My feed was tech-only. Real people publishing real stuff.
Last year X started occasionally showing some random content like Reddit, I'd mark them as "not interesting" and move on.
Since last month there's no tech content by tech people, there's exclusively junk worse than on Reddit's homepage. No amount of "not interesting" will fix it. Oh, there's porn now too.
Yup. I had a beautiful infosec feed that was incredibly useful. Sometime over the summer my "for you" devolved into wild political opinions, and many of the smartest people left the platform which turned by "Following" feed into a ghost town. Every time I used the app I came away feeling angry, and I realized I was happier not using the app than using it.
Fortunately about 1/2 of the smart people have shown up on Bluesky, and we can have technical conversations now. I'm hoping all the energy eventually comes back.
Infosec twitter had been self-immolating long before X. I basically solved the influx of weird stuff in one night by blocking everything that wasn’t related to my interests. The next day I was reading about rockets from my rocket peeps, radios from my radio peeps, and politics and posturing from my infosec peeps.
That plus even the classic SV tech crowd is now so entangled in US partisan politics that you're more likely to hear about whatever outrage is happening in culture wars than a new technology. Complete write-off and I don't just mean X
The classic SV tech crowd wasn't worth following anyway. It was an endless stream of self-promotion and people pretending to have great wisdom because they exited one company once (or, worse, got a job as a VC).
I have noticed searching for topics that interest me, ends up showing more content related to that search term in my feed. At least for some time. Just putting it out there incase someone wants to manually tweak their timeline using the search workaround.
I don't post about politics on my social media feeds, but... I spend increasing amount of time feeling that I should start.
Context:
1. I come from a country that was torn into horrible civil war by populist leaders spouting exactly the same tactics and phrases as some of the North American elected leaders do now.
2. I don't believe in manifest destiny, I'm not religious, and so I don't believe that the average well being in USA and Canada is God given, inevitable, or guaranteed.
3. All it takes for evil to win is for good people to do or say nothing.
So... Is covering my head under the sand like the mythical ostrich and going LaLaLa over next 4 years the polite thing to do, lest somebody unsubscribe? Or do I have all but duty to try to encourage tolerance, bridge communication between my polarized friends and neighbours, speak of my past and hope for the future?
Posting about politics on social media changes exactly zero. In the end you will only have people with the same opinion as yours around you which distorts your world view. If you really want to get involved, you should start with your local community and make things better in your hometown. You can't change country-wide politics.
Well you can share the same message you just shared on social media. Suddenly many people with the same ideals can improve their community all over. Sounds like great impact to me.
> If you really want to get involved, you should start with your local community and make things better in your hometown. You can't change country-wide politics.
Care to explain what you mean here? Getting involved in local community is where you can make a difference in your and your loved ones lives. Voting in local elections is INFINITELY more important than general elections and it is not even close… Not sure what Russia has to do with that?
it's not about changing anything, but it can make a difference if people notice that x amount of people or people xyz they care about are not actually apolitical bots, but do have opinions and values.
Based on what you've written, you are choosing between polite self interest (unsubscribes), and vocal group interest (speaking out).
Essentially a choice between helping and staying out of the way.
The real question is your values, the reason you want to speak up in the first place.
In addition, it doesnt look like you want to speak up for the sake of it, but to prevent a dangerous outcome.
For a situation like this, its safe to say you will always be conflicted if you don't speak out.
What you will rue, is speaking out ineffectively. So speaking out without a plan, alienating people - NOT achieving the goal that motivated you in the first place.
At this point, i typically try and come up with a diagnostic question. Something that puts two values a persons holds in conflict.
Eg: If someone gave you a clear set of topics that would prevent this outcome, would you immediately speak up on them, even if you may not agree with the words? (I guarantee that these words prevent the outcome you foresee, and have no hidden knock on effects)
This asks how far you would go to achieve your outcome. Would you be willing to say things you dont like, to prevent populism?
If no, then there are conditions to your goal, or your goal is slightly different.
Knowing your motivations (just want to speak, want to achieve a goal, want to achieve a specific outcome, want someone else to handle it), helps you figure out what you want, and the limits of how far you are willing to engage.
