To all complaining that twitter is full of hate. Have you ever tried using twitter without the search feature, or clicking on hashtags? I'm following a lot of interesting people and I find the content fascinating.
The best way to improve it would be an optional UI that didn't show comments to posts.
Everyone time I read those, and I can't help it sometimes, I lose a little more faith in humanity.
The real rabbit hole is to click on a particularly pungent response's source. It's always some guy with tens per day rude bon mots to his favorite enemies.
I strongly recommend using any unofficial Twitter app. My experience significantly improved once I stopped seeing "liked" tweets from people I follow. I don't even understand what the point of that is, if they wanted to share those with their followers they'd retweet it
I follow a carefully curated list of people in my field but invariable hate gets on my feed. People slip and can't resist liking a tweet about a recent controversy, or giving their sociopolitical hot-take, and then you get exposed to it even when they tweet 99% of the time about math.
I agree the content can be absolutely invaluable and fascinating otherwise, but I just couldn't deal with the seeping toxicity in the end.
I just cannot see myself spending money on a site so full of hate. Everyone these days has a take on everything that, when condensed, is just so emotionally distilled that it twists me up after maybe 10 minutes of browsing.
This is the problem with a default-public-broadcast site that is entirely driven by the engagement metric of comments. It's like browsing Facebook but only reading public articles; no groups, no friend's cat photos. No default-friends-only.
One the one side I really miss the BB-style format where the thread with the newest comment was on top but on the other side discoverability of legitimately good content was a mess.
"Solving" this issue with automation will most likely just recreate the already existing engagement algorithms. Strict moderation and more importantly curation is probably the only way to make it work but who's going to pay for this at scale?
For me, the public-ness is what makes it compelling. IMO what it lacks is an HN/reddit-style downvote, that would immediately send the vile comments to oblivion. Then perhaps you could choose to only let users with positive karma reply etc. HN & Reddit does have some rude/know-it-all comments but I don't see much of the real nasty stuff.
I honestly couldn't come up with a less compelling set of paid features if I tried. I would love to see things like no ads/promoted tweets, premium API access for third-party devs, live timeline streaming (more like what Tweetdeck does [or did]), higher quality media, and the ability to always keep the reverse chronological timeline.
So wait, does this also come with all tracking disabled? That would be awesome. Are they trying to test the waters with regard to alternate monetization strategies, or this is simply a way to doubly monetize subscribed users, via the monthly fee _and_ their data?
Imagine paying $3 to a site that is largely driven by trolls, agitators, bad actors, foreign intelligence, ads, and corporate shills. Twitter and others add gasoline to every single sensitive issue in the countries that use it.
Imagine if you could filter all of that out and only see other paid subscriber content. That would get a rid of a lot of trolls and bots. Not all, but a LOT.
Now imagine a site that only gave you the comments you agreed with. And every time you were looking for something you only saw information you agreed with.
Anyone who pays for Twitter gets exactly what they deserve. Twitter isn't an enemy of the right or left, they're an enemy of humanity. Literally a machine that monetizes human suffering, and amplifies it to increase revenue.
Are you looking for a protocol or client? For protocol, ActivityPub works for my needs currently. For clients, there are some really good ones on F-Droid.
RSS. Look at https://www.overcomingbias.com/ as an example of a microblog. Tweeter’s main selling point is the lack of friction, but this is also why it’s so low quality.
The feature that looks interesting and could be useful depending on implementation is collections if they are easier to share and link to as well as organize. Tweets are hard to sort through and organize today, would be cool if they offer a way to do things like pin a collection of your top ranked tweets or favorited tweets, rather then the current mode of pinning only one tweet. I tried creating something to help with this but it's hard to get traction if it's not natively supported (had a few users), though that could also just be the very bare boned state of the site, gotta be embarrassed by your first version right :) http://tweetlights.com/
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Everyone time I read those, and I can't help it sometimes, I lose a little more faith in humanity.
The real rabbit hole is to click on a particularly pungent response's source. It's always some guy with tens per day rude bon mots to his favorite enemies.
I agree the content can be absolutely invaluable and fascinating otherwise, but I just couldn't deal with the seeping toxicity in the end.
Dead Comment
I have the engagement algorithm blues.
"Solving" this issue with automation will most likely just recreate the already existing engagement algorithms. Strict moderation and more importantly curation is probably the only way to make it work but who's going to pay for this at scale?
Now imagine Facebook or google news.
Deleted Comment
Collections? No thanks.
I'd pay $30/mo for a good, FOSS, Federated Protocol to compete with T (and the others)