's also very kind in that people will try to uplift each other and offer support in more ways I can recall.
Question is, how did people find out this specific set of mute keywords work? Was it a leak or did people really just figure them out through trial and error?
Either way it feels like Twitter has an incentive to close this "loophole" because they would believe it would decrease engagement, which would impact their bottom line.
I wrote something very similar for reddit a while back using an extension called Tampermonkey. Reddit uses the same CSS classes on all their promoted content so if twitter does this same this could work.
Basically, you make an eventlistener on the scroll wheel and do document.getElementsByClassName('promoted-css-class-name'). Loop over the array of elements found and set the element style to 'display:none' for every element found every time you scroll.
Oh, adding the event listener to the scroll is very clever. I was trying to do it "right" and using a MutationObserver to find when they added nodes to the document but this gets too convoluted fast.
This doesn’t work. I have blocked over 26k accounts and I still see ads. I don’t have blocked Apple or DuckDuckGo and most of the time I see those, but every single day I’m blocking more and more sponsored accounts because they keep appearing. You can’t block all of them.
Here’s my Block List. Not sure why it didn’t update for two months, maybe it doesn’t work anymore:
For promoted, you'll need to use like a browser extension or something 3rd party to remove those. I would be VERY surprised if they gave native ways like this to mute the main income source of their platform (promoted tweets/ads). haha
They have the "See this less often" option if you click the options chevron within the promoted content. I'm convinced it's a placebo feature but...that's just me.
Yeah, that (placebo), or it could mean "see this less often" of this TYPE of ad. So more about the content than the actual ad. Again, I highly doubt they are just going to let users use the platform without any ads.
My assumption is that is only for the particular ad or company and that they will just show you ads from other places instead. More of a way to nudge the system into showing you more "relevant" promoted tweets than actually removing them.
The change I've made is that I set the display of the promoted tweets to none, rather than setting their opacity to 0: article.setAttribute('style', 'display: none');
If you look at the request it does, use "copy as curl", replace the word with "$word", and put it between:
xclip -out -selection clipboard | while read word; do <the curl command>; done
Then you can probably do the whole list at once.
There is probably also a javascript way to automate this, but if they do it with ajax, this might be faster. Since I do this sort of automation regularly, I aliased the clipboard pasting to "c-v"[1] and so it's quite easy for me to do this sort of thing quickly without having to remember the exact flags and type all of that.
[1] .bashrc addition: alias c-v='xclip -out -selection clipboard'
If you feel like trying something else than xclip, xsel allows you to easily remember the command with just `xsel -o` instead of that.
Also, if the JS way would use AJAX, it would take the exact same time to perform the requests via the browser, as it would with curl, unless there is some particular quirk with their server/setup/deployment/god, or if you have a computer that doesn't run Twitter (the client side application) so good (bottleneck in cpu/ram rather than network speed)
Wondering if the downvote came because of someone thinking xsel is inferior to xclip, or if there is a misunderstanding what AJAX really is... Would be great if people say something more than "I DIDNT LIKE THAT"
Yes I considered posting my political term block list but didn't want this threat to devolve into a flame war. I cringe wondering what my timeline would be like without those muted words.
Simply blocking “Trump” made a massive difference for me. My accounts are all specialized and have nothing to do with politics, and yet no matter who I follow my feeds turn into at least 50% Trump stuff.
But I still spend way too much time saying “see less often” to things. Hopefully this mute list works well!
twitter is what you make of it. if you follow toxic people, you will get a toxic timeline.
me? i follow close friends, a bunch of economists from all sides (mostly from my own country) and some comedians. that's it. my timeline is super clean, i open every once in a while and it's never bad.
(side note: i met both of my best friends on twitter. oh and i also met my wife on twitter. it's not a bad platform as long as you can curate what you see).
