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nevi-me
adastra22
The little heart button isn’t endorsement though. Lots of people use it as a bookmarking tool, or as a stochastic retweet button.
2muchcoffeeman
Some people will block accounts that follow accounts they don't like. I specifically follow people I don't agree with so I am exposed to the dumb things they are saying. I'm not sure how many people have blocked me even though I barely tweet much.
I'm pretty sure social media is simply a system to reinforce echo chambers and tribalism.
mxmilkiib
I guess one could use an alt account for that.
nevi-me
Endorsement/support/agreement. When applied on a tweet I consider to be vile, to me it means that the person retweeting/sharing it is amplifying that vile message.
There's already a dedicated bookmark button.
stewbrew
There is no dedicated bookmark button. The Bookmark functionality is hidden under the share button.
The Like-button maybe is one of the most misused features of twitter. People don't always use software the way some developers think it should be.
AnonymousPlanet
There is no such thing as a dedicated bookmark button on twitter. At least not on my client. Twitter on the web or with their app is unusable for me. The only thing I have to find a tweet again is the star / heart button.
yaa_minu
Most people don't know that you can bookmark a tweet. Besides the like button is more convenient
dmitshur
It is also sometimes (probably quite rarely) an unintended misclick.
anonymousab
I have found that my right thumb, when scrolling, will be directly over top of the vertical space that the like buttons move through. As such, accidental likes have been much more common for me than when I had a smaller device.
ed25519FUUU
I’m actually afraid I’m going to click like on something and it’s going to come back and haunt my career for some god awful reason. So much so that I use a script to “unlike” everything after a few weeks.
porker
Until Twitter has an API to get the tweets I bookmark, this is exactly how I use the like button.
ASalazarMX
The heart button means you liked that specific tweet, the follow button means you track that account. They shouldn't be treated as implicit endorsement. Endorsement of a specific tweet comes from a retweet; endorsement of an account comes from a tweet/retweet of yourself that explicitly states such endorsement.
Why do people have to radicalize everything?
Changing topics, megablocking seems like a really good idea to mass block bots manipulating trending topics, since Twitter won't do anything significant about them on its own.
sedatk
It's endorsement as much RT is, as Twitter puts tweets liked by people you follow on your timeline. It serves as an amplification tool, not just personal interaction.
adastra22
Not all people use the Twitter interface. I used Tweetbot for years and "like" has no effect in that app, as it has no algorithmic feed. Since there is no way to bookmark a tweet from that app, that's what I used the "like" button for.
I'm not the only one either. Lots of people use Twitter this way, whether the Twitter devs intended for it to be used this way or not.
pjc50
> stochastic retweet button.
One of twitter's terrible design decisions.
Because the "like" button causes a tweet to appear in the feeds of your followers who don't religiously use "home timeline" despite twitter's efforts to switch them to "top tweets", it is an endorsement and an amplification. It doesn't matter what your intent is, the effect is to put it in front of other people who don't want to see it.
hoten
Where can you view a list of the tweets you've liked?
dmitshur
Go to the desired Twitter profile, then switch to the Likes tab. Its URL will be something like https://twitter.com/{user}/likes.
codezero
It's not petty, it's just controlling your inputs.
Sargos
It's creating your own bubble. Not really a good thing for anyone who values a broad perspective of the world.
panarky
You can value a broad perspective of the world, and follow high-quality feeds of many perspectives.
But when you find a low-quality feed, blocking the author and their entire ecosystem of promoters and sycophants is an effective method to increase your signal-to-noise ratio.
newaccount74
If you want a broad perspective of the world, reading negative bullshit from angry twitter trolls is not going to help. It's just going to make you angry too.
renewiltord
It’s just a spam filter, homes. You telling me you don’t block spam? Bullshit.
undefined
lvoudour
We should probably spend more time controlling our outputs than our inputs
soheil
I think blocking anyone who liked it also may be a bit harsh. Maybe "mute" them for a few days instead and if they're repeat bad actors then block.
nirui
One question: does it monitors the Tweet and keeps banning new likers?
I found that most people in my block list were fans of few propaganda accounts. It could be a nice addition if the service can monitor those accounts, and keep banning people who liked any Tweet posted by those accounts.
