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.
It's easier that you think, I get 1-2 calls per month on average. Using Calendly I can ensure that people give me enough notice to prepare. I'll be writing a post about it in the next 1-2 weeks.
In short: yes, I moved from a big city where I felt like home (Shoreditch, London) to a smaller city (Porto), where due to the pandemic I'm still sometimes struggling with the language and meeting new people. Often, when I feel down, I get one of those random calls and end up feeling like I did something useful.
What can happen during those calls? Here's the worst case: the conversation is somewhat dry or boring, we say bye to each other, maybe take some notes, likely never speak again. Has the worst case ever happened? Yes, once, I think, and I didn't feel like I wasted my time. Did I hear a 3 minute rant about tech that ended up being a 2 hour discussion about the weird, beautiful and fascinating life of the person who called me? Also yes!
But, the main reason is not related to covid or any big life decisions, such as moving to a different country. I think that, especially in our lines of work, it's quite hard to feel like what we do impacts other people. Everything's so immaterial/unreal: the person becomes a user, the user becomes a persona. People who call me are generally very open, curious and, for some reason, surprisingly grateful that someone has time to speak to them. And that's really strange because the amount of effort on my side is minimal. I'm grateful that they decided to spend some of their time calling me.
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.
"It is in this vein that I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of [sci fi] is crud. The Revelation:
Ninety percent of everything is crud."
As the amount of content on the internet grows dramatically, that 90% appears much larger. The problem of finding the good 10% does not scale proportionately.
Therefore, I fully believe the ratio of good:bad content remains the same as it ever was (~1:9), but sifting through the "crud" is much harder and will continue to grow harder. Perhaps exponentially.
I think most blogging drifted towards affiliate marketing and as a result, Google drastically devalued that content (for that and other reasons).
As a result, I find it so hard to find genuine experiences through web search now. It's all just USAToday, CNN, NYTimes, Webmd, etc. media sites (which are themselves mostly just affiliate marketing/advertising plays, so maybe that wasn't Google's motivation).
I miss the days of searching the web and finding content written by real humans.
The only search I find that satisfies this consistently is Reddit (especially searching google with site:reddit.com)
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 problem is that ultimately the business' incentives aren't aligned with their users'
Twitter and facebook's business model is to amplify hate between groups of people with varying viewpoints and they got rich by encouraging people to get in other peoples faces and giving them a place to fight it out; might not have started out that way, but that IS the business model now.
It's really no difference than a boxing match promoter selling tickets to a fight, with fans on both sides cheering on their favorite boxer.
most people - if meeting in real life - could have put aside slight differences in viewpoints and converse on the things they do share common-ground, like actual adults.
> Twitter and facebook's business model is to amplify hate between groups of people with varying viewpoints and they got rich by encouraging people to get in other peoples faces and giving them a place to fight it out; might not have started out that way, but that IS the business model now.
The comment you replied to makes sense to me as a money maker but I don't see where the money is made with yours, care to explain?
If people hate each other enough, they feel a need to prove the other one wrong - so they do that on twitter and facebook, i.e. some 'red' person posts something, 20 blue people attach them back, a 'blue' person posts something, 20 'red' people attach them back.
When people are attacking each other online, they are engaged online - and the longer the stay online, the more ads they see, the more money facebook and twitter etc make.
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?
There's a difference between "doing it all the time" and "using it when I want to have it". We could be reading press newspapers once a day, and yet we check online webpages and forums. Do we really need it? Or we do it because it is an improvement as long as we use it wisely?
Not that many people use Twitter. It has 400 million monthly active users, about the same amount as MSN had in 2004. It's just not that indispensable for most people.
exactly - somehow we managed to survive a long time without needing to know 'instantly' that 'something' is happening 'someplace'.
Most of the instant reports are just plain lies anyway - watch any of big news channels when there is some breaking news - they literally just sit in front of the camera and make things up to fill the airtime with useless speculation, devoid of any real facts or news - I can tune in 6-12-24-48 hours later and read what really happened if I want to.