That’s how Twitter started for me too, but after a while degenerated to become the toxic mess which finally drove me away. My experience goes to show that people change over time: some, whose influence I formerly found enlightening, reverted to behavior that made me angry and unhappy. Soon others followed suit. Eventually signal was drowned in noise, so I quit.
If you stick to "latest", you pretty much just see chronological ordering of those you follow. Every time you see a toxic tweet, unfolow the person. The world is big enough that you can still have an active and healthy timeline even following these rules. Just like life really.
Keep follows/lists at 50 people or less of which no more than 10 are high volume tweeters. If people turn toxic, either mute them for a week or unfollow them if they keep it up.
It happens where a lot of people just have a bad week and need to rant, but it does get annoying. Doing it this way you won't lose out on insightful stuff they usually post and keeping the lists smaller gives you glimpses into area events or interests without drowning you.
I don't know how you managed that. I don't follow "toxic people" but Twitter just doesn't work. The use case for Twitter seems to be to follow important thinkers in areas you care about, so I get to hear what a renowned scientist had for lunch, an out-of-context reply from a computer security researcher said to someone else I don't know about something I don't understand, and that an F1 star took his family to the zoo.
Maybe I'm just the wrong audience for twitter. Facebook, as problematic as it is, has people I actually know, with their real names, and their real pictures, and their real life.
The nature of an "open" platform like Twitter seems to be specifically for people who want to hear from people they don't know, and unfortunately the content from those public figures is almost never about the thing you actually follow them for, because, guess what, people are multi-faceted.
Add to that the outrage-driven like/RT algo and I think it's toxic by default.
The platform itself optimises for outrage and encourages it, explicitly worsens the user experience with the “algorithmic” timeline and stuff you don’t care about like tweets from accounts you don’t follow, etc.
It sounds like the common reply regarding Reddit quality and toxicity as well.
Don't visit the front pages, stay in the curated sub-reddits.
I think it is good advice but the low-quality and the toxicity of the front/main pages still inevitably ends up bleeding into the smaller channels.
And the fault is still on Reddit/Twitter themselves because they aren't/can't ever de-emphasize those main top-level channels, as that's their main audience and so that's where they make money in advertising.
Nah, it means "people being mean and awful, by a reasonable person's standards." Obviously this is somewhat subjective, but abstracting it into "things I don't approve of" misses the point.
So why is it almost every-time I here it mentioned in regards to this topic it is by those who act pious and pompous as a way of shutting down legitimate criticism?
If you’re referring to my use of “toxicity” I definitely don’t mean that. In fact I support the crazier subreddits (you know which I mean).
And I agree it gets way overused by many. And maybe toxicity is a stretch for reddit front page but I think you still know what I’m talking about: the shallow, mindless/hivemind garbage. It brings down everything and everyone else to primal attitudes and people go straight for the shock value in order to get internet points.
Most of the interesting sub-reddits have been shutdown or are in quarantine for having "wrong think", though hardcore pornography, discussions about disgusting and dangerous sexual fetishes are just fine.
> And I agree it gets way overused by many.
It isn't just overused. The language itself and other terms and phrases that usually accompanies it gets used as a stick to beat legitimate criticism. By using their language which redefines what is commonly meant you are promoting such an ideology.
Keith Henson explained a great joke about the local loopback address 127.0.0.1 under oath to the Church of Scientology lawyers in a sworn deposition once.
Does anyone know if there is any way to mute every twitter account that contains their "pronouns" in their bio? I have a running theory that nobody with gender pronouns in their bio has anything of value to add to the conversation. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
I wish there was a way to block all tweets from profiles that list their preferred gender. It should stop the vast majority of gender politics bickering. Nearly every tweet that makes me cringe, riled up, or shake my head, shows these preferred pronouns after a quick hover.
What I want is an option in the dropdown menu next to tweet to mute the tweeter for 24hours. Sometimes, someone randomly goes on a tirade you don't want to scroll past.
