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Comment by ziml77 | Hacker News Reader

I suggest to anyone using twitter to either add rules to your ad blocker to remove the trends section or use an extension like Tweak New Twitter to remove it. It makes Twitter so much nicer to visit when you don't have those stupid trends shoved in your face making it seem like you should constantly be anxious or depressed about the state of the world.

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Two years ago I changed my trends location to a county whose language I can't read (Japan). The trends box still exists, but I can't read it and can't care about any so-called trends.

I personally have the trends country set to one that doesn't usually have a very big (or any) presence on Twitter (e.g. British Indian Ocean Territory, Falkland Islands, ...). This makes the "Trends for you" part of the page empty.

Thanks for this hack. I found it hilarious (and useful).

I wonder if it'll start filling up if enough users do this

No, that's not how it works. The only way it would start getting content is if users actually started tweeting from those remote locations, which seems unlikely.

...or someone figures out that appearing to tweet from that location suddenly puts their tweets in front of a lot of eyeballs.

brilliant - thanks

Great tip! Surprisingly awkward to do, but well worth it.

That's amazing. I picked the country Chad and I see no trends at all! With word and account blocking, I get good control over what I see, even in the official Twitter app. (A good number of the control methods, like disabling like numbers, are only available via browser extension.)

Some years ago I did something similar with Facebook - switched my location to North Korea and voila all advertisements disappeared. Later, it stopped working and even later Airbnb (where I foolishly linked the account) asked me to accept new terms of use but I couldn't because they blocked anyone from North Korea from using Airbnb.

If you're using uBlock Origin, here are some of the filters that the author, gorhill, uses to strip out things like Trending Now.

https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1375805467893624840

Thank you! I use an extension on Firefox for Windows but I had no solution for Android. I'll try this!

Is there any github repo or article or something with a collection of every ip list, filter snippet, configurations one could/should want in their browser extensions (UBO, umatrix, etc)? I want pretty stringent defaults, but I understand why site altering defaults aren't there in the base extension, but I'm also not motivated to google for every permutation of things one could want.

Is there a way to do this in Safari? I notice that this extension isn't available :/

I use adguard for Safari but I'm not sure if the filters would be identical. It does have a "filter this element" option.

Thanks! my twitter experience is already more positive.

If you want to stop using Facebook, go through your friends list and unfollow everyone. You can still see what they are up to by visiting their pages and can still message them but it breaks the addiction. You will also realize, as you visit peoples pages, that almost nobody you know posts about themselves, it’s all news and memes and outrage

I just unfollow the people that only post memes and outrage.

My Facebook feed is mostly photos of my friends lives and I actually do enjoy seeing what they're up to. There's still memes and news articles but most of the really toxic stuff is gone.

Also,in another area, 'People also ask/search for' section of Google. Worst offender when it comes to spoilers (movies/shows/books...). You just want to search something about one character and there it is, recommended search "who killed x", "why did x die" etc.

Twitter trends can also be spoilerish in that way, although it's usually more ambigous.

Tweak New Twitter has made the Twitter experience so much nicer for me. I basically only follow 2 categories of people: People I know and artists. With retweets in a separate tab, I only see the content I signed up for when I clicked the follow button. It's fantastic.

Yes, I can only agree. I even wrote a blog post about it in 2018 [1] because the design was so annoying.

[1] https://schleiss.io/fixing-twitter-design-with-extension

Ive started using the "Calm Twitter" extension which hides both trends and social signals (number of likes and retweets, tho they're still visible on hover).

Together with the time-based ordering, it has made twitter a much quieter experience.

Maybe it's because I'm in Germany but I use Twitter daily and have almost never more than glanced at the trends. It's as easy to ignore as seeing a front page of a newspaper on the street or a sponsored result in Google.

In the same vein, I actively unfollow or hide all forms of news on Facebook. Including friends who just can’t help but post political commentary all the time.

Now my feed is funny, sports, friends and family.

Did this too. Now my whole feed is mushroom foraging groups and I sort of like Facebook again.

I use 200% zoom so that only tweets and navigation icons are visible.

You'll be even better off if you just stop using twitter. Twitter is highly manipulated by twitter, than by bots, then by brigading, etc etc.

Ultimately it's a weird armpit of the internet elevated by the attention of journalists to something that simply does not deserve attention, and on whom attention actively damages your perception of reality.

Minimal Twitter is a nice chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/minimal-twitter/po...

Tweetdeck also does not display trends unless you add a column for them.

Huh, I use the official Twitter app on Android, and I don't even notice the "trends" - only time I even see the option to see them is if I use the search function.

> either add rules to your ad blocker to remove the trends section

how?

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