Bouncer: Block "crypto", "rage politics", and more from your X feed using AI

Adding to the chorus: if you need to apply a solution like this, it's probably time to walk away from the platform. (Well, the right time to walk away would have been years ago, but...)

I'd like to just quit twitter, but unfortunately the other places devoted to discussing some of the hobbies I go to twitter for, are much more toxic (Reddit, 4chan etc). Simply being able to filter out everything unrelated to the hobbies I'm there for would be sufficient.

What I don't understand how difficult it seems to be for some people to simply ignore topics or people they don't like. If an algorithmic feed keeps presenting you with certain topics, it's largely because you're engaging with them. Isn't that on you?

I don't use Twitter but I use Tiktok and you know what I do when I see something I'm not interested in? I scroll up. If it's someone who never has anything interesting to say, I just block them. And I never think about them ever again.

I rarely see anything about crypto. I don't even think about it really. Go back ~4 years and everything on HN was about crypto this and blockchain that but that's how it goes. There are fads and, more importantly, there are people just trying to get their bag with their latest "acquire me please" startups. Actually, crypto just had a bunch of straight rug pulls too. And then there was NFTs...

Anyway, I've worked for my Tiktok fyp. It's a constant moving target for the platform too, like these bot accounts that somehow get to 10K followers and then appear on your fyp with audio over a movie or TV show to get around copyright detection. I honestly don't know how they haven't solved that problem yet.

All these platforms, particularly Twitter, put their thumbs on the scales about what gets distribution but for any platform with a block feature, this seems like a "you" problem if your feed isn't what you want.

Also, "rage politics" in general just means "things I disagree with" whenever anyone talks about what they see on any social media platform.

Block and move on.

I find not using twitter to be the best solution.

I find that using Control Panel for Twitter (not affiliated, just a happy customer) to see only the Following tab in reverse chronological order makes X tolerable. There is no benefit to For You.

It should also click "see less often" on every detected bait post. Heals the algo really well if you do that persistently

Then what shall remain?

I feel like regex and curated blocklists would get you pretty far before needing an LLM to continuously read your feed. I'm wondering how successful the local options are, because sending your social media feed to an API that is also being used to serve you low quality posts your blocking is a pretty depressing ouroboros.

Simpler to just delete Twitter

Is there a tool to undo the extra weight added to paying subscribers? Analysis shows premium subscribers end up with 10x as much reach on average than people not paying.

Pay2Play was toxic enough on gaming, why would we want it in our social media?

You can also use "muted words" feature built right into X

I get the idea but honestly asking: if you filter out stuff like this will you end up with a completely blank feed on x? To me it kind of just seems like we're all going to need to curate our own RSS feeds in the future. eg: real people who are insightful, rather than rely on any kind of algorithm.

Xtwitter’s own mute words is very good . And mute words supports TTL. LLM will have precision / recall issues too – no filtering system will be perfect.

Cleaning up 90% for free is better than burning tons of tokens / GPU / battery to clean 95% (and suffer from false positives).

This would be great for Reddit - the king of rage politics.

I'm amused at thinking of the other effects this can be used for, rebrand it as a tool like that copilot recall and point it with child privacy in mind for the general internet.

or you know, require it for internet/computer usage for a very dim futuristic outlook.

I don't think that automated filtering on conditionals like "rage politics" is a good idea. At best, you're going to end up with a confusing feed that contains reactions to the outrage without the actual outrage that's driving them; at worst, you're going to end up systematically misinformed on political topics that people find outrageous.

Better still, just don't use twitter or any of the other oligarch-owned sites.

[dead]