Bouncer: Block "crypto", "rage politics", and more from your X feed using AI | Hacker News Reader

Bouncer: Block "crypto", "rage politics", and more from your X feed using AI

github.com

54 pointssteveharing1121 comments

Why, when you could just not use X though?

The only thing stopping me from eating shit is the smell, taste, texture, and possibly of disease. But if all those where removed I'd be the first to chow down.

This is a clear example of purity spiral groupthink.

this is like telling smoker not to buy smokes? :)

Yeah, if you could get cigarettes without the tar and nicotine I might even take it up.

Tangential, but the nicotine is not as bad as people think.

Why would you stop using X if it has valuable content at times?

So that it stops existing.

It has valuable content for you occasionally.

Your behavioral profile is valuable content for it constantly.

Unfair trade.

Don't you have to pay Twitter to get programmatic access to a X feed? [1] The documentation mentions using the "Twitter adapter", which uses a paid API.[1] Using an unofficial client has been a TOS violation for many years now, since Twitter killed off TweetDeck.[2]

I used to have an ad filter for Twitter, but gave it up a decade ago when they changed the TOS.

[1] https://docs.x.com/overview

[2] https://cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com/content/dam/legal-twitte...

Hasn't everybody already figured out how to do this with a Mute Word list? The topics and names that trend on Twitter are not exactly a mystery. Every post of that nature follows a predictable pattern of key phrases/terms plus stupid emojis in order to "go viral", and can be filtered out easily.

You could also just be careful who you follow and constantly curate.

That doesn't work, regular people who aren't the audience for ragebait don't realize that quoting ragebait tweets with a sardonic reply is a positive signal for the algorithm to circulate that tweet even further. Mute is the only way to go.

That's a ton of effort. And often I do want to follow someone for their tech content, I just don't want their politics.

Then don’t follow them. That’s just encouraging their politics. I mean, vote with your follow.

I'm not saying I disagree with their politics, I just don't want to read it. But the same would apply even if I did disagree - you're just promoting further division.

"Promoting further division" sounds like a reasonable thing to strive to prevent, but I think the paradox of tolerance applies here.

For example, DHH was a brilliant programmer who created Rails. I say was, because now he is a self-admitted white nationalist. I no longer care about his technical work or opinions, because if he has ventured so off-course so as to convince himself that white nationalism is worth supporting, I must necessarily question his judgment on technical matters as well. To tolerate his white nationalism and continue to promote and condone his work would be helping to further the spread of white nationalism, which I find abhorrent and unacceptable in any form.

Trying to prevent further division is completely reasonable when you're talking about opinions like "we should have lower taxes" or "we should spend more money on schools." It is not reasonable when your political opponent literally wants to do genocide.

The trouble is, where do you draw those hard lines? I have many friends for whom pretty much any discussion of trans issues is tantamount to discussing whether genocide is ok. There is one set of acceptable viewpoints and anything else is "transphobic".

I'm not sure what you mean by "discussion of trans issues" in this context. Most of the trans people I know are happy to discuss the issues and hardships they face as long as you aren't throwing slurs their way, so your phrasing is a bit confusing.

As I said in my first post, wanting to exterminate people of a certain ethnic group is certainly over the line for me. Similarly, openly expressing support for the fascist paramilitary force who are murdering people in the streets of my country is also over the line. These don't seem too troublesome for me.

It's often very frustrating when you care about something that shares a name with the ticker symbol for a popular shitcoin

I have spent a long time maintaining mute word lists but it's never more than about 80% effective because obviously there's a lot more to content than mere keywords. Tons of false positives (trump as a verb) and negatives ("he's blocking the strait!!")

I feel like regex and curated blocklists would get you pretty far before needing an LLM to continuously read your feed. I'm wondering how successful the local options are, because sending your social media feed to an API that is also being used to serve you low quality posts your blocking is a pretty depressing ouroboros.

You can also use "muted words" feature built right into X

Xtwitter’s own mute words feature is very good . And mute words supports TTL. LLM will have precision / recall issues too – no filtering system will be perfect.

Cleaning up 90% for free is better than burning tons of tokens / GPU / battery to clean 95% (and suffer from false positives).