I know there are side effects for doing that, but I have other ways to gather valid information and opinions so I don't really care. I rather save my time from useless and baseless online arguments (a lot of those were sent by bots), and focus on things that are really important.
janandonly
Unfortunately, no. Not yet.
But this service makes Twitter soo much more useful I wonder why it is not a standard built in option??
Gareth321
>But this service makes Twitter soo much more useful I wonder why it is not a standard built in option??
A lot of people are about to have very quiet, very calm, very rational feeds, and this isn't good for engagement metrics.
I still wouldn't go near Twitter if my life depended on it, but it will certainly help people who are already hooked.
pugets
I’m glad it isn’t built in. Twitter is already enough of an echo chamber.
nirui
Not all echo chamber are bad.
It's like religions. Somebody who lives deep in the religion that they believing in might deny all other beliefs, and almost all religions were created from adult fairy tales (in another word, lies). But what if a religion makes people peaceful, kind, productive and healthy while strongly rejects the idea of harming the others? Is that religion bad?
Contrary to what people might think, more information does not necessarily make you more rational and reasonable. It can be the opposite, sometimes information makes you anger and hatred, while ignorance gives you the power of justice and forgiveness. That's why sometimes those who made improvement to the world were doing so from their own veil of ignorance. Nobody tell them to hate, so they helped instead.
Echo chamber is an overly stigmatize word. It's true that some people handled it poorly, thus sadly created a spiral that dragged them all the way down. But on the other hand, echo chamber can also be a useful moderate tool to keep yourself out of those harmful ideas online too. It depends on how you craft the chamber, how you use it, and whether you left the door unlocked.
I would rather use my ignorance as a vault to keep my humanity.
bigiain
> anyone have suggestions for my next career move?
Because it works against the viral rage amplifying feedback loops that the advertisers and shareholders demand...
hnlmorg
> > anyone have suggestions for my next career move?
Guessing you forgot to hit 'copy' before you pasted that quote? Looks like you've re-pasted the same quote from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30839804) :D
actionfromafar
It would result in less "engagement". (And a better "filter bubble". At this point, I don't know which is worse.)
jasonm23
I expect it's about farming hate engagement.
Not that Twitter would openly say it.
b112
This may seem a bit crass, but I mean it honestly. Why not just leave twitter?
I assure you, you will quickly realise you miss nothing.
j4yav
Parts of Twitter are great. Endless US culture wars, not so much.
nirui
Because Twitter is one of the important way to get informed in near realtime on what's happening around the world, simply due to the size of it's user base. And this makes it useful ...before bots and mobs catches the wind too of course.
dageshi
For the average person that information is pretty much useless, it's just another type of entertainment.
b112
My parents grew up, just as people started to get TV in their homes. Mostly, when very very young, they only had radio.
And as they matured, so did TV. Became larger, colour emerged, audio improved, and the wonder of viewing events live, in real time, from around the world was fascinating to them.
Soon, cable TV, and eventually 24 hour news appeared.
I watched the news morph from a 30 minute nightly summary, to a relentless repeat of the same news over, and over again. And talking heads, opinions relentlessly speed forth, by "experts" and "analysts", just droning on, hour after hour. All basically gossiping, rehashing the same info endlessly.
You, instead, have twitter. You, are in the same trap.
There is nothing of value there. No in depth news. No thoughtful information.
Just a relentless spew of opinion, talking heads...
Decades ago, magazines abounded. What does celebrity $x think of politics today? Or, what does the CEO of Ford, think about this and that?
This is the level of most of Twitter, the rest being people working (eg, fully biased) to amass follower. Once gained, via fraud, or being trendy (same thing really), they then sell their output to the highest bidder.
This can be political, or commercial.
Twitter makes my parents addiction to 24 news, alway on at home when I visited, seem trivial in comparison.
You have been tricked, had manipulated. There is nothing of value on twitter. Nothing.
If something is important, it will only be a mess of tangled garbage on twitter.
You know this. You already work against twitter's addictive, and useless properties, for you attempt to remake it into something sane, and useful.
But you cannot. It is designed to prevent this, designed to pull you in to the absurdities.
Get out. Follow what you secretly want.
