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Comment by leviathant | Hacker News Reader

Be selective in who you follow, and if you're following someone who shares interesting thoughts but retweets too much, you can turn off their retweets. That in combination with being judicious on the block button makes Twitter one of my favorite social networks.

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I am careful but Twitter still shows tweets that people I'm following have liked. And they always seem to be the most enraging tweets (presumably with great engagement).

Basically I want my Twitter to be a politics-free zone, but I can't help it if some of the people I follow occasionally like political tweets.

Also, today it has been sending me a push notification to the same race politics tweet repeatedly even after I keep dismissing it. The author isn't anyone I follow and the tweet wasn't liked by anyone I follow - Twitter is desperately trying to get me to see it though.

Yes, I really wish there was a way to turn that off. I personally use Twitter almost exclusively through a 3rd party Android app (Twidere) which just shows me my timeline in chronological order and nothing else. Seems most of the problems with Twitter comes from it not just doing that.

Switch to “latest” view instead of “home” and you receive a chronological timeline without seeing the liked tweets. I can’t imagine using Twitter without this. See the instructions on how to switch on this Twitter support article: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-timeline

Yes! I forgot to include this particular step.

I've heard that viewing Twitter exclusively through the Lists feature also removes a bunch of cruft, but things aren't so bad for me that I've had to try that out.

Change your timeline to "latest" from "home", and you will stop seeing tweets liked by people you follow.

I believe you can add "suggest_activity_tweet" to your muted words under Privacy and Safety. I'm fairly certain this still works.

I found pruning and cultivating collections of 'good' twitter accounts just too much work for what it was worth.

The accounts are all run by human (well I hope they are) and all prone to the same problems that make me not like Twitter ...

At least most folks maintain some focus on the topic / decorum on their blog or in a random article. Most seem incapable of ignoring the attention you get from being a jerk or typical twitter drama and etc.

I agree with you but don't all the actions you mention turn Twitter into an even larger, more strict echo chamber?

I’m not sure you can make that assumption.

Part of what makes these social networks echo chambers are the unconscious ways we navigate them: how long we linger on a post, stay in the site, etc. I’m not sure whether conscious decisions like being judicious with the follow and block buttons would pull you into more of an echo chamber than the algorithm does, especially if you’re selecting for things other than “this captures my short-term attention span.”

I think that's a cop-out. There are no objective measures of these things, the meaning of "how long you linger" or where you move your mouse are completely made-up by the coders who wrote the algorithm. They don't have to be a signal of anything, but the companies just go ahead and decide it means something. Then Goodhart's Law finishes the job.

To continue the analogy, I might say that rather than creating a larger echo chamber, it's moving into a well-tuning studio space. An echo chamber is cacophonous, a well-tuned room improves clarity by reducing excessive concentration of individual frequencies.

Arguably, the curative approach lets me hear higher quality content from folks who have different perspectives than me, compared to just leaving the floodgates open.

I think that is the difference between an echo chamber, where everybody is amplifying the content, and a gateway chamber where who gets there is heavily limited[0] but the conversation is not. In the first the conversation is limited but participation is not[1] in the second participation is limited but the conversation is not.

An echo chamber is bad, but I think a gatewayed chamber is not only not bad but required for effective communication, learning and development of new ideas. You can't enforce the Chatham House Rule unless you get to choose who gets in.

[0]: This doesn't have to be by any external source, it can be just by whom you choose to follow on Twitter.

[1]: Everybody gets to talk about the need to defund the police or #stopthesteal or whatever position the platform supports because more voices behind your position is more power.

I add people to Lists and then let some of their tweets get pushed into my timeline. Another way to manage over-tweet-ers. Didn't know about blocking re-tweets though. Off to do that to a few people.

Absolutely don't use the block button, they can tell you've blocked them and it can open yourself up to harassment. Use mute instead.

You can also unfollow them, or soft block (block and then unblock, which forces them to unfollow you), which are both noticeable but not as bad as a hard block.

> you can turn off their retweets.

How does one do this?

Navigate to the profile of the account you'd like to stop seeing retweets from. Click the circular icon with three horizontal dots to the right of their profile picture. Select the first option in this menu labeled "Turn off Retweets."

Thank you.

I've been waiting for that to be a global option since forever.

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