Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless

My feed looks like this:<p>1) &quot;Facebook style&quot; post are proliferating, that is memes from last year and images&#x2F;videos from 5 years ago<p>2) Too many &quot;cookie cutter&quot; posts, that is variation of formats like &quot;100 million people are using AI but %99 are using it wrong&quot;<p>3) Propaganda accounts pushing narratives, that is something like &quot;before everything was great, now everything is bad. what changed?&quot;, then with flood of replies indicating that what changed is loss of Christian values and too many immigrants.<p>4) Obvious lunatics, that is chemtrail enthusiasts who pose as Phd in this Fellow in that.<p>5) Tesla FSD just saved lives, the real danger are the human drivers<p>6) Get rich fast schemes and courses that are supposed to give you passive income to retire early.<p>7) MAGA types and anti-MAGA types fighting<p>8) TikTok videos<p>9) Stuff from people I follow<p>10) scam ads<p>The general content on Twitter has become really low quality rage content. Some good things that you can&#x27;t find elsewhere still exists though and that is tweets from real people tweeting about current events as those events are unfolding.<p>Sometimes I think maybe Twitter should have been a non-profit that captures only the part about real people broadcasting about current events as they are unfolding.

&quot;The changes to the algorithm turned the platform into a form of attention roulette.&quot;<p>Twitters artificial limit of 140 character made the plattform always a shallow clickbait rage addiction thing to me. I never ever enjoyed reading anything there, before or after Musk aquired it. Anything good I did find, always would have been nicer to read as an ordinary blog post. But blog posts don&#x27;t get as much attention as clickbait tweets, so people stay on twitter, as long as there is audience.

I don&#x27;t get why people keep using the default recommendations? The whole point of twitter was that you manually pick who to follow and see just that. And you still can do that, use the Following tab and it&#x27;ll work just the same as the day 1. For extra points you can create lists so that you can group people and fine-tune your timeline...

this is news? social media and promotion algorithms have always been attention roulette for ad dollars, and nothing in that ecosystem has a knowledge of &quot;meaning&quot;, just engagement through statistics.

There is a way to make twitter usable. Mass blocking.<p>And I do like the &quot;For you&quot; feed. I do want to read random people&#x27;s tweets, I keep finding solid reading material that way. But that means I have to block a significant portion of <i>all of twitter</i>. I&#x27;d say after about 50k to 100k accounts blocked it gets better. Less for other languages.<p>There are browser plug-ins that block all accounts that follow a given account. Those are great. So, whenever I find a MAGA guy with Russian grammar structure, an NFT scammer, a bible quote proselytizer, or a Tesla bag holder, I just block everybody <i>following that account</i>.<p>It takes about a day or two of doing, but then it works great. Best done when sick, works well with headaches and a fever. But now my twitter experience is about as good as it was 2017.

&gt; This no longer works since you no longer see tweets from the people you follow unless they go viral.<p>I agree that this makes the site not worth using as is. So I use a browser extension that removes almost everything except tweets from people I follow, including ads. With that in place I find it to be a service with a high signal to noise ratio.

This is the reason I really like Mastodon. No algorithm, just timesorted posts by who you follow.

So I have never really used twitter much and I don&#x27;t think I even signed up for it ever. But I want to double check something -- is it the case now, as this post suggests, that if you follow somebody, you do not see their posts? Isn&#x27;t that the main purpose for the follow function?<p>Why would you do that? Why would you have a follow function and break it? And what else do you show people? I mean if your user follows someone, then it is what they want to see, why wouldn&#x27;t you show them what they want to see?

&gt; My preferred solution would be if we could just go back to personal blogs, blogrolls, newsletters, and RSS feeds. It seems unlikely but maybe a new generation of wrappers around these decentralized protocols would work.<p>Be the change you want to see in the world they say. If you can and want to, bring back a personal blog and post there. Blogging and rss are definitely not dead.<p>The growth is slower, it’s hard to go viral but that’s a feature imo, not a bug.<p>You’ll get fewer connections but are going to be a lot more meaningful.

&gt; <i>Attention on Twitter no longer has any ripple effects beyond the platform</i><p>out of the internet, back into many many sub-nets all isolated and in many cases fighting each other<p>&gt; <i>Attention on Twitter no longer has any ripple effects beyond the platform</i><p>because you&#x27;re now expected to pay for that, pay google, pay face book, the more of them you pay the higher your reach. money has reasserted itself as social control over the internet too; wanna be famous&#x2F;go viral? pay up

I&#x27;m curious if Twitter publishing view count just exposed his account and that caused a personal crisis. He posts about four times a day and I&#x27;m yet to find one valuable tweet from the last month. It could all be ai generated reposts from &#x2F;r&#x2F;im14andthisisdeep such as:<p>&gt; Most people are secretly convinced that they are a little bit smarter and a little bit crazier than the average person.<p>&gt; reminder: the fastest way to get unstuck is to change your environment<p>&gt; Don&#x27;t write a book or live a life that can that can be easily summarized.<p>&gt; Coaching is 99% about listening which is why virtually everyone sucks at it.<p>Maybe the algorithm isn&#x27;t the issue in this case.

For some reason Attention is still not thought of as finite Human resource that needs to be allocated with care.<p>Its like there is no mechanism that measures waste of Attention at a high level. Not at the individual level.

High school cafeteria is the analogy that makes the most sense to me.

If you just follow a couple of bright AI luminaries and block everything else it&#x27;s very useful and enjoyable.

Always has been.

It&#x27;s also virtually a paid service unless you only interact with your inner circle.

Don&#x27;t use the algorithm. Press the &quot;following&quot; tab.

Twitter is still the only.place you can have user uploaded videos for events such as the border crisis, the ongoing wars.<p>Its easy to criticize the attention traps without seeing the benefits

You shouldn&#x27;t be looking at the feed

Thats how all social media are. Welcome to the world I guess? you&#x27;re about 15 years late.

Roulettes aren&#x27;t useless though

&gt; I&#x27;ve personally gone back to reading books and blog posts, talking to people via email, working on a book project, and prioritizing in-person, local relationships.<p>I mean, this sounds great? Or maybe I misinterpret that this change in how we view twitter is positive rather than a negative. I believe that Twitter as a centralized sounding board was a net bad for Internet culture anyway.

&quot;Now&quot;?<p>Limiting outbound reach was, insanely, a deliberate decision by the new mismanagement.

&quot;now&quot;<p>It was always attention roulette and ultimately meaningless.

I like fact checking (Community Notes) on twitter. I am not that much exposed to western culture, and it is good for explaining latest fads and memes from west.<p>Like why someone refused to provide definition of something somewhere. It provided commentary for clawn universe.

Good timing... I&#x27;m building an alternative to Twitter and nearing our launch date. It&#x27;s focused on devs and HN readers, even having an integration with HN.

I feel it’s primarily a platform for Elon to cultivate bagholders for his various enterprises. The whole white supremacist cosplay just a method to filter to the most gullible audience looking for a strong leader.<p>Not sure how Cathy woods as the Queen of bagholders fits in there but there’s probably a connection.