Abandon twitter completely.
apexalpha
That's a generous way of describing anonymous 'rumours'.
mensetmanusman
The more real-time it is, the more likely it is misinformation.
oneeyedpigeon
Some of us have gained work from Twitter. I can assure you, we would have missed something.
fsckboy
i need metablock.xyz, a tool that blocks all the people who use this tool
noizejoy
And then I’d love a game-of-life style visual simulation of the effect of both kinds of blocks.
Will the Twitterverse split in two? Into n?
Will everyone end up in their own Twitterverse of 1?
Will Twitter implode with blocking taking all the resources away from tweeting?
pjc50
> Will the Twitterverse split in two? Into n?
This happens periodically with things like "menshn", "gab", "truth social". The problem is that Twitter functions as a PVP MMO: the wolves want prey, but nobody wants to be prey, so when they get isolated off into a hardcore PVP server it stops being fun for them.
pfarrell
What if I’m not shadowbanned but the only person who isn’t?!?
fsckboy
that game of life thing sounds pretty good, I'd like to watch any type of internet virality, ratio-ing, cancellation, etc. that way
thinkingemote
I know this is a (sort of) joke but does any know if it is technically possible?
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1337biz
next step: the metametablock, a tool that blocks all the people who block the people who use this tool.
saddist0
Eagerly waiting for the LinkedIn version to clean up my timeline.
dartharva
I have already given up on LinkedIn as a social network. My profile only exists as a public resume for recruiters and peers to see, I never interact with anything on the site except to update my profile and check my privacy settings.
apexalpha
Based on my 0.5 days as a CyberIndustry specialist I want to send out a message to everyone:
* Half the teams waste collaborative potential by not having a second standup around 2PM.
* We do things DIFFERENTLY from all others; watch our funny PR video.
* Why waste time inside when you can code on your iPad in the sun?
<super clever algorithm hack>
* What do you think 1 + 4 =?
Heart for 5, Like for Five or Comment your answer!
</super clever algorithm hack>
<insert meaningless picture of author>
amanzi
I've been actively removing connections who comment or like posts that add no value to me. But LinkedIn is rapidly going downhill - some days my feed is just full of rubbish.
bl4ckneon
It feels like it is turning into like early to mid Facebook with all of the posts that are like "what is your favorite programming language. Like for C++, heart for Java...".
Such low effort, low value engagement posts. Pretty sad tbh...
Yhippa
It's turned into Facebook 2.
jader201
I honestly don’t know that many people that still use LinkedIn. I have an account, and most people I know have an account, but I’m not aware of any of them actively using it.
Seems like it’s mostly there for when you need to reach out to folks if you’re looking for a job.
I actually stopped logging in and sending/accepting connections not long after I started my current job (8 years ago).
Gareth321
I use it strictly for job hunting. I receive a lot of offers there and it's a great way to contact recruiters. That was its premise, but they've been working hard to turn it into a social platform.
thethimble
It’s used pretty commonly if you’re a hiring manager or if you regularly interview people. It’s much more convenient than looking at resumes because of its standardized format.
hbarka
Why is it that when you reply to recruiters their first request is to send them a copy of your resume?
j4yav
It took a while, but unfollowing anyone who produced low quality content did eventually result in an interesting LinkedIn feed. I wish I had started doing it sooner.
srvmshr
Twitter is a place where my blocklist length far exceeds my follow or following list. I use it only for the academic chatter. It is unfortunate that ML/Systems research has major presence on Twitter & thats happening to be high SNR.
vishnugupta
Same here. Besides author wise block I desperately need topic wise block. For instance this Will Smith slapgate has totally screwed up my carefully curated timeline. My only option is to take a two week Twitter sabbatical and hope it dies down.
oefrha
This is the social graph vs interest graph problem. With an interest graph you should only see content on topics you’re interested in. With Twitter’s social graph however, which is only a poor approximation of an interest graph, once you follow someone you also get all of their political hot takes, sports and other shit you don’t care about.
pbowyer
That's a great framing of it. I'm a good example, interested in many things so my tweets are about multiple topics. It must drive my followers nuts. And the accounts I like to follow are focused on a single topic.