There would be absolutely nothing of substance left on X without crypto and rage politics

America and Japan have been discussing BBQ for about a week and. And the Japanese have just discovered ranch dressing. It's hilarious to watch.

Russians recently joined in and, they're fuckin' hilarious in a way that only Russians could be: https://imgur.com/GaTnQk7.jpg

The people who hate Musk/X always out themselves by flagrantly lying about it/him.

Is this the X marketing team or something? You’ve posted about discussing BBQ with different nations twice in the comments here

It completely took over twitter for like a week and it was endearing. I made this myself (with grok's help) to celebrate: https://i.imgur.com/MG9mUxW.jpeg

If you're rejecting X out of hate for Musk, you're simply missing out on some really cool stuff happening.

The BBQ thing a huge international thing. I learned that the Japanese have a term that translates as "food terrorism": pictures of mouthwatering food that you only get to look at, not eat.

It was a bigger deal than even I'm conveying and honestly heartwarming.

This sounds delightful and wholesome. :D

I think it's easy to lose sight of these pockets of mundane goodness, and I appreciate you highlighting them.

“If you reject the Nazi bar out of hate for Nazis, you’re simply missing out on some really cool stuff happening.”

Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds? I’m not going to grab a beer at the Nazi bar just because there are occasionally cool people there who aren’t Nazis.

> I made this myself (with grok's help) to celebrate:

No, a slop generator generated it for you. You did not make it yourself, in any sense of the phrase.

So a couple of people in Japan tried ranch for the first time and it is news worthy?

If this isn’t a paid marketing post, you should apply!

You can tell someone is having a very emotional response when they respond with a strawman fallacy like "a couple of people in Japan tried ranch for the first time"

And that's when you stop engaging with the bad-faith actor:

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

"this doesn't sound as interesting as you seem to think it is" is not a strawman

Please take your own advice to follow the site's rules and stop being so quick to falsely accuse people of fallacies. Engage with their actual words instead. Ironically, when you post a reply like this, it is you who's committing an ad hominem fallacy (but as I mentioned in another thread, I'd much rather address your arguments than call that out).

That's simply not true.

Is there a tool to undo the extra weight added to paying subscribers? Analysis shows premium subscribers end up with 10x as much reach on average than people not paying.

Pay2Play was toxic enough on gaming, why would we want it in our social media?

You can also get excellent results with User Scripts that connect to a local language model.

1. Run LM Studio (download the Gemma 4 model), which has a 'local server' w/ API.

2. Use a more powerful LLM to write User Scripts (Greasemonkey, etc) to do whatever you want on any website you go to. Instruct it to connect to LM Studio.

3. Classify and highlight posts / comments based on any criteria that suits you. Summarize, delete from the DOM, etc., Just have fun.

This might get me back to using X. I only want ML content, nothing else.

I don't think that automated filtering on conditionals like "rage politics" is a good idea. At best, you're going to end up with a confusing feed that contains reactions to the outrage without the actual outrage that's driving them; at worst, you're going to end up systematically misinformed on political topics that people find outrageous.

"you're going to end up systematically misinformed on political topics that people find outrageous."

If you spend too much time on X, that's a given. The problem is that informed, nuanced, and factual takes don't drive clicks and are hard to fit in 140 characters. Long-form Youtube is a much better place to find those types of takes anyway. Generally, the shorter the content, the worse the take.

> you're going to end up systematically misinformed on political topics that people find outrageous.

That sounds... fine?

I would emphasize misinformed, not uninformed. If Policy X has 30% of people politely supportive, 20% of people politely opposed, and 50% of people incandescently furious about it, you're going to mistakenly think it has majority support.

This is exactly the reason I used to be almost exclusively an r/all browser back when reddit was worth using. I didn't want a curated feed tailored to my beliefs. I wanted to know what was going on. Then in ~2015 free speech was killed, and it seemed like every new feature added was one that increased censorship. Like post locking wasn't a thing the petty tyrants could do. Now they lock posts and sticky their midwit opinion at the top of the thread, and ban whole communities with racist biases. So I strived to be less of a redditor and quit completely when they killed Apollo & third party apps. No use for the site anymore.

