No need for an algorithm to decide what is worth seeing.
I'd welcome per-user curation tools like OP's which don't affect the content for the rest of us.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
> If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
Flagging is a way to shape what types of content takes up the finite amount of attention available on HN. If everyone used it (only) in the way the guidelines ask you to, the front page would look very different on a given day.
I am happy on my personal Mastodon instance and occasional visits to HN. You might be too if you allow yourself to be.
That being said, there are clearly multiple active automated influence operations happening on X all the time. If Elon wants X to stick around, it would be in his interest to put a stop to those. The default feed is full of posts from those bots; that's also a big problem they (X) needs to fix.
I say "not interested" to a reel and get more just like it.
Facebook somehow can’t detect these obvious scams, but somehow they have no problem pushing them to me after I looked into it when a fried almost got taken.
Pay2Play was toxic enough on gaming, why would we want it in our social media?
It's when I click into an interesting topic, and it's steered into being an offtopic retread of every other thread about US politics. The upvote/downvote system simply no longer works to squelch it as it once did, because there are enough people here who believe "everything is political" and therefore it's always "on-topic".
That is their prerogative, but it has dramatically lessened my enjoyment and engagement on this platform in the last 5 years. And it's gone into overdrive in the last 6 months.
Cleaning up 90% for free is better than burning tons of tokens / GPU / battery to clean 95% (and suffer from false positives).
or you know, require it for internet/computer usage for a very dim futuristic outlook.
If you spend too much time on X, that's a given. The problem is that informed, nuanced, and factual takes don't drive clicks and are hard to fit in 140 characters. Long-form Youtube is a much better place to find those types of takes anyway. Generally, the shorter the content, the worse the take.
It's just that this content is outnumbered some 100,000:1 now instead of the mere 1000:1 it used to be (ratios made up, but directionally correct.)
From my point of view, HN is trending in that same direction. It's just that the ratios aren't nearly as dramatic.
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.