I get this a lot on Twitter. There is a very interesting tech account that I follow that half the time is complaining about British politics. It's really frustrating, since I don't want to ditch the tech posts
I was briefly in a Facebook A/B test that automatically categorized every post by everyone. I then had the option to "Unfollow Alice for posts about Politics". It was glorious, and I always wonder why they never released that broadly.
That, plus hours after deployment it would hit US national news, and hours later you'd have politicians accusing Meta/Facebook of bias because their political spam was correctly labeled as political spam, but the opposite side's politician's cooking recipes were NOT labeled as political spam, which reeks of favorism, bias, and is anti-democratic in several different ways.
Interestingly, I can see this going either direction. In my case, this feature caused me to refollow Alice, enabling me to see most of her posts and thus increasing my engagement.
OTOH, I bet not many people use the "stay friends but unfollow them" functionality.
I think it just comes down to if you see yourself as an entertainer or not.
Social media based on a social graph forces you to be niche because you have to be that proxy for interest. i.e. it's. better to have three people who post about tech, British politics, and Seinfeld separately than one person who posts about Seinfeld one day, politics the next and tech the next because it is impossible for me to curate my feed correctly.
Ironically, If you ONLY posted about the tech of all of the political scenes in Seinfeld that included British actors, that would be fine.
If you don't see yourself as an entertainer, or put another way, if you're not trying to build an audience, then you can bring your whole self or post about whatever you're interested and passionate about knowing that people will be upset when you don't post what they are interested in and that you won't build as big of a following.
There is a widespread tendency on HN to complain about various forms of noise/distraction. Whether it is the unusability of the web without an ad blocker, or the apparently impossible task of using Google these days (too many useless links returned).
I strongly feel that, unless you have some acknowledged difficulty in dealing with extraneous information, it is just not reasonable to expect the world's data to be presented to you prefiltered, "on a plate". If you do have a recognized problem with information overload, you'll have to accept that some info sources are not for you. This is not ableism.
> I strongly feel that, unless you have some acknowledged difficulty in dealing with extraneous information, it is just not reasonable to expect the world's data to be presented to you prefiltered, "on a plate". If you do have a recognized problem with information overload, you'll have to accept that some info sources are not for you. This is not ableism.
This is an incredible take, I strongly agree. I haven’t been able to articulate my thoughts as well as you have here but I completely agree.
This is incredibly reductionist and I’m not trying to strawman here but I feel it’s appropriate. There’s this huge group of people that absolutely despise & openly mock Apple users but simultaneously seem to want some extreme guide rails in their web experience. Absolute lunacy, lol.
I had a similar experience on Twitter. There was this guy who used to talk a lot about technical details related to his successful rocket business. But over time that stuff was replaced by right-wing culture war politics. Sad.
