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Comment by throw_m239339 | Hacker News Reader

> I couldn't agree more. It's like when you see headlines claiming "people" are outraged by a jeans advertisement.

Well, it turns out that some people are actually outraged by a jeans ads... the problem is that these social networks tend to amplify these sort of divise issues for engagement purposes.

My problem with Twitter/X was that, for instance I was following somebody in 2010's who talked about Javascript and Node, only to end up with that person constantly ranting about partisan issues that had nothing to do with it (especially after Trump election), but at the time, Twitter provided no way to limit feeds to center of interests. That made me quit the platform and I imagine it's getting way wore now...

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Sounds almost like we need something similar to Google+'s circles, but instead of just being able to tag followers/followees into categories, it'd also be useful to be able to tag your own posts into different feeds that people can individually follow or avoid (hashtags aren't really robust enough for this).

Of course, if you see everyone following you for topic X but that nobody wants to hear your opinion about anything else, I can imagine that making it feel like people are just using you as a tool, and that decreasing incentive to participate in the whole thing. But it'd be interesting to try at scale.

It's funny you talk about Google Plus. the only reason I didn't stay more than 10 minutes on that social media is because of that horrible sticky header that was taking 1/3 of the browser screen on a laptop.

How could that design choice go past basic UI/UX checks is still beyond me after all these years, it made that website horrible to browse.

I don't remember an annoying header bar, and that's beside the topic of algorithms and content. I do think the UX of circles themselves were much better than e.g. Facebook lists-- circles were much more visual, easier to add/remove people in (drag and drop!), and much more central to the posting experience, which all made them easier to understand and more universally used. Facebook lists feel like an after-thought that only power users even know about at all, and Twitter hashtag/word block lists feel like a heavy-handed last resort rather than something everyone's supposed to use.

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