/rant

"free speech is kill"

"no"

What makes you think policy positions on Twitter are representative of anything at all..

People absorb politics from our social environment. We judge what's good and bad, what's controversial and uncontroversial, based on our models of the political discussions we've heard among peers and what we imagine they'd say. Every Twitter user I know comes to believe that the political dynamics on Twitter are a reasonable approximation of the political dynamics in the US, no matter how much they repeat the mantra that Twitter isn't real life, and this leads them to repeatedly overestimate how much people support crazy niche positions or care about esoteric issues.

I agree, it's amazing how many Twitter users get their sense of politics warped by the platform, and I think this is a big part of the reason why it's appropriate and important for those of us who realize this to loudly and vocally shun the platform. I've called out friends and acquaintances in person who still use it, and I'll continue to call it out online (for example, any HN post that is a link to Twitter).

I'm not sure there are many causes that have "50% of people incandescently furious about it", except maybe heavily diluted positions like "corruption = bad". Even just based on voter turnouts. If you see this kind of activity, it's most likely representative of the terminally online class and not actual people.

Well, your heavily diluted position is actually a great example. One of the running threads of the current administration has been that they do not think corruption is bad and routinely engage in open bribery. Tim Cook gave the president a gold bar on national TV!

But people who criticize this are almost invariably enraged about it. And so I’ve encountered otherwise informed people with this kind of attitude towards “rage politics” who either don’t know about the issue or assume it must be exaggerated because people are so mad about it.

It should also click "see less often" on every detected bait post. Heals the algo really well if you do that persistently

On Facebook, at least, the click seems to outweigh the feedback.

I say "not interested" to a reel and get more just like it.

I get the ads about Warren Buffet’s (or other money celebrities) investment group or whatever. They are usually WhatsApp based pump and dump schemes for Chinese stocks.

Facebook somehow can’t detect these obvious scams, but somehow they have no problem pushing them to me after I looked into it when a fried almost got taken.

Exactly my experience a few years ago (it not working is directly related to how little I use Facebook today). You might stop getting stuff from that specific page or account or whatever but you certainly continue to get related stuff.

The fact that you use the word 'persistently' seems to somewhat (or completely) undermine what your point.

I would also recommend Control Panel for Twitter, easy to install on PC, and you can also have it for your phone if you use twitter via the Firefox mobile browser.

If all you can see is the following tab, then any ragebait that gets in your way is much more actionable, simply unfollow or mute whoever got it on your feed.

X as a platform is dead. It's all bots and engagement farming. Just disengage.

What makes X usable for me is the keyword blocking. You can also block posts that contain certain Emojis, including in user profile. This _really_ helps get rid of a lot of crap.

I have an easier solution: just don’t use X.

It does not have anything worth following, and useful content is minimal.

I find not using twitter to be the best solution.

The only winning move is not to play.

Then what shall remain?

I'd like to just quit twitter, but unfortunately the other places devoted to discussing some of the hobbies I go to twitter for, are much more toxic (Reddit, 4chan etc). Simply being able to filter out everything unrelated to the hobbies I'm there for would be sufficient.

Could you expand on this a bit? I'm deeply interested in how one could make a not terrible social network and I'm curious what gets people so unable to walk away

I'm into niche VTubers and other anime stuff. Twitter is pretty much the primary platform for keeping up with Vtubers (besides wherever they stream).

The other platforms don't let you interact with or keep up with the vtubers directly, and often involve just mindlessly repeating the same joke, or they go the opposite route and take things so seriously that all discussion is stifled.

With other anime stuff, Twitter is the easiest way to keep up with the Japanese side of things.

Lately I've learned about tildes and while I haven't looked around much, it has me wondering if maybe invite-only forums with low barriers to entry (and low barriers to being banned) are the way to go.

AI moderation / adblock is the future !

yea it could be the future

I get the idea but honestly asking: if you filter out stuff like this will you end up with a completely blank feed on x? To me it kind of just seems like we're all going to need to curate our own RSS feeds in the future. eg: real people who are insightful, rather than rely on any kind of algorithm.

