Social media sites are the collective equivalent of a "dollar auction"[1]
In the dollar auction, each immediate choice isrational, but the overall process inevitably results in you losing value once you've decided to participate. But at each step, you lose more by quitting than by keeping going.
Social media is the same, except that it's collective: if you want to keep in touch with certain people, you don't have a choice other than to use the social media site they are using, so leaving is a collective action problem.
> you don't have a choice other than to use the social media site they are using
Hence federated social media. No one’s pretending the current implementations are perfect, but they’re far more interesting than the existing closed platforms.
They are, but I'm not sure what will cause a critical mass to switch. Short of the EU mandating that the existing platforms federate, which could be problematic.
As someone who doesn't use social media this analogy strikes me as a rationalization for something you know is bad for you and a waste of your time but you can't stop so you make up this fiction about how you would lose more by stopping.
An alcoholic who can't stop going to the bar because they will lose their drinking buddies is not a dollar auction.
As someone who doesn't use social media this analogy strikes me as a rationalization for something you know is bad for you and a waste of your time but you can't stop so you make up this fiction about a dollar auction.
I'm guessing the algorithm put you in some bucket, as my (Spanish/European, if that matters) "For you" looks quite different, the 10 first tweets are ~4 coding things, 1 meme, 2 WIP animation things and 3 different angles on the ongoing Telegram story. Last time I opened Twitter seems to have been 3 months ago according to my browser history, so not really a big user of it either.
If you don't use your account you will get what most people look for in your location, in your case probably sex, violence, politics, memes, ragebait...
The feed should adapt to your tastes depending on what you like, retweet or who you follow, maybe also on what you click on. You can also add topic of interest somewhere in your profile.
For me, just following a number of "good" accounts seems to do the job.
Or you could just ignore the "For You" tab and use the "Following" tab
> you will get what most people look for in your location, in your case probably sex, violence, politics, memes, ragebait... The feed should adapt to your tastes
That's a bit of a metaphor for the current world, isn't it? Out there, it's a cultural desert with Mad Max undertones; but in our well-behaved, manicured corners of intellectualist internet, all is good and everyone agrees with each other.
> Every time I see or hear someone is using Twitter, I really wonder what is wrong with them
I feel the same about facebook. Sometimes when I visit my mother she'll show me something on there and I'm struck by how much garbage fills the screen. Why bother? But I can see there's a small percentage of content that actually matters to her (family updates) and the other stuff doesn't upset her too much. Except when a cooking channel sneaks in pornographic advertisements in their story feed and she couldn't figure out how to get rid of it.
While logged out (on desktop at least), all I see is the single linked post with no other content, no ads, no popups. The worst is a couple of sign in/up buttons on the right side and a banner on the bottom of the screen asking me to log in. It's actually pretty great.
If you meant that last question sincerely: I’ve been able to improve the recommended tweets a ton (its basically good and useful now) by hammering on the “not interested” button a lot. It started out garbage as for you too though
It is because your account is mostly unused. If you use Google search without a login and all cookies cleared, you get one murder, one car accident, one latest meme, etc. In other words, tabloid material.
I am afraid to use autocomplete because it is so disgusting and distracting.
The problem for me is, that I don't want to use a site where I can stumble upon gore, obscure sex stuff or some ragebait political stuff in the first place.
