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Comment by thekyle | Hacker News Reader

The problem I have with Twitter is that it's too people centric. For example, I like to follow finance news, so I could probably find some Twitter accounts that post about that. But surely the people running those accounts would also post about other interests they have besides finance. I probably won't really care about their other interests so all of their non-finance related posts would just be noise in my feed.

On the other hand, there are topic centric social networks like Reddit where it's a lot easier to find and follow just the news about a specific niche (like finance).

I'm not totally against the people centric model. I think it can work well in social networks like Facebook and Instagram that are more friends and family focused, but I don't really get that vibe from Twitter.

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> The problem I have with Twitter is that it's too people centric. For example, I like to follow finance news, so I could probably find some Twitter accounts that post about that. But surely the people running those accounts would also post about other interests they have besides finance. I probably won't really care about their other interests so all of their non-finance related posts would just be noise in my feed.

That's solved by being stingy with your follows and not being afraid to unfollow people. From my experience I have zero issues keeping my stream focused on finance (though i do follow one or two comedy accounts that post every once in a while)

Or use lists

That doesn't sound like a solution. Some people might have really good financial tweets but your solution would be to unfollow them for their irrelevant ones.

Yeah, some people post good stuff but their signal to noise ratio is just too low. Not much choice but to unfollow them.

Or Twitter could let accounts create categories for their tweets so that you could opt-in or opt-out to them when you follow people. I may be into finance but I want to be able to post other things too, as I'm human. Trying to juggle multiple accounts is frustrating and time-consuming, and often thwarted by randomized phone number verification requirements on new accounts.

> I'm not totally against the people centric model. I think it can work well in social networks like Facebook and Instagram that are more friends and family focused [...]

I feel Instagram is 100% influencer focused -- i.e. sponsorship focused -- with just enough "friends and family" to not make it feel like an advertisement show.

You know how music on a commercial radio station is there to fill gaps between ads? That is Instagram and Facebook! Same concept but "done with computers". :)

Not judging, just expressing my disappointment about the lack of honest separation between ads and private life.

> I like to follow finance news

Isn't RSS more suitable for this? Subscribing to feeds from finance news sites?

You can follow topics on twitter.

Topics are "curated" at best and algorithmic garbage-in-garbage-out at worst. Subreddits are moderated, often by people with at least a passing familiarity in the subject matter. Moderation allows on topic discussion without putting a gatekeeper behind exposure, as long as posters follow the rules.

I tried following the webdev topic and it's just interaction-baiting bullshit. Like loops vs reduce. Or "offend a webdev with 3 words".

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