No, there's approximately just as much technical and interesting content on Twitter as there used to be. Lots of people left, lots of different people joined.

It's just that this content is outnumbered some 100,000:1 now instead of the mere 1000:1 it used to be (ratios made up, but directionally correct.)

From my point of view, HN is trending in that same direction. It's just that the ratios aren't nearly as dramatic.

It's the ratio that counts the most. You seem to be implying TwiX is getting an increasingly bad ratio. That would imply, to me, an increasingly limited lifespan for encouraging quality.

I find that using Control Panel for Twitter (not affiliated, just a happy customer) to see only the Following tab in reverse chronological order makes X tolerable. There is no benefit to For You.

TIL: there are still people out there who find value in x even though when I log in my feed is just hatred and false info.

I will join the others and say you should just leave twitter: https://yoyo-code.com/you-should-delete-twitter/

I'm amused at thinking of the other effects this can be used for, rebrand it as a tool like that copilot recall and point it with child privacy in mind for the general internet.

or you know, require it for internet/computer usage for a very dim futuristic outlook.

here I vibecoded an app to fix your twitter experience

sudo cat 0.0.0.0 x.com >> /etc/hosts

Adding to the chorus: if you need to apply a solution like this, it's probably time to walk away from the platform. (Well, the right time to walk away would have been years ago, but...)

Network effects are stronger than we are. People are there because people are there.

I know a bunch of people and companies who happily dumped the twitter cesspool. It has to be > 50% scammers and ragebots at this point.

And when you are not there you are not there. We are way too obsessed with missing a thing. May it be a popular figure or someone we know in person. The reality is that it's actually not too bad to miss things and most information still gets through. Especially the one that's important. You might even miss out on a lot of crap that is filtered out when it gets to you.

I am happy on my personal Mastodon instance and occasional visits to HN. You might be too if you allow yourself to be.

The problem is that your definition of "crap" is probably a bit different from others. Everyone probably has a slightly different definition. Also, your feed is probably mostly stuff that was posted on X first and replicated over somehow. Network effect is real.

That being said, there are clearly multiple active automated influence operations happening on X all the time. If Elon wants X to stick around, it would be in his interest to put a stop to those. The default feed is full of posts from those bots; that's also a big problem they (X) needs to fix.

> Also, your feed is probably mostly stuff that was posted on X first and replicated over somehow.

Possibly. But if it reaches me anyways then there clearly was no need for me to be there. And if more people realize maybe the discussion might be able to move away from that place.

> The problem is that your definition of "crap" is probably a bit different from others.

I was talking about everyone's personal definition of crap. If it has not enough velocity to leave the sphere it might be only relevant for a small community or just not relevant enough to discuss. Or something different.

My argument stands. It is okay to not be part of every discussion. A lot of people think that they must be on X to stay in touch and be informed. I am not there and I am informed enough and in touch with all the people I want. If you can't be bothered to make an account outside X then we don't need to talk.

yea but which people ;) unless you want to in that in-group, crypto, rage and all, better off without it

All remotely popular online public spaces are completely infiltrated by bots/propagandists/trolls/morons/etc. If you could successfully filter that type of content out you'd end up with a much larger pool of valid/authentic content to access than if you abandoned the space altogether and switched to some very obscure/niche space that's yet to be manipulated.

Bluesky has a default feed that is just the posts/reposts of the people who you choose to follow, in reverse chronological order.

No need for an algorithm to decide what is worth seeing.

Twitter/X has the same feature. It is all I use.

Maybe, but no one worth listening to uses bluesky

Incorrect. William Gibson does. And he’s definitely worth listening to.

You can already follow who you want on Twitter. The thing is, bots etc take their toll even on the good users.

I was actually thinking of making a similar app for hacker news comments. Should we all quit hacker news too?

HN is my top candidate for a solution like this, too. Because there's a ton of high quality content here, increasingly buried beneath a small number of sentiments and topics I don't care to see rehashed constantly.

I'd like to see it, too, but for the opposite[1] reason: Others can use this curation (which only affects their own view of HN) instead of flagging (which affects my view and everyone else's too).

