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Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

I'm a longtime lurker on Twitter, the list of people I follow is well-curated. If someone looks like they cause me more trouble than insights, I unfollow or even block them with little hesitation. In this form, Twitter is working great for me. Needless to say that I stay away from politics (and related topics) as much as possible.

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I tried that hard for quite some time but never managed to get a purely on-topic timeline. Follow 10 experts who post mostly about topic X and you'll constantly find at least one of them posting something different at any point.

For example you can't subscribe to grugq for political-infosec content without some IRA memes. And I don't mean that other people shouldn't post stuff they want, just that I'd like to see a filtered view of their posts most of the time. After a few iterations I gave up Twitter almost completely.

That's the problem with Twitter, you can't follow only a subset of tweets of a person that is related to a particular interest of that person. You only can follow everything the person tweets, likes, and retweets (albeit randomly filtered by Twitter's AI logic). Which makes it hard to exclude various nonsense from the feed.

I wish Twitter allowed people to tweet into different personal channels, and I could only subscribe to the personal channels I'm interested in.

Social networks badly need to evolve. What they are currently is quickly eroding the social fabrics.

On Twitter I also mainly lurk. I've found it to be the best place to get the detailed news I want (for example, Wasserman or Cohn for election result), but know to avoid comments unless I'm looking for pure entertainment.

But, I have all Twitter alerts turned off, and only check every few days. I rarely look at my own Twitter timeline and instead go directly to people's timeline who I have found will have the news I'm interested in.

If you only want to visit other people's timelines, you might want to have a look at https://nitter.net

It's a blazing fast way of accessing Twitter content.

Neat! Thanks!

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