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Comment by SekstiNi | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this sentiment echoed a lot, and I find it somewhat perplexing as my own twitter experience has been mostly pleasant.

Do people simply not bother curating their follows?

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It has become harder and harder to do so, because Twitter (in its default state) now insists on inserting brain-meltingly lowbrow content in between every other post from someone you actually follow. And adverts for low quality iPhone games that are themselves also simply platforms for further adverts.

This is no longer true. Twitter now has 2 browsing tabs that you can easily swipe between.

The first is a “For you” tab which contains recommended content based on YOUR browsing habits (and a “Not Interested” option to curate, just like Tiktok).

The second tab is a “Following” tab which is strictly tweets from people you follow, in chronological order.

It’s pretty great now. Twitter used to be nothing but quasi activism and rage bait. Now it’s exactly what I envisioned it could’ve been, which is nice.

But stay away from it if you have the reddit mindset of “If I don’t agree with it, it should be banned”, because your feelings will get hurt.

It feels a lot like the internet 10-15 years ago, it’s great.

But I can freely talk about sports and shoot the shit without worrying about triggering an autoban for saying the “badspeak” term or phrase which is currently flavor of the month.

Exactly. You can make Twitter what you want. Just never use "For You", unless you hate your time.

I said ‘in its default state’ because although you can try to configure it otherwise it always seems to gravitate back towards being shite. I commend you both for bothering, but I’d rather just use a service that is fundamentally less filled with rubbish. It always feels like fighting a losing battle.

If you haven’t used it recently, then you wouldn’t understand. But don’t use it if you have such strong feelings about it, it’s still a time sink.

I will say it’s one of the only services of its type that’s no longer a contrived echo chamber though. All opinions can be heard… But only if you seek them.

I’ve posted here before about how I refuse to use Twitter due to its toxicity (in the past), but its recent lack of toxicity has made it very fun and addicting lol

Now, if you’re a positive person who just enjoys tech and cat videos, that’s all you’ll see.

In the past, you could spend hours trying to curate Twitter to be good/positive, but you would still see nonsense.

The biggest improvement is the removal of the feature where completely unrelated content would be pushed into your timeline with a note at the top that said “Your follower [insert follower name] liked this”

So you were at the mercy of what the people you followed also engaged with. Now, you can follow someone who may be on the other end of the political spectrum (who may post cool tweets) - And while you don’t agree with their views on the election, you can still see their tweets without the “Pastor Bob liked this” type post appearing of QAnon bullsh*t.

Well, I’m glad it works for you. My experience is quite the opposite though and it seems like I’m not alone.

It definitely used to be a lot more 'curatable', but in the Musk era, it's become less pleasant on average.

Well, I think Twitter can actually be a normal place. But the sentiment is about the average, not what it can or can't be.

Even liking a single political post will fill the timeline with blatant political disinfo from the fringes of the political spectrum.

But it was also this bad before Musk.

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