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47744253

I use the flag functionality as per the guidelines:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

> If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Flagging is a way to shape what types of content takes up the finite amount of attention available on HN. If everyone used it (only) in the way the guidelines ask you to, the front page would look very different on a given day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

HN doesn't need it. I'll read this site, not gonna bother with Twitter or Reddit though.

You need to curate your algorithm. Took me 10 years before I started blocking aggressively and now my feed is amazing with 90% bangers. Twitter is by far the best product in this space. Every other platform is 2+ weeks behind. Twitter is where the news breaks.

I had a well curated feed too (even used word filters) and yet I felt compelled to pack up and walk away. It was simply not enough.

The negative effect the various drivel had on me was nonlinear. Even if 99% of posts were fine, if that 1% was seriously upsetting, it just ruined the whole thing.

We have a solution like this for HN, but people don't use it: It's the "hide" button, and it's right next to the "flag" button. Yet, when users see content they don't like, instead of just hiding it, to block it for themselves, they often choose to flag it so that they can block others from seeing it too.

I'd welcome per-user curation tools like OP's which don't affect the content for the rest of us.

This would be great for Reddit - the king of rage politics.

Any social site inclusive of this one ought to have such a feature.

Agreed. I am getting tired of half the HN posts being about politics. I come here to get away from that stuff, but it is becoming a greater portion of the content.

Look at the number of responses on each article to see why that happens. Also, most articles aren't about politics. But the ones with lots of responses and discussion usually are. Network effect sucks sometimes...

I would mind far less if the political comments were only the political posts. I just avoid clicking into those.

It's when I click into an interesting topic, and it's steered into being an offtopic retread of every other thread about US politics. The upvote/downvote system simply no longer works to squelch it as it once did, because there are enough people here who believe "everything is political" and therefore it's always "on-topic".

That is their prerogative, but it has dramatically lessened my enjoyment and engagement on this platform in the last 5 years. And it's gone into overdrive in the last 6 months.

HN posts are mostly not about politics, at least not on the top page. Sometimes a non-politics post ends up getting politics comments though.

The problem with Reddit is different. Poor quality human moderation is the problem there. Basically who has 10 hours a day to read Reddit? Answer, terminally online bubble people who have no business moderating other's posts. Maybe if the LLM could completely bypass the moderators then it could work though.

When I tried Reddit a while back, that problem showed up even with no moderation action being taken. I guess cause an obsessed person will use the site like 1000x more than a regular person, they end up being the "majority." The voting system also encourages bad behavior.

Simpler to just delete Twitter

Oh thank God I can still give Elon Musk more money and power but don't have to read about politics

What I don't understand how difficult it seems to be for some people to simply ignore topics or people they don't like. If an algorithmic feed keeps presenting you with certain topics, it's largely because you're engaging with them. Isn't that on you?

I don't use Twitter but I use Tiktok and you know what I do when I see something I'm not interested in? I scroll up. If it's someone who never has anything interesting to say, I just block them. And I never think about them ever again.

I rarely see anything about crypto. I don't even think about it really. Go back ~4 years and everything on HN was about crypto this and blockchain that but that's how it goes. There are fads and, more importantly, there are people just trying to get their bag with their latest "acquire me please" startups. Actually, crypto just had a bunch of straight rug pulls too. And then there was NFTs...

Anyway, I've worked for my Tiktok fyp. It's a constant moving target for the platform too, like these bot accounts that somehow get to 10K followers and then appear on your fyp with audio over a movie or TV show to get around copyright detection. I honestly don't know how they haven't solved that problem yet.

All these platforms, particularly Twitter, put their thumbs on the scales about what gets distribution but for any platform with a block feature, this seems like a "you" problem if your feed isn't what you want.

Also, "rage politics" in general just means "things I disagree with" whenever anyone talks about what they see on any social media platform.

Block and move on.

When I was on Mastodon, I followed a bunch of people for their tech expertise: FOSS, security, networking, Linux.

They also posted about other topics where I wasn't interested in their commentary. Even when I agreed, I still didn't want to see it, because I went to Mastodon solely for tech. I had other sources for other topics.

So I added a bunch of filters to exclude those posts. It worked well!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com