alt Hacker News> Just because I said to someone 'Brexit was dumb', I don't expect to get fed 1000 accounts talking about it 24/7. It's tedious and unproductive.
I’m not the biggest Twitter user but I didn’t find it that difficult to get what I wanted out of it.
You already discovered the secret: You get more of what you engage with. If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content. Unfollow people who are talking a lot about Brexit
If you want to see more of something, engage with it. Click like. Follow those people. Leave a friendly comment.
On the other hand, some people are better off deleting social media if they can’t control their impulses to engage with bait. If you find yourself getting angry at the Brexit content showing up and feeling compelled to add your two cents with a comment or like, then I suppose deleting your account is the only viable option.
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I got out of Twitter for a few reasons; part of what made it unpleasant was that it didn't seem to be just what I did that adjusted my feed, but that it was also affected by what the other people I connected to did.
> You get more of what you engage with. If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content.
The algorithm doesn’t show you “more of the things you engage with”, and acting like it does makes people think what they’re seeing is a reflection of who they are, which is incorrect.
The designers of these algorithms are trying to figure out which “mainstream category” you are. And if you aren’t in one, it’s harder to advertise to you, so they want to sand down your rough edges until you fit into one.
You can spend years posting prolificly about open source software, Blender and VFX on Instagram, and the algorithm will toss you a couple of things, but it won’t really know what to do with you (aside from maybe selling you some stock video packages).
But you make one three word comment about Brexit and the algorithm goes “GOTCHA! YOU’RE ANTI-BREXIT! WE KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THAT!” And now you’re opted into 3 bug ad categories and getting force-fed ragebait to keep you engaged, since you’re clearly a huge poltical junky. Now your feed is trash forever, unless you engage with content from another mainstream category (like Marvel movies or one of the recent TikTok memes).
I use X. I have an enormouse blocklist and I block keywords. I found that I can also block emoji. This keeps my feed focused on what I want to see (no politics. Just technology, classical and jazz music, etc.)
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> If you don’t want to hear a lot of Brexit talk, don’t engage with Brexit content.
That is really limiting though. I do not want to see Brexit ragebait in my threads, but I am quite happy to engage in intelligent argument about it. The problem is that if, for example, a friend posts something about Brexit I want to comment on, my feed then fills with ragebait.
My solution is to bookmark the friends and groups pages, and the one group I admin and go straight to those. I have never used the app.