Twitter already provides the option to mute phrases or accounts for the following periods: Forever, 24 hours from now, 7 days from now, 30 days from now
Either way, I had no idea Twitter muting worked like this, where you could actually mute TYPES of tweets, and not just content IN the tweets. I don't think they go over this in their docs: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-m... - I wonder if they will block this or break this if it picks up steam since it would lower their engagement numbers some (half the reason they stuff all this extra junk in your timeline, to begin with).
I can't imagine this is something that's intended or expected, but I could be wrong. I'm guessing OP is going to end up regretting posting this awesome little "hack" once they change it so it no longer works. haha
Lower level can equally mean 'direct access' or 'service level' it doesn't have to be a corporate hierarchy thing
Every dev has low level access at some point be it writing or approving production code where do you think the concept of Easter eggs comes from which these clearly fit the description
It seems however we've gone so far up the ass of the corporate machine that we have become synonymous with it
I read a funny excerpt the other day in a book -- when Rome was full of slaves everyone started adopting a slave mindset because it was everywhere pretty soon you can't distinguish slave from master and so it is here when we as devs put ourselves into comfortable stereotypes but what do I know I'm just a low level dev
- instead of following people, add people to the list
Bam. No ads, no suggestions, no "x liked this", reverse chronological order with no missing posts.
Right. The other problem is that garbage mode is two-way.
I don't want to see other people's likes etc, and I don't want to have my own garbage jammed into anyone else's feed either. Short of going private there's no fix for this.
As someone launches twitter 20 times a day I don't wanna click around every day for no reason.
> You have to be logged in to hide.
john carmack for example often updates on his twitter. a couple of programmers & artists i like too. also the trends column is the most accurate "mood indicator" ever.
1. The fraction of people on the world on Twitter is very small. Either most people in the world are missing important information, or not being on Twitter doesn’t cause one to miss important information.
2. If something important does occur on Twitter, it will be repeated on other news sources. It seems like half the news stories these days are just a bunch of tweets surrounded by boilerplate.
I think that listening to emergency radio is a good model for Twitter. It might provide you with information earlier than relying on conventional sources, and it might provide you with more blips of information, but not all of that information is necessarily correct, and you will spend a lot of time and not gain much of value over traditional sources.
It still means that cutting it out of your life won’t doom you to missing important information.
Found this yesterday here. Had some great conversations!
"La la la, I can't hear you, you're not saying anything important"
Twitter is kinda weird in that there are some blindly obvious UX improvements everyone is aware of that Twitter refrains from because the poor UX is subsidizing their business model.
Open App
Press on avatar
Press Lists
Press desired list.
vs.
Open app
Now on desktop, using bookmarks, or a client like TweetDeck this is a valid solution.
It's a little subtle, but on home you'll now have "Home" and your list's name at the top of the screen, with the active one getting a blue underline. Swipe left or right to select one or the other.
Sadly the entire update still feels half-baked and not thought-through and given that it's been months I don't feel too optimistic. There's so many small things that worked fine before and are just missing completely or broken now. It's a shame because I've been using Twitter for a decade but it's hardly useable now.
Now you're my one follow. :-)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icotile-twitter-fr...
In particular, there is a "select all" button. It may break if you have too many people, though.
I don't know if it works with many follow-ees(?), I have only a few.
> Hi Ian, muting these keywords won't actually change the number of suggested Tweets in your timeline. We are exploring ways to improve suggestions to allow you to further customize your timeline. More to come!
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/122087242860531712...
There is no "official" way to disable these annoying entries in your feed, but over time people have found secret "tags" that if you put in your mute list, will achieve what you want.
This here is a list of all those available tags. There's no real description of what "kinds" of tweets each block other than the vague name though.
I'm not following this account. Nobody I follow is, and nobody I followed interacted with this tweet in any way. Twitter's "reason" for showing it to me was "Bernie Sanders (Parody) received a reply", which is a bizarre justification for adding it to my feed.