I'm confident there are examples but I've yet to see anyone artfully navigate this.
A few years ago a bunch of folks I followed started adding politics to the list of things they would regularly talk about, which I fully support. But I don't owe them my attention and when the topics start to just become a steady stream of undifferentiated ranting about political topics I'm out. Then they would invariably take a self-righteous position to explain the drop in their numbers as people that 'can't handle the truth' and that they are better off without them, when the reality is that they
mostly just spammed themselves out of an audience.
Do what you like of course, but for me unless the person is bringing new information or context to the conversation I'm out.
Because a lot of the smartest and most interesting people just stopped posting. And frankly I don't blame them. A good chunk of the reason is that the replies are recently much more angry and toxic, which makes the entire platform stressful to use.
I tried but I don't follow enough people I suppose (~100) and many probably left. This resulted in my "Following" feed being completely taken over by really prolific CSS guy.
Discover feeds, if they try to be actually relevant to the user, can be a great tool for finding new people to follow and help keep the following feed fresh. I primarily follow artists on Twit-alikes and it’s how I once upon a time used it on Twitter and now use it on Bluesky.
A discover feed that’s not adversarial isn’t strictly necessary but it’s a significant selling point.
Also make sure to remove bots from your followers. Having them in your social graph impacts your feed for sure.
I made the "x bot remover" Chrome extension that automates removal based on simple rules. It's free.
Most of the tech people I recognize are on Bluesky now. If you follow enough of the same people, even the "Following" timeline won't help because they're just not there.
What is infuriating is the fucked algorithm that is now showing in priority the tweets of Elon, even if you don't subscribe, follow or care about him.
That is the real problem nowadays, he destroyed the system to make it a self promotion tool first. I'm quite sure that always on feed tweets of him can easily brain wash hundreds of millions of people.
Weird, I'm not getting nearly enough Elon tweets as I would like. Each day there is news about another wacky thing he tweeted and I only learn about it afterwards.
I don't get why people would be so kind as to use the "not interested" button, on Twitter or anywhere. Just block them all. Content creators are same thing as 10x engineers, they can't be manufactured and supply is limited. There should be only so many of them that are capable of writing passable spams that can be force pushed without mentally destabilizing the team that does it.
Not that anyone should go back to a dead website, just that not blocking is too nice.
Good point. Unfortunately blocking people often takes more taps and achieves less. The platform definitely won't show you the creator, but can still show others exactly like them.
My X experience has become scrolling through the 2/3 of posts I never asked for, including: 1) Elon's posts, though I never interact with him as a subject, 2) Ads from Trump-supporting PACs seeking donations, 3) Ads for hunting games with graphic depictions of animals being shot. Everything else is insultingly basic clickbait. These aren't topics I interact with, they are just representative of baseline content on X right now.
"Latest" is still exclusively people you follow, in chronological order (and content explicitly marked as sponsored if you don't have premium.)
X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this. You don't like the algorithm? Don't use it, and use X just like everybody else for the first 10 years of its life.
I didn't provide an example because there's already a ton of other responders with examples. The claim is clearly false, but it was presented as emphatically true and I was wondering why.
I have found my mental health substantially better from downvoting and moving on in those cases, especially if there’s other people already responding with what you would want to say.
Yeah, I should do that instead. I'm just so tired of people uncritically and emphatically spreading falsehoods, especially in cases like these, when it's not a function of philosophy or viewpoint, and can be found to be objectively wrong, despite initial insistence. But yeah, downvote, move on.
Downvote and move on, or provide the reasoning behind your claim. Simply saying "you are obviously wrong" without any substantiation adds nothing to the discussion and instead tends to derail it, prompting further low value comments or causing people to respond to a straw man of what they assume your reasoning is. You shouldn't assume that other commenters will know that your reasoning is expressed in comments by other people you haven't linked or referenced. Some of the other comments provided counter examples that aren't as obviously social media (YouTube) or corporate (BlueSky) and which I found less convicing than the clear analogue in Threads (which I have never used and just assumed worked like Meta's other products which don't allow this.)
