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Show HN: Filter out engagement bait and politics on your X/Twitter feed
hi friends!
i'm pretty tired of engagement bait and all the political nonsense on my x/twitter feed.
i was curious if i could use an llm to filter out these type of content, so i prototyped a quick chrome extension.
it uses LLama 3.3 to analyze the tweet through https://groq.com/ https://groq.com/ (because they are super-super fast).
the extension is available in the chrome store, also there is a link to the repo.
- you can tweak the system prompt for the filtering
- but you need your own API key from Groq (you can get one for free)
- nomilk 2y agoI'm personally a huge Elon fan, but I know many who are not and have heard from multiple sources that they can't get him out of their feeds no matter how hard they try. If you tweak your current idea to simply remove all Elon-related content from the feed, that would be funny but may also be strangely profitable (people would probably buy it out of spite).
- VeejayRampay 2y ago[flagged]
- snag 2y ago[flagged]
- dole 2y ago[flagged]
- danlugo92 2y agoThere's no antisemitism/racism at those levels, it's all elite v non elite. You're playing right into their game.
- felixgallo 2y ago[flagged]
- plaguuuuuu 2y ago[flagged]
- nomilk 2y agoLeaving X is one way. But there is an intersection in the venn diagram between those who find X valuable and those who dislike Elon's content.
- ImJamal 2y agoYou won't get messages from Elon, but you will sure get a lot of messages about Elon since he lives rent free in so many people's mind.
- palmfacehn 2y agoAt the time of posting, I count 8 matches for "Elon" on this page and 23 comments. All of but one of the mentions has a negative sentiment.
- croisillon 2y agohow dare they talk (badly!) about him in a thread about twitter!
- palmfacehn 2y agoThe above poster didn't elaborate when he mentioned, "Living rent free". If we are going to have a discourse on the topic, I think it deserves more depth. He's a complicated figure. I'm not a fan of all of his ideas, nor do I consider him some kind of right-wing free speech savior. He's like anyone else in that there's some hit and miss. I do find it disturbing how quickly the predominantly left-leaning tech sphere turned on him. This coincided with politically driven media talking points. A few short years ago he was celebrated for his association with green energy. He was even celebrated by the globalists at the WEF. For this and other reasons, I suspect his promotion to be something of a false alternative. Idolizing him seems a bit naive. The demonizations I regularly read on this site are often poorly reasoned or Godwinian hyperbole.
- patchtopic 2y ago[flagged]
- blueflow 2y agoThe platform was not the problem, it was the people. People migrated to bluesky and fedi and now create these contents there.
- anthk 2y agoElon was one of the main enshittifiers. I even used to read Twitter without JS.
- input_sh 2y agoIf the platform wasn't the problem, nobody would've moved. Closing down the API, charging for the checkmark, not displaying tweets to those not logged in, artificially boosting tweets by the owner itself etc etc.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xmodem 2y agoSwitching to mastodon has been such a breath of fresh air. No algo-driven feed manipulating me to constantly check in means that I have a much healthier relationship with it. If I'm, say, on the metro I can use it to kill time for 5 minutes... and then put it down, and I don't feel compelled to pick it up.
- bArray 2y agoBe careful what air you breath in: "Twitter rival Mastodon rife with child-abuse material" [1] [2]. A lot