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Comment by not_a_cop75 | Hacker News Reader

Making twitter a little less like Jerry Springer could definitely help. Don't promote tweets from opposing groups to opposing groups. How hard can this really be?

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I've never really seen tweets from opposing groups promoted to me. As a non-public-figure (AKA, nobody is directly @-ing me or attacking me), Twitter makes it really easy to stay in your own bubble. You follow who you want, and that's it. You might get some suggested tweets, but they're tweets fav'd or followed by people you're following.

There's also the promoted/sponsored tweets, and I think that's what they were hinting at (eg a Chinese news agency promoting their pro-China news stories to Hong Kong Twitter users [1]).

But that's very easy to avoid. Get one of the original Twitter clients like Tweetbot (iOS / MacOS) [2] or Fenix (Android) [3] and you'll get a chronological timeline, no promoted ads, mute/keyword filters, and you'll never see other people's likes & replies suggested to you as notifications. It puts you in control and removes the worst parts of Twitter.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20734808

[2] https://tapbots.com/tweetbot/

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.mvilla.andr...

Nothing really puts you in control of twitter, when half the Twittersphere is calling you a moron because you said one thing which is counter to half the population. It doesn't matter how much you ignore them once they put you on the news. You don't even have to be as stupid as the people below to have a negative outcome from Twitter. Just consistently use it to cite your honest moral opinion and I guarantee someone will hunt you down as if you were the worst serial killer.

https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/7-people-whose-lives-were-ruin... https://www.theclever.com/15-tweets-that-have-ruined-peoples...

From someone who's been chased off of twitter, perhaps your opinions are simply mainstream? Or maybe you're just not popular enough to be attacked.

They need to de-emphasize the blue checkmark. The eye is drawn towards it, and it lends tweets a false sense of authority. I'm not sure what a good solution is, as it is necessary to differentiate authentic accounts from fake ones, even for people who are not super-famous.

But that'd just create more echo chambers and destroy their engagement metrics, right? I feel like the contemporary draw of Twitter is the discourse.

I think there are good parts of Twitter. But it's also very easy to be a part of outrage-driven discussion.

I liked this suggestion that one way to reduce outrage is to reveal the complexity of what's going on. https://thewholestory.solutionsjournalism.org/complicating-t...

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