After having looked further, I agree with your claim, but it wasn't "obviously true" to me. I only use a small subset of social media and thus the knowledge from which I operate is different from yours and different things are obvious to me.
While I appreciate the energy, they aren't the account I originally asked the question to. That account never responded, and wandered off into the night after being correct a dozen times.
> X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this. You don't like the algorithm? Don't use it, and use X just like everybody else for the first 10 years of its life.
Speaking as a non-X user, doesn’t YouTube offer essentially the same thing with the “subscriptions” tab?
The "not interesting" barely does anything. I've probably pressed it on the various angry bullshit US politics shit-slurry posts over a hundred times and they still sneak in.
Who the hell is "Vivek" and why do I care at all? And since when did I ever express interest in "confirmation hearings"? And does Musk have his account hard coded to be every 3rd post? Jesus
Same here its all trash, i stopped logging into X a couple months ago, its all political and hate speech now its nuts, i used to have funny meme's and general tech news and gaming news, nope not 1 of those things anymore its all political shit and people complaining at each other about random shit, oh and insane amounts of crypto
To me the worst part is not even the feed (I can use “following” tab) but the replies. I often used to look at single threads to see replies there. Since they started prioritizing replies from premium users it turned into cesspool and I eventually stopped using X altogether
Bluesky doesn't have contact import yet (or I didn't see it). Are there any good lists for techie/nerd content? I really miss my old Twitter feed but most people I followed switched to Bluesky and it's a lot of manual work to find people again.
Yup, so short-sighted. Probably boosted numbers when lots of trolls bought premium to be noticed (where their obnoxious replies normally would land in the bottom with no views), but in the end I got so tired of the hostile environment that I just stopped using it.
Everyone's x feed is FD. I don't not follow Elon yet his crap posts are littering the app when I open it. It's turned into his personal bullhorn of miss information and rage bating.
He's either been radicalized by his own platform, or he's intentionally being provocative to drive engagement, to drive ad revenue. It's disgusting.
The hypocrisy is absurd. Like telling everyone to go fuck themselves, and then hours later, pleading for users to post more positive content... or making a big show of being worried about using AI untruthfully, and then repeatedly posting AI-generating images smearing people he doesn't like. Pretending like no one had "free speech" until he bought the platform, and then selectively banning vocal dissent he doesn't like.
Why suggest AI when simply paying a social media manager for his twitter account would be a normal thing to have done at his level of wealth?
Which is something he has obviously done with his grind-centric videogame accounts and actual livestreams of him not knowing how to play on those accounts?
Reason I suggest AI is more related to him as a Technology enthusiast who has had enough money to have private technology available to him to experiment with.
Even if that's true, he's still cosigning the account isn't he? He's putting his name on it, it's not weird for people to assume that these are his viewpoints and/or opinions, no matter how unhinged.
FWIW, I can't recall seeing Elon except as retweets. The downsides are the bots, the exodus, and the stupid renaming, but it's been almost entirely improvement to me.
I was pretty tired of Mastodon and thus happy to return when Elon bought it.
ETA: I use a preferred subset of my follows for my main feed, a few subject-delineated lists for particular research, and occasionally my "following" feed to branch out.
> FWIW, I can't recall seeing Elon except as retweets.
I had to block his account to not see one of his posts at the top of my screen every time I logged in. I was a casual user and didn't follow anyone (only started logging in when it was impossible to see anything otherwise), so I had what could be called the "default" experience.
It's crazy how blatant it is. If you block him and his promoted bunch, you still get occasional fascist/racist bait on the feed. Following feed is also mostly dead because many people I followed left.
I use X to mostly follow politics and some math/physics, and the political feed in the "For you" tab is remarkably balanced. I actually maintain two separate lists called "Left" and "Right" that I slot accounts into, and I just go to each list's feed to see what each side is saying about something. The "For you" tab has a mix, and overall has been pretty well balanced.
I know that Twitter is US site but I still find it strange when people talk about balanced political views and talk only about 2-sides. Yes it is one more than in China but still...
I'm not from the US, but from India, and it's the same here. "Left" and "Right" may be misnomers, but there are effectively two main blocks at the national level, and supporters of each block get slotted into one of the two. Of course there are disagreements between members within each of the two blocks, but ultimately all the fine distinctions boil down to which of these two a voter would choose!