Same thing happens on twitter - some big event happens and ten's of thousands of people start commenting on their version of 'the facts'.
Take a 2-3 month break from twitter - see if your life is any worse of for not constantly being 'in the loop'.
> exactly - somehow we managed to survive a long time without needing to know 'instantly' that 'something' is happening 'someplace'.
We survived millions of years without having agriculture or human-made shelter, and yet at some point we built a civilization. That's not an argument for not doing things.
> Take a 2-3 month break from twitter - see if your life is any worse of for not constantly being 'in the loop'.
Who says I am constantly 'in the loop'? I do check Twitter when I want to, because there are subjects where I want to get the influx of raw ideas before they are processed and packaged by the powers that be. (It's also useful to track how those ideas are later processed and packaged in real time, something that you could never get by consuming mass media alone).
If you are addicted to it and can't spend one weekend without it that's your problem, don't project it on others.
It's just like representing debt with marks scribbled on a totem instead of a generic vague feeling of owing you something, or like movable types on the printing press. We could do without those, they were novelties at their time, but they happened to change society at a fundamental level when their substained use changed relationships built around the new tech.
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.
Yes, this is a very natural conclusion to make. We all have definitely seen people upvoting content as a way to promote their opinion, even if the content is not accurate or an outright lie. This happens on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit. If people behave this way on LinkLonk then we can imagine how it would connect people with the same opinions into echo chambers.
But I would argue that this behaviour is the result of the incentive systems. Our likes/retweets/upvotes don't have much effect on us. The recipients of these actions are other people - they affect what other people see. And when we are given tools that can influence other people it should no surprise when we use them to do just that. The content that is good at influencing (we are clearly right and they are clearly wrong) is often sensationalized and misleading. The means justify the ends. And the other side lies too.
On LinkLonk the incentives are different and therefore the behaviour would be different. Your upvotes have a limited power to affect what other people see. Instead, your upvotes primarily determine the type of content your future self will see. I believe that you would be more likely to upvote content that informed you, than content that simply says how right your side is (which usually has little new information to you).
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.
You're going to miss a lot of content no matter what. It might be for the better if one simply accepts this.
I guess I'm speaking from my experience as a Fediverse user. I don't feel I miss anything, even though there are literally thousands of messages that have passed me by on the feed whenever I open it.
Surely someone is going to comment that I'm not missing anything because nothing of value was said, but the posts I do see are things that makes me satisfied for the most part, and that's enough for me.
> 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.
That’s what retweets are for. You see content suggested by people you’ve chosen to follow.
On Instagram people you follow reshare posts on their stories.
Why should people who don’t know you have your content shoved down their throat by generally piss poor “algorithms”? The alternative (recommendations from friends via retweets/reshares) is infinitely better.
But retweets is not content discovery, retweets are content posted by people you follow (albeit originally posted by somebody else).
I'm looking at it from the perspective of somebody with a new account with only few followers. How do you get people to see things you post, and ultimatively follow you? In principle you can just reply to their tweets and get their attention, or approach them outside of twitter.
In some fraction of cases, twitter suggests things you post to strangers that have common connections. I think that is beneficial and actually doesn't happen nearly enough, leading to people living in filter bubbles.
I've never used algorithmic timeline (using either Tweetdeck on desktop or Talon on Android)
I discover new people via retweets, reading replies, just running into then somewhere else where they link their Twitter handle. Really don't see a problem with that :)
I’m going to wade in with some pedantry here - retweets didn’t really exist for a fair bit of Twitter’s existence, and grew organically from users introducing the convention of prefixing reposts of other people’s content with an “RT @whoever”.
> Unfortunately for me, I find external sources (blog posts, news articles, etc) often the most relevant and insightful; and Twitter deliberately filters them out when discovering new people.
Right, so what the author is looking for is... RSS feeds? Twitter is simply a poor-man marketed RSS feeds aggregation with all kind of flavored noises.
To me it feels like the author is not interested in what the people have to say, but more like a network of shared resources on specific topics. Well then, maybe reddit is a generic answer, and HN or lobste.rs for specialized topics.
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.