I've thought about running half a dozen accounts with a focus on each, but be far easier if I could curate my output by topic and people can subscribe to only those they want (religion, ML, funny, politics, arty photography, steam trains)
vishnugupta
Indeed! My purpose to follow someone is to get their insights into a specific topic. If they go off topic beyond my acceptable threshold (which is set to very low) I just unfollow them; the noise isn't worth it. However once in a while stuff like slap gate happens to mess up with my timeline. So sabbatical it is.
cpncrunch
You can already hide tweets containing phrases in your Twitter settings.
Freak_NL
Might be a bit of a challenge with two generic names such as 'Will' and 'Smith'. Even in combination these offer a good chance of occurring in non-actor related phrases (e.g., “Will Smith's new paper offer valuable insights into ML-research applied to Twitter threads?”).
EricE
Third party clients are a must if you are going to screw with Twitter. You can filter out all the noise and topics that aren't of interest.
That people use the native Twitter interface at all constantly amazes me.
TOMDM
The ML community has been so focused on recommender systems, maybe what we need is un-recommender systems.
(I'm joking, it obviously has very similar perverse results)
idrios
After reading this comment, now I wish there was a way to create something analogous to Pandora or Spotify channels for Twitter. If you want to view news on ML research, change to your ML channel where you've followed relevant researchers and used this blocking tool for all else. Want to follow certain artists, change to your art station. Same for politics, sports, animals, etc.
I'm sure the way to do this for someone who wanted to is just to have multiple profiles but it'd be cool to have Twitter with a Spotify-like interface to use the site through different contexts with a single click.
NikolaNovak
For some reason, this worked brilliantly and organically on Google plus. I easily built circles of photographers, astronomers, computer geeks, artists, etc. Got interests based suggestions that made sense. I felt I had curated, high quality content lists. Compared to my google plus experience, Facebook and Twitter are just so much crap crap crap.
Therefore It only makes sense Google plus is the one that died - I'm pretty much the universal negative focus group :)
everly
Twitter has lists for exactly this purpose
soheil
I often wonder how valuable a public block list might be and even if more valuable than a follower/following list. In this case as in many other cases there is probably more insight to be gained in silent evidence than in positive evidence.
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randallsquared
A lot of people seem to "like" tweets for reasons other than liking the tweet.
__float
Like what? It's become a semi-public endorsement in some ways, at this point -- Twitter frequently recommends tweets in the feed because someone you follow liked it.
If you use Twitter, you probably know that. So, liking a tweet is not very similar to up-or down-voting on Reddit or HN, which is private.
randallsquared
Bookmarking for another platform or another time. Some twitter interfaces have a bookmark affordance and some do not (the web doesn't, at least in my cohort).
These alternative uses is why people say often in their bio that "likes" do not imply endorsement, but it's so common to say that that I didn't even mention it on my bio, though of course it's still the case.
agilob
I very often like/share/upvote comments just to promote stupidity of the author. My followers are fully aware that I like something stupid for the lulz, not to promote it. If author of a stupid comment thinks they're being liked, that's even better for the lulz.
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boomboomsubban
I don't use twitter, but on both reddit and here I'd estimate around ten percent of my voting is misclicking. Phones make it too easy to accidentally press a button.
bluescrn
If you can't avoid social media entirely, avoid using it on a touchscreen device. A accidental fat-fingered like/retweet on the wrong post isn't just embarassing, these days it has the potential to have serious consequences.
darknavi
Very similar to upvoting on reddit.
bambax
Quitting Twitter is very easy and one of the best things I ever did. And I thought it would be hard! It really isn't.
bombcar
I wonder at what point the blocklist would surpass twitters storage mechanism for it.
Can you block every single Twitter account?
ryanSrich
I’ve seen people on Twitter brag about having 6 figures blocked. So it at least works for that many. I know Marc Andreessen notoriously has a lot of people blocked. I wonder if it’s in the millions.
dwaltrip
If someone spent 5 hours a day on twitter, and blocked a new person every 5 minutes... then after 4.5 years of doing this every single day, they would reach 100,000 people blocked.
Bedon292
Once every five minutes feels quite low in this situation. I don't really block, just mute for the most part. But I can go in and mute a dozen accounts in a minute in the comments on someone big's tweets. If you are someone with a high engagement rate, and actually want to curate the comments, you could easily end up blocking a hundred in a couple minutes.
estebank
As evidenced by this post, people use automated tooling that can easily make that number balloon.
ryanSrich
Block lists. They exist, and there are tools to implement them.
