Never e-meet your heroes I suppose. But you know, your mind is your own, you can just literally ignore or make peace with parts of reality you find unpleasant.

It seems quite strange to me how people clamor for push button blinders on what is actual life. You are not a horse to be led around by an app.

What a pretentious response. Bad art exists, twitter showing people you don’t follow in your feed is bad software art.

Who needs blinders when the feature could just work? Follow someone; see them. Don’t follow; don’t see.

> a lot of the smart people I followed followed complete tools

There is no technological solution to this. It isn't bad software art. Sometimes life is disappointing.

Maybe I like Harry Potter and enjoy fan fiction of a certain flavor on twitter and follow the author only to discover she doesn't share my politics (via her tweets and retweets). That is not the fault of Twitter. Well, if I didn't find certain views held by JK Rowling's disagreeable everything would actually be working as it should and there would be no complaints.

You can't pick and choose only the things you like about the people you are interested in. Having those books in common doesn't guarantee fellow fans are agreeable - same thing would happen if I were to attend a book reading in the olden days before twitter and overhear people expressing views that upset me.

I can of course demand everybody at the venue accommodate me on everything since we all enjoy Harry Potter and I am very special but that might not fly. I could compartmentalize and stick to the the things we have in common. Or I could excuse myself.

I honestly can’t work out if I’m arguing with a bot or not. There is literally a single solution: the main stream is purely a stream of tweets from who you follow. I realise this is an existential threat to machine learning engineers who just love to build recommender systems, but that’s it, that’s all it is.

Dude that is exactly how it works in most Twitter clients. On the website you click on "Lists" and curate away, no ML or recommender systems are involved.

Most people don't bother, they sign up and follow JK Rowlling or whatever and she tweets once a year or something so there's nothing to show you so it treats her as a subject not an individual. Bad UX and terminology for sure but most of the complaints are not about that.

Do you also get mad at reddit for whatever the hell the weirdos post in the default sub-reddits when you login?

There is a "block" and a "mute" function.

So force the user to block and mute users they never followed in the first place? No.