Comment by pyreko
5 days ago
I have this with Twitter surprisingly.
I only use it for animal pictures, art, and to follow artists. I usually just use the Following page, but my FYP is always just... animal pictures and art, exactly what I want. No weird right wing shit, no weird crypto shit, no drama or ragebait shit, etc... somehow.
I know some day it'll break though.
Same here. The trick is to unfollow people who start posting things you don't want to see in your feed any more. It sounds so simple, but many people treat their following list as an append-only log.
I've followed accounts for hobbies that later spiral off into the deep end of Twitter's topics of the day, which is always my sign to unfollow them.
Some people cannot resist clicking on things that make them angry, though. These websites continue serving up more of what you click on.
> Some people cannot resist clicking on things that make them angry, though. These websites continue serving up more of what you click on.
"We're going to keep putting crap in front of you until we find something you click on. And even if you take a breath, don't reply and close it, we now know we have you and we'll keep showing that type of thing to you. Also, even though we're not going to tell you we're doing this, we and our power users are going to blame you for doing it to yourself. lol."
Same. It feels like the real trick is to get platforms to think you're some kind of important person that could hurt the platform if served too much ragebaits.
And it also feels like they're compelled to maximize ragebaits for some reason - maybe the Web2 is running out of "advertiser friendly" contents.
For twitter I have a sports list that I stick to 99% of the time. A little politics filters through, but I've found that to be just the right amount.
When major events happen, I switch over to my full feed, where I follow a bunch of political posters, and go into a blind rage in minutes.
On Bluesky your feed will also have animal pictures and art, just not the kind you wanted.
I have an account to follow artists on X. Surprisingly, it never pushes even one single blatant AI artist to my feed (not saying I'm an expert to recognize AI-generate artworks, but I've done digital painting as a side gig and.) There might be some paintover or more subtle ones that eluded my radar, but I've never seen the typical AI styles on my timeline.
However, if you check posts remotely related to the US politics the reply section is out of control.
I honestly believe out of Reddit, Facebook, Bsky and X, X is the one with the most reasonable timeline algorithm[0]. Reddit and Facebook are unusable except for very specific reasons (asking questions in certain apps' subs/groups). Most people I know irl moved to instagram though.
[0]: Bsky is the worst, but interestingly if you use a third-party feed like 'For You' it's on par with X, just less traffic.
Why do you call it X?