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Comment by maxaf | Hacker News Reader

For optimal effect, add the following to your /etc/hosts or its equivalent on your system:

    127.0.0.1 twitter.com

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i... don't agree there.

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.

EDIT: Also, add 'unroll' to your mute list.

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.

Toxicity seems to be a code word for "the plebs are saying things that I don't approve of".

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.

This joke never adds anything to the conversation, I wish people would stop making it.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791891

Wasn’t meant as a joke.

... and then host my own local Mastodon responding to twitter.com locally?

Or, for the entire list

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h...

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