Via heavy use of the ”Hide|Show Less|Not Interested” button I’ve managed to get youtube recommendations surprisingly relevant, and a big surprise was facebook reels, which started as complete junk, and is now an astonishing mix of science (startalk, Tom Scott, Physics Girl, colour theory) and nature videos. It’s arguably the most relevant “tv” I’ve ever seen. I suspect curation on Twitter is solvable, but neither Twitter nor its clones have successfully done it yet.
One really interesting innovation that Bluesky supports right now is custom timelines. You can paste a URL into the app of any webserver hosting a custom timeline and have it available as a tab. This lets people make and share custom timelines using different recommendation and personalization strategies.
I'm hoping some easily-supported competition for timeline algorithms helps people figure out how to make ones that show content we really want instead of click bait and outrage bait.
Yeah custom TLs have a lot of promise and might be the most interesting feature among all the clones. It's a big ask to (new) users to curate our experience and having turnkey options could really make it easy to get the specific type of value we want right away. I hope they lean into it a lot more in the design.
The Twitter algorithm is especially bad if you're a lurker, because the only feedback you can give it is what posts you view and search for. And it has no way of distinguishing whether you're viewing something because it's outrage bait, or because it confirms your world view, or because it offers you new information that you want more of...
