From your perspective it is just bots, "influencers", and propaganda.

From my perspective it's the everyday chat of my friends, and interesting security-researchers posting their findings.

It's also a randomly acquired group of people I follow to improve my ability to read the Finnish language.

> From my perspective it's the everyday chat of my friends, and interesting security-researchers posting their findings.

I wish this was true. I’ve struggled for years to keep my feed about the tech topics I’m interested in. Twitter keeps making that harder and harder.

Now twitter force feeds every viral anti-Trump or political outrage tweet, liked by some random user I followed 4yrs ago, into my main feed.

Their insistence on choosing what content I want to see for me, instead of just the feeds of the people I opted-in to follow, has made it nearly impossible to avoid the cancerous US political and other social issue outrage machine which is what 90% of Twitter’s popular content seems to be.

I had no choice but to abandon Twitter. Unfollowing people who post political stuff was hard enough, unfollowing people who use the like button on political/outrage stuff plus other viral content that surfaces the highest is near impossible.

I hope Twitter makes a ‘retro’ mode where I can just see the actual tweets of only the people I follow in semi-chronological order. With the same option to turn off retweets for certain users, with no "liked" or trending tweets forced in.

> I hope Twitter makes a ‘retro’ mode where I can just see the actual tweets of only the people I follow in semi-chronological order. With the option to turn off retweets for certain users.

I think both of these exist? There's a way to turn off retweets for particular users (it's in the same menu you'd use to mute or block someone) and there's an option to show a plain timeline (uncheck "show the best tweets first").

The plain timeline option doesn't seem to consistently work on the mobile app, but many (most? all?) alternative Twitter clients show you the plain timeline.

Yes I'm sure there's some workaround way to do it either through custom lists or using Tweetdeck (or some other app) but I've tried those and unless it's the primary feed with full native mobile support the UX is awful and Twitter still finds ways to force content on you.

Twitter is pretty simple fundamentally. It is just the feed with some notifications for 90% of the UX. I just want a different kind of primary feed that reflects what it used to be about. Even it's just a tab on the feed. Like how Reddit has "Home", "News", and "Popular" tabs, I just want the home tab.

Just sounds like way more effort than is worthwhile to curate that information and filter out the garbage.

I have very limited connectivity and spend minimal time online, twitter is time wasted for me.

Speak for yourself I guess. I get a lot of quality content from following engineers and projects - big and small - on twitter.

I think you're preaching to the wrong platform here. HN is one of few corporate tech forums out there and twitter is a very corporate medium.

Whole twitter culture honestly is quite saddening and it's leaking to alternative mediums as well (like mastodon.social has started to suffer from same problems).

We worked so hard to create easy and accessible way to micro blog and communicate through text via formatting, proper structures with rss feeds etc and twitter just threw all that through the window in favor of short unformated, unsorted and algorithmitized, toxic "chats".

Ugh, I'm excited to finally see it go the way of the dodo.

You're right about this being the wrong forum. However I used to work in corporate tech and even then I found it to be an inefficient time sink.

Those are only things that get media attention, Twitter is much more than bots and propaganda.

Try unfollowing the bots, influencers, and propaganda pushers.

it is easier to just stop using twitter.

> From my perspective it is just bots, "influencers", and propaganda.

That's completely up to you; you need to create your own bubble (for better or worse).

What I find bad is that there's no "circles" concept (both incoming and outgoing). While the "incoming" part is not a problem for me, the "outgoing" part is (example: posting slightly conservative views will cause tech snowflakes among your followers to be upset; I'd like to restrict outgoing tweets to a subset of my followers).

Avoiding deliberately inflammatory alt-right language like "snowflake" would probably go a long way in getting people to engage in good faith with you, for whatever that's worth.

That phrase has a long history of use way before alt-right was even a thing. I've never heard of it being co-opted by any particular group. Other than in extreme cases, that's just not how words work. Just because one group uses a word doesn't mean it's taken out of the lexicon for everyone else. In fact, I think you are giving a group unneeded power by suddenly categorizing certain words as their language that should only be used by them.

Prior use of the word snowflake just means somebody who thinks they're uniquely special. Just like everybody else. And I'd say you can continue using it in that sense.

But the particular meaning of snowflake as someone who is too sensitive and easily triggered is newer and more inflammatory.

Most words have a history of use before their current use. Führer was just German for "leader," but it still has some very specific connotations nowadays. In this particular case, the word snowflake, when used in a context similar to how that poster used it, is very strongly associated with far-right "political correctness" grievances these days.