It really is unique to everyone and who they follow.
But when the US election came around all of our business For You feeds switched to political, far-right content even though we are not in the US nor political. And the fact that the EU is investigating X for its algorithm changes means at least some other people have had the same experience.
That's not balanced though. Only a small subset of people decides to actively talk about politics on social media. So most likely you see just the opinions of radicalized cronically online left-wing people and the opinions of radicalized cronically online right-wing people. None of those represent the real world and their arguments are almost always a repetition of the same bad-faith take on the current issue, just to get easy engagement from their community. It's not really a representative (or healthy) window to society.
That's the trap of politics on social media, they give you the illusion that you get a pulse of what society is thinking, when you actually just see a very vocal minority repeating the same arguments over and over again.
I just don’t get why don’t people use the “following” tab. You only see people you follow, if they post things you don’t like unfollow them that’s all.
I feel like you don't use Twitter that much then. Because they added the whole notifications about new posts feature a while back and it's not based on who you follow and I believe famously it's like that so Musk gets more views. And I feel like my tabs get changed on a somewhat frequent basis but I've stopped using it to really keep track.
This is simply not true. Before Musk took over Twitter they constantly switched to the "For You" tab. Only after Musk bought it it was changed so the setting sticks. You can also change your notification settings to the old way (only people you follow, etc.).
I think you need to readvise what "simply not true" means. I gave my experience and for you someone who doesn't even know me cannot say what is or is not true about my experiences.
> It's not an opinion. It was like that (Twitter), now it's not (X).
????????????
> He's telling you your experience is outdated.
No, they said what I said was simply not true.
And my experience is from using the new stuff. There may be technical reasons why it wasn't sticky however in my experience it wasn't as sticky as it should be and I ended up on the crappy feed all the time.
If I were to use this credulously, I'd be committing the same error as believing everything in my X feed.
I have no idea who made this tool or what their biases are, why would I believe their analysis any more than I'd believe a stranger on X? I can't find any information on who is behind this.
The different axes that they uses for analysis (health, political balance, "vibe', etc) are all inherently subjective. How are they measured?
I very much doubt it even works or tries to, even though a lot of barriers have been lifted recently (I'm handwaving at https://xkcd.com/1425/ x the input being just a video x output sold as rigorous deep analysis)
I have a stroooong feeling this is just a wrapper around Gemini, as it has video input.
No source available but the JS code for the extension should be readable on your extensions dir. I'm using MutationObserver to check for tweets appearing and then extract their texts and send them to the server.
Server side code is just some Go to handle calls to Gemini Flash, auth, tracking quota usage...
To be honest even the prompt used is quite simple, the fun part has been optimizing it using promptfoo for running the evals.
UPDATE:: The uploading function was not working for a large number of users - this has now been fixed! (it was an issue with the callback URL not being set in the .env which meant file upload progress wasn't returned to the client).
If you have attempted to use this previously without success, please retry - it should work fine now :)
It says that my feed is pretty fucked, but I only follow pixel and anime artists :) I unfollow anyone that posts anything other than art repeatedly, I guess it is an echo chamber of some sorts.
Not sure why anyone sane keeps using X. Bluesky has reached critical mass at this point and has proven its reliability under pressure, and has far better tools for managing your feed.
people are sheep :) they will believe that X was bought to usher a new are of “freedom of speech” so if most X users believe this (they do) why would they ever leave? going to bluesky is like leaving your own parents to go to foster parents
Would you rather give a random 3rd party API access to your social media? Would you trust X to not leak more than just the first few pages of your feed?
This way is clumsy but I appreciate that you have absolute control over what you are sharing.
Yeah I tried for a long time on this! Initially I attempted APIs - but they're locked down and you can't get access to user's feeds.
Secondly, I tried a chrome extension, but these don't work on mobile devices (80% of social media users) so it was redundant (plus very brittle as it depended on specific DOM elements). Also, a lot of content is video/audio, which isn't well captured by static analysis.
A video is a bit annoying to take, but yes, it was the only solution I found!
