Hacker News

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

19 points by steveharing1 4 hours ago | 25 comments

Philpax 60 minutes ago

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...)

thegrim33 25 minutes ago

All remotely popular online public spaces are completely infiltrated by bots/propagandists/trolls/morons/etc. If you could successfully filter that type of content out you'd end up with a much larger pool of valid/authentic content to access than if you abandoned the space altogether and switched to some very obscure/niche space that's yet to be manipulated.

jachee 12 minutes ago

Bluesky has a default feed that is just the posts/reposts of the people who you choose to follow, in reverse chronological order.

No need for an algorithm to decide what is worth seeing.

api 50 minutes ago

Network effects are stronger than we are. People are there because people are there.

BadBadJellyBean 17 minutes ago

And when you are not there you are not there. We are way too obsessed with missing a thing. May it be a popular figure or someone we know in person. The reality is that it's actually not too bad to miss things and most information still gets through. Especially the one that's important. You might even miss out on a lot of crap that is filtered out when it gets to you.

I am happy on my personal Mastodon instance and occasional visits to HN. You might be too if you allow yourself to be.

jazzyjackson 4 minutes ago

yea but which people ;) unless you want to in that in-group, crypto, rage and all, better off without it

daveguy 38 minutes ago

I know a bunch of people and companies who happily dumped the twitter cesspool. It has to be > 50% scammers and ragebots at this point.

hgoel 36 minutes ago

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.

bombdailer 2 hours ago

I find not using twitter to be the best solution.

yabutlivnWoods 57 minutes ago

The only winning move is not to play.

patrickmay 2 hours ago

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.

klntsky 39 minutes ago

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

ceejayoz 3 minutes ago

On Facebook, at least, the click seems to outweigh the feedback.

I say "not interested" to a reel and get more just like it.

tonymet 5 minutes ago

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).

bytecauldron 54 minutes ago

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.

tantalor 47 minutes ago

Simpler to just delete Twitter

culi 55 minutes ago

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?

pawelduda 48 minutes ago

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

starik36 47 minutes ago

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

antonymoose 7 minutes ago

Any social site inclusive of this one ought to have such a feature.

rootsudo 2 hours ago

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.

SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago

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.

andyjohnson0 2 hours ago

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

operatingthetan 2 hours ago

What about this one?

z3c0 2 hours ago

Thank you for the laugh. Some probably need to be reminded of Sam Altman's roots, as much I detest what he's done to the word "open".

73738488484 2 hours ago

[flagged]

tonetheman 2 hours ago

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