28 points | by natdude6 hours ago
The problem comes from the default sort order shown to everyone though, not just you as you're reading it.
And often non-premium users are simply flagged as spam and hidden.
Which actually means that if Elon removes your blue checkmark (as happened recently with Asmongold) then it is akin to a shadowban.
My feed was tech-only. Real people publishing real stuff.
Last year X started occasionally showing some random content like Reddit, I'd mark them as "not interesting" and move on.
Since last month there's no tech content by tech people, there's exclusively junk worse than on Reddit's homepage. No amount of "not interesting" will fix it. Oh, there's porn now too.
I stopped opening X altogether.
Side note: It's annoying how many tech people started posting their political hot takes since ~2016. I unfollowed everyone who tweeted about politics.
"Latest" is still exclusively people you follow, in chronological order (and content explicitly marked as sponsored if you don't have premium.)
X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this. You don't like the algorithm? Don't use it, and use X just like everybody else for the first 10 years of its life.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/x-bot-remover/aohkh...
That is the real problem nowadays, he destroyed the system to make it a self promotion tool first. I'm quite sure that always on feed tweets of him can easily brain wash hundreds of millions of people.
What does that mean? Twiter doesn’t switch my tabs on its own, neither on desktop or mobile.
>and even then you also have all the random notifications from people you don't follow.
I only get notifications from people I don’t follow if someone likes my tweets or they reply
My takeaways are as follows. First, I would take these with huge grains of salt. Second, the political leaning distribution is super weird, it is super polarized with a clear lack of "centrist" takes. Third, can someone please explain to me what "non-violence" is in this context (even the guy who only follows are got like 50% on violence??). Fourth, I wish the "vibe" section was expanded upon, my issue with the For You Page is that it hits the middle point of "slop" and "rage-bait" that lulls you into a passive doom-scrolling brain-emptying mooch. The "Vibe" here doesn't seem to capture that, and I can't really put my finger on what the difference is except for "I know it when I see it". Anyways.
PS: You should probably install browser plug-ins that remove the for you page! PPS: You should probably switch to Bluesky.
Is that really the only way to get hold of someones feed? It's neat from a tech perspective & very AI...but seems rather cumbersome
This way is clumsy but I appreciate that you have absolute control over what you are sharing.
Secondly, I tried a chrome extension, but these don't work on mobile devices (80% of social media users) so it was redundant (plus very brittle as it depended on specific DOM elements). Also, a lot of content is video/audio, which isn't well captured by static analysis.
A video is a bit annoying to take, but yes, it was the only solution I found!
Just define topics you don't want to read about and the AI filter will hide them from your feed.
Technically is just passing the text to Gemini Flash 1.5 with a simple prompt to detect if the tweet is from a forbidden topic.
You can try it here: https://twitter.cercaapp.com
1. The open, "town-square" nature of Twitter meant that it was easy to run into each other again, and she was feeling uncomfortable sharing space with me.
2. This was taking a huge toll on my mental health at the time, because just being on Twitter (or any of the many Twitter clones, for that matter) was reminding me of my relationship with her, just because of how the algorithm worked.
I still think Twitter provided value for me as a startup founder, for marketing and networking purposes. But It wasn't really matter of if it provided value or not; Twitter was driving me to death in the most literal sense of the word possible. To choose life, I chose to leave Twitter.
As someone whose startup builds social platforms, I am extremely turned off by the idea of "public square" models for the internet, after these incidents. We shouldn't aim to get everyone into a single feed, where you are given a curated feed, designed to engage you for as long as possible for the whims of advertisers, as opposed to the utility of the users.
My card: https://files.catbox.moe/t8rzlb.png
There may only be a couple of ads per 'sample' though, so maybe not enough to be interesting.
If you have attempted to use this previously without success, please retry - it should work fine now :)
I rarely or ever see any promotional tweets.
Not sure analysis is needed. Algorithmic feeds are fucked and impact you negatively. All of them!
You have no real control over what you see, they're ephemeral, nobody has a shared experience, and that's _only a few_ things that are fucked.
A forum like HN is much more of a town square because pretty much everyone sees the same content in every set of comments, with just one toggle ("showdead") to modify that.