Again I use Twitter like RSS feeds where I put those people into my list, Hardware, Ruby, Software, Database, Economics etc. If you curate your own list and avoid politics it is mostly fine.
I don't need this tool to tell me how f*** Twitter has become. I already know that. It is mostly junk, highly politicised (how did they allow this to happen after the CA fiasco), and largely dysfunctional with pockets of interesting communities here and there. Not spending either money or time on it anymore.
I compared by "Following" tab and "For You" Tab and they got a pretty similar health score ~40%. It wasn't able to analyze the "political diversity" of the Following tab which I will take as a win lol. It seems like the "Vibe" Score was slightly better on the "Following" and the "Non-Violence" score slightly better on "For You". Political Leaning was Center-Left for "Following" and Center for "For You".
My takeaways are as follows. First, I would take these with huge grains of salt. Second, the political leaning distribution is super weird, it is super polarized with a clear lack of "centrist" takes. Third, can someone please explain to me what "non-violence" is in this context (even the guy who only follows are got like 50% on violence??). Fourth, I wish the "vibe" section was expanded upon, my issue with the For You Page is that it hits the middle point of "slop" and "rage-bait" that lulls you into a passive doom-scrolling brain-emptying mooch. The "Vibe" here doesn't seem to capture that, and I can't really put my finger on what the difference is except for "I know it when I see it". Anyways.
PS: You should probably install browser plug-ins that remove the for you page!
PPS: You should probably switch to Bluesky.
I've had a particularly bad breakup with my ex-girlfriend who I met on Twitter (I was the one responsible for the falling out), and I had to delete my Twitter account for two reasons:
1. The open, "town-square" nature of Twitter meant that it was easy to run into each other again, and she was feeling uncomfortable sharing space with me.
2. This was taking a huge toll on my mental health at the time, because just being on Twitter (or any of the many Twitter clones, for that matter) was reminding me of my relationship with her, just because of how the algorithm worked.
I still think Twitter provided value for me as a startup founder, for marketing and networking purposes. But It wasn't really matter of if it provided value or not; Twitter was driving me to death in the most literal sense of the word possible. To choose life, I chose to leave Twitter.
As someone whose startup builds social platforms, I am extremely turned off by the idea of "public square" models for the internet, after these incidents. We shouldn't aim to get everyone into a single feed, where you are given a curated feed, designed to engage you for as long as possible for the whims of advertisers, as opposed to the utility of the users.
We did block each other mutually, but the world is a small place, and the algorithm works to ensure that the world is a small place, as you're usually only one or two degrees of separation away.
Nice job. It should ignore ads imho, my top 2 "largest influences" were just ads. I mean, I guess we do influence ads via engagement or whatnot, but it's not as if I pay mind to an ad the way I pay mind to a post.
I reckon it's mostly noise. An ad I saw three times in the sample was just an awful mobile game I don't deserve to be subject to ads about, and the other ad I saw twice was just based on my location.
I keep getting an error “your file exceeds the maximum allowed size” or something.
It’s a clip of 1:20 on iphone. I tried clipping it to 1 min but then it wouldn’t allow upload. I exported the clip to files and then uploaded but same error.
How may I reduce the file size on my iPhone?
I'm curious about how you process the video feed; Do you stitch it back together as one long image and then perform OCR? Or just look at every N frames?
I've been looking for an open source library that helps with taking a scrolling video and then stitching it into an image but I haven't had much luck.
Just tried it, says it's fcked but I don't agree. There is zero political tweets on the feed analyzed, yet it says center left; it's basically just tech tweets.
I've the maximum muted words (200), literally muted country names so maybe that's why my feed is clean ish. Wish there was no limit though, still get some ai stuff sometimes
"For You" is an engine designed to provoke an emotional reaction (engagement) from you at any cost, to the detriment of your mental health. Mine was filled with people getting into fights, toxic right-wing misogyny, "karen calling the cops" videos, etc.
Twitter has a perverse financial incentive to capture and hold your attention, and negative attention is far easier to provoke.
Another dark pattern used by X that i haven't seen mentioned much:
When you open a link in the webview, it doesn't show the icon to open it in your preferred browser.