For a moment I 100% thought this was a real tweet because I usually look at the user's handle rather than their display name. Anyway, this encounter has made me decide to take a break from Twitter this election season.
I barely know how to use twitter in all honesty. I'm worried I'm liking too many things and shoving stuff in peoples faces. That's a big turn off on me using social apps.
I would love to block all twitter commercial adverts. Presently I block them on sight and now get only adverts from small companies.
Tweetdeck was created by a third-party developer in 2008. It was and is so popular that Twitter acquired it in 2011 for £25 million.
And then Twitter started slowly shutting down its apps, all the mobile versions of Tweetdeck (Desktop, iOS and Android) were suspended and removed from respective app stores. Only keeping the web version alive altered and modified by Twitter. Tweetdeck also had Facebook, LinkedIn and some other social networking service integration, those were removed too. Tweetdeck is pretty much the best Twitter app for advanced users. Now its alive but we never know what Twitter plans to do with it.
BTW, there's a browser add-on called "Better TweetDeck" that adds some more options to it.
https://better.tw/
Also I don't stay on Twitter all the time, so a curated timeline is more useful than a chronological one (yes, I'm going to miss some tweets, but I will miss some anyway even if I use the reverse chronological order because I won't scroll down that far.)
Now of course, I'm not special, I shouldn't expect it WOULD be aligned with what I consider good curation. But I can't imagine the choices they ARE making are anywhere near the mean users preference. So lots of people reject that curation and choose to curate for themselves as if it was an RSS feed.
But I think the thing that these people (and I count myself among them) really want is for companies like twitter and youtube to let us make our own choices about curation.
"I really like this person and want to see everything they release."
"I like this persons tastes and want their feed added to mine"
"This person isn't that interesting, just show me stuff they make that gets popular"
"I only want to see tweets from this person about certain subjects. I don't care about their views on woodworking."
ect.
How effective it is, I don't know.
My only complaint is the autorefresh. Sometimes I'm reading something and boom the feed is refreshed and I have to scroll down to find the thing I was interested in. This has also happened when I was about to click on something. so annoying.
Interested to see how these work.
I'm assuming though that this is a technicality of implementation. Since it changes their preferred experience, I can't imagine these keywords will remain available to block.
You can even remove replies as well: https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3Are...
also can i suggest that filter:follows is super useful if you want to search a term exclusively among your follow list.
I would say as a heavy Twitter user my needs are probably not typical, but imo tweetdeck with its live updating columns is the true nature of the firehose that Twitter is, and I love it.
[1] https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac5...
* Some key topics missing
* The ones that are not missing, miss key people
* They keep adding me to new topics that I have 0 interest in
Also, Topics were always in Explore tab that showed all sort of shit that I don't care about. Should be a separate tab for topics (though useless now, so don't bother I guess).
That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is as a strong signal that you're not already invested in a competing service so acquisition should be much cheaper.
Reason is none of these words actually appear in the tweet body. It is not 'mute meta data about tweets' it is 'mute words' which presumably only are in the tweet body.
You can't mute tweets 'Sent from Android' why would you be able to mute tweets based on Twitters internal meta data?
Direct quote from Twitter "Hi Ian, muting these keywords won't actually change the number of suggested Tweets in your timeline. We are exploring ways to improve suggestions to allow you to further customize your timeline. More to come!" source - https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/122087242860531712
Yet, after a few months “sober” I wonder if I might be missing out. Is the signal to noise ratio high enough to justify using Twitter these days if you are not a major celebrity and don’t intend to promote something?
* Bad Twitter: is run by Twitter Inc. and tries everything to mess with your feed, turning it into a toxic mess that's designed to clickbait and outrage you. It is disrespectful and domineering in the way the UI is designed and every now and then it slaps you around by introducing a change in the UI that increases the noise in your feed.
* Good Twitter: this is the amazing people you know and don't know who use the social network to connect, create and have fun. It's creative af and makes it easy to discover new minds all around the planet. It's also very kind in that people will try to uplift each other and offer support in more ways I can recall.