Spivak
Which is why you have a block-chain browser extension do it recursively.
undefined
5560675260
Whenever I see this I wonder how much overhead blocking as a feature generates for twitter.
mr_toad
As a programmer I’d be more worried about the lookup cost. There are efficient ways to lookup a name in a list and very inefficient ways that would be fine for small lists, but struggle with large lists.
pugz
Maybe this is an ideal use case for a bloom filter. The answer to the question "is user X blocked?" is almost always going to be "no". And the "maybe" cases can consult the actual block list.
How exciting. I've waited my whole career for a bloom filter use case. Please no one tell me that there's a much more obvious solution.
caseysoftware
This made me curious and I wondered how it might work...
The simplest approach would be to start from user id 1 and increment up blocking each one but then you'd block millions of inactive, dead, or suspended accounts which would probably get you suspended.
A better approach may be to choose a "recent" tweet id, block the author, count up from there, checking if each author is blocked and blocking if they're not. The best part is that you don't even need to know the author when you make a request. For example, tweet id 1508540042817376256 is Elon's and it resolves to him whether you use https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1508540042817376256 or https://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/1508540042817376256
This is no longer blocking "every single Twitter account" but blocking "every single active Twitter account" but may still be able to trigger whatever limits.
bob1029
Compressed bitmap indexes are the way to do this in theory. Very efficient storage.
ladyattis
People lamenting this tool for making echo chambers don't really grasp that in practice people already actively filter out what they don't agree with. This just makes that process explicit. If you think for example someone who's an ardent Catholic is going to listen or even accept my views as a Valentinian Gnostic as valid then you really don't know how folks work. Heck, there's people will argue blue in the face a given sports team is the best even if they've never made it to their conference's playoffs in five years. To twist the phrase from Ben Shapiro (whom I find to be repugnant but that's neither here or there): feelings (or sentiments) don't care about your facts.
EricE
The act of filtering still exposes you a little. Using tech to wholesale blackhole "wrongthink" is probably one of the worst aspects of social media. Frankly I think terms like "bubble" dramatically trivialize just how dangerous this kind of myopia is.
aldousd666
The Network Effect, except, in reverse. Pretty soon, six degrees of kevin bacon means you'll see nothing.
sixstringtheory
Why stop there though? For every person that liked it, it should also block anyone that follows them, or has ever liked one of their tweets.
Why stop there though…
flenserboy
Blocking those who like a tweet seems excessive. Plenty of bad hits — people who use likes as bookmarks, etc. What would be really nice is to be able to group block by profile content, or if they were simultaneously followed by five accounts of your choosing. Some fine-grained blocking like that would be nice; it would also be nice if muted words & phrases would also apply to search results — I've seen too many sneak through, especially when attached to hashtags.
ramesh31
Nah. The SnR of Twitter is absolutely abysmal. The only way you can possibly use it effectively is to accept that there will be false positives caused by your filtering heuristics.
adastra22
Prune the people you follow and don’t use the algo feed. My Twitter feed is very high SNR.
unlaxedneurotic
I too disabled the default "Recommended by Twitter" feed and instead chose to view only tweets by accounts I follow in a chronological order. Absolutely no political stuff. This resulted in a very pleasant twitter experience.
davidmurdoch
Yeah, mass blocking people only creates more isolated filter bubbles for everyone involved. Seems like a great way to create an echo chamber though.
Edit: wait, why the downvotes?
_teyd
Depends on who you are blocking. If it's anyone who slightly disagrees with you and anyone who likes them, then you'll probably quickly end up blocking literally everyone. But if it's people who are off-topic replying that Bill Gates is inserting microchips in vaccines, flat earther, or other Qanon style posts and those who upvote them, I don't really personally mind the loss.
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I sometimes manually do this when I'm feeling petty, or when a tweet is so offensive that in real life, I'd disassociate with people who endorse it. Good to have a tool. I just tried it on a spam tweet, and only the author got blocked.
Maybe other users get put in a queue or the service is close to Twitter limits. Probably still good to create my own block function (and hope Twitter doesn't ban the API use).
Reminder: Probably best to revoke the app's permission when done.