When you close it and open it again, the button is there. Clearly they are scared you'll leave and won't come back. That's also why they are downranking links.
If you find your X feed is fucked, bluesky is right there and offers complete algorithm customization… the network effects aren’t as strong but at least there’s some options to better control the experience.
Bsky does not fix any of the core problems with Twitter. It's still fundamentally a "town square" with algorithmic feeds that keep you engaged. It actively tries to transplant the culture of Twitter to itself, which is something that I don't wish to deal with at all.
It presents itself as a "town square" but because the platform has such strong behaviour in severing interactions between accounts, in practice it consists lots of isolated silos of users echoing the same views to each other ad infinitum.
A forum like HN is much more of a town square because pretty much everyone sees the same content in every set of comments, with just one toggle ("showdead") to modify that.
The two feeds on Bluesky are "Following" (only posts by people you follow show up) and "Discover" (largely dominated by posts by people you don't follow). There are two huge tabs at the top of your feed to switch between them.
If you are following 0 people, the "Following" feed acts similar to the "Discover" feed. As soon as you follow a single person, it works as you'd expect (only showing content from people you've followed).
Something is terribly wrong, then; my following feed shows posts (and certain replies) from people I follow in reverse chronological order, and nothing else, ever.
Are you maybe seeing things that have been reposted by people you follow? There's a lot of that, but those still count as "posts from people you follow". If you want to exclude those, there are settings at the following link:
You can turn off retweets and replies. If you're going to use software with only the default options, at least don't spread misinformation about what you failed to try to learn.
I am not talking about replies and retweets. Those are literally posts from people I dont follow and are not reposts. 4 day old post is followed by posts posted only hours ago.
Maybe you're looking at the "Discover" tab and not the default one which is called "Following".
One scenario where chronology is confusing is when a reply to an earlier tweet takes its chronological place in the timeline but also includes the earlier tweet for context.
I am looking at the tab called Following. I even turned off quotes, replies and mentions. It still shows only 3 days (yesterday it was 4 days) of posts by followers followed by random crap.
If you’re at all worried that your social media feeds from any one website are ruining your mental health, I would suggest just not using them period. Why risk it?
I only have an X account so I can read tweets that are mentioned on the news or in blog posts. If I ever look at my timeline I see a bunch of AI generated thirst traps.
Fair - the video could be expanded to be way bigger (1000s of posts)
I found 1-2 minutes was decent (30+ sample size on average), and a tradeoff for convenience. Background sampling would be ideal but privacy concerns and technical limitations (especially on mobile devices)
Today was the first time i tapped into the "For you" feed since i made my twitter account. I only follow a dozen or so people, all of them singers and musicians from Japan. I am not American nor anywhere near America.
The first bit of scrolling was relevant content from artists i follow on youtube but not twitter. Then suddenly all I saw were Elon Musk doing the Nazi pose. Wtf
This sends like a great idea... for 2019. Unfortunately it's not 2019 and X isn't Twitter.
Where's section that tells you what percentage of your feed is Elon spouting contemptible nonsense, non-Elons raging at Elon's contemptible nonsense, or the muffled whines of even other non-Elons as their contemptible reguritations of Elon's contemptible nonsense squeezes past Elon's sphincter?
lol. Imagine realizing in 2025 twitter is broken trash.
If you think your feed worked before, you’re a fool and lying to yourself. Fools everywhere, as far the eye can see. Fools as CEOs. Fools as engineers. The amount of foolery in the world has reached meme levels and I love it. I love watching you turds scream and wretch. I love watching you be autistic. It puts money in my pocket and provides endless entertainment. When you know it’s not an honor society but just a lolz society it’s easy to make the big bucks on all these fools, and I love it.
lol. Twitter is trash in 2025, you fuys crack me bulp
My feed was tech-only. Real people publishing real stuff.
Last year X started occasionally showing some random content like Reddit, I'd mark them as "not interesting" and move on.
Since last month there's no tech content by tech people, there's exclusively junk worse than on Reddit's homepage. No amount of "not interesting" will fix it. Oh, there's porn now too.
I stopped opening X altogether.