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-b...
When will twitter implement this?
It takes one day to hack this.
Either way it feels like Twitter has an incentive to close this "loophole" because they would believe it would decrease engagement, which would impact their bottom line.
https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac5...
Its also a great way to organise your timeline by subject.
Things like that appear in a separate column, which you can hide.
Basically, you make an eventlistener on the scroll wheel and do document.getElementsByClassName('promoted-css-class-name'). Loop over the array of elements found and set the element style to 'display:none' for every element found every time you scroll.
Not the most efficient approach, but effective!
In my experience, the vast majority are time-limited movie accounts.
Here’s my Block List. Not sure why it didn’t update for two months, maybe it doesn’t work anymore:
https://blocktogether.org/show-blocks/BrCdgyZpXmLQ25akOwtgfR...
Mine is 100% (I think) from blocking ads, if you want a second source: https://blocktogether.org/show-blocks/njFjyOn40oKxRW8XJLmN70...
(it's also updated 2 days ago)
The change I've made is that I set the display of the promoted tweets to none, rather than setting their opacity to 0: article.setAttribute('style', 'display: none');
xclip -out -selection clipboard | while read word; do <the curl command>; done
Then you can probably do the whole list at once.
There is probably also a javascript way to automate this, but if they do it with ajax, this might be faster. Since I do this sort of automation regularly, I aliased the clipboard pasting to "c-v"[1] and so it's quite easy for me to do this sort of thing quickly without having to remember the exact flags and type all of that.
[1] .bashrc addition: alias c-v='xclip -out -selection clipboard'
Also, if the JS way would use AJAX, it would take the exact same time to perform the requests via the browser, as it would with curl, unless there is some particular quirk with their server/setup/deployment/god, or if you have a computer that doesn't run Twitter (the client side application) so good (bottleneck in cpu/ram rather than network speed)
Yes. When you use "copy as curl" a request, it copies the actual request as a curl command, including any headers (bearer token / cookie / whatever).
But I can empathize with your cringing. It must be tough.
But I still spend way too much time saying “see less often” to things. Hopefully this mute list works well!
Also available in the app in settings. You need to add each word one at a time.
twitter is what you make of it. if you follow toxic people, you will get a toxic timeline.
me? i follow close friends, a bunch of economists from all sides (mostly from my own country) and some comedians. that's it. my timeline is super clean, i open every once in a while and it's never bad.
(side note: i met both of my best friends on twitter. oh and i also met my wife on twitter. it's not a bad platform as long as you can curate what you see).
It happens where a lot of people just have a bad week and need to rant, but it does get annoying. Doing it this way you won't lose out on insightful stuff they usually post and keeping the lists smaller gives you glimpses into area events or interests without drowning you.
EDIT: Also, add 'unroll' to your mute list.
Maybe I'm just the wrong audience for twitter. Facebook, as problematic as it is, has people I actually know, with their real names, and their real pictures, and their real life.
The nature of an "open" platform like Twitter seems to be specifically for people who want to hear from people they don't know, and unfortunately the content from those public figures is almost never about the thing you actually follow them for, because, guess what, people are multi-faceted.
Add to that the outrage-driven like/RT algo and I think it's toxic by default.
And the fault is still on Reddit/Twitter themselves because they aren't/can't ever de-emphasize those main top-level channels, as that's their main audience and so that's where they make money in advertising.
And I agree it gets way overused by many. And maybe toxicity is a stretch for reddit front page but I think you still know what I’m talking about: the shallow, mindless/hivemind garbage. It brings down everything and everyone else to primal attitudes and people go straight for the shock value in order to get internet points.
> And I agree it gets way overused by many.
It isn't just overused. The language itself and other terms and phrases that usually accompanies it gets used as a stick to beat legitimate criticism. By using their language which redefines what is commonly meant you are promoting such an ideology.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791891
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h...