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.
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
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.
"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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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 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 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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
My X feed is FUBAR.
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.
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
Why not use the "Following" feed? You won't get any recommended content (besides ads without an adblocker) and only see stuff from people you follow.
Side note: It's annoying how many tech people started posting their political hot takes since ~2016. I unfollowed everyone who tweeted about politics.
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.
>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.
I still do this on Twitter and the "For You" feed works great.
Use "latest", not "for you."
"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.
… Bluesky offers a clean, strictly chronological following feed as well as your choice of algorithmic feeds.
> 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?
Tumblr also has this?
(Not counting the ads and specifically-paid-to-be-promoted posts, but those are clearly marked, and I’m pretty sure twitter has as many in-line ads)
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.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/x-bot-remover/aohkh...
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.
At the risk coming off as pedantic, it ceases to be a self-promotion tool if the system is destroyed.
I had him blocked and last I used xitter I still saw his stuff.
i turned off the images, it’s under bandwidth saving settings but makes x much better and helps keep the alg away from memes also
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.
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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
I did the same, very quickly. I'm now on BlueSky and it's exactly like pre-Musk Twitter.
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.
Here you go: https://goodfeeds.co/search?q=tech
You can change how replies are sorted for you via a button on the top right, but you have to change it every time you open some replies.
The problem comes from the default sort order shown to everyone though, not just you as you're reading it.
> started prioritizing replies from premium users
And often non-premium users are simply flagged as spam and hidden.
Which actually means that if Elon removes your blue checkmark (as happened recently with Asmongold) then it is akin to a shadowban.
It's a de facto entry level advertising tier for the worst products and the worst takes. Everything on the platform is an ad impression.
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.
Screen recording and processing because it's easier than just scraping now is wild.
I made was tired of reading political crap from some accounts I follow and created a Chrome extension to filter them out.
Just define topics you don't want to read about and the AI filter will hide them from your feed.
Technically is just passing the text to Gemini Flash 1.5 with a simple prompt to detect if the tweet is from a forbidden topic.
You can try it here: https://twitter.cercaapp.com
Oh cool - its like anti-virus for your brain. AI firewall! haha
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.
Because Twitter switches you a lot and even then you also have all the random notifications from people you don't follow.
Old twitter switched you all the time. I even used a plugin to switch me back.
I've never knew been switched since the acquisition.
during the old twitter times you could use a third party client, that was the trick
>Because Twitter switches you a lot
What does that mean? Twiter doesn’t switch my tabs on its own, neither on desktop or mobile.
>and even then you also have all the random notifications from people you don't follow.
I only get notifications from people I don’t follow if someone likes my tweets or they reply
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.
I use it all the time and I’ve never seen posts from people I don’t follow. Once again I only use the “following” tab
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.
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.
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.
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.
He's a child. Such a waste.
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.
https://files.catbox.moe/ehu9pc.jpg
Oh interesting - thanks for the upload. Ahh - its the N/A political diversity being seen as 'low' when a null should just have no impact on score.
Thanks! Will work on a fix
Happened for my feed as well. It had ZERO political content but showed me a fully red bar for lacking political diversity. It showed N/A%.
Oh interesting - thanks for the upload
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 :)
>Record and upload a 1-2 minute screen recording of you scrolling through your X/Twitter feed.
Is that really the only way to get hold of someones feed? It's neat from a tech perspective & very AI...but seems rather cumbersome
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 rarely or ever see any promotional tweets.
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.
Apologizes if this is insensitive, but was one of you blocking or muting the other an option? I’ve muted all my exes on IG.
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.
My card: https://files.catbox.moe/t8rzlb.png
Thanks, that's a good point - do you think some analysis of advertising would interest you?
There may only be a couple of ads per 'sample' though, so maybe not enough to be interesting.
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.
Yes. Negatively.
Not sure analysis is needed. Algorithmic feeds are fucked and impact you negatively. All of them!
You have no real control over what you see, they're ephemeral, nobody has a shared experience, and that's _only a few_ things that are fucked.
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/twitter
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 has totally optional algorithmic feeds, and the ones it does have don't work (they only show me spambots) so there's no motivation to use them.
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.
Bluesky doesn't even have a following feed like twitter (where only posts by people you follow show up)
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).
What the hell are you talking about, that's the default view.
yes it does…
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.
If you're using X or any other social media, the answer is yes and so are you.
Is this analyzing the video with AI?
Newly released! Feedback would be great!
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?
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’m not sure how that thing works and I haven’t tried it, but even my tech tweets on the feed are sometimes deeply political these days.
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
Wouldn't most tech or science tweets be considered left since the right has divorced itself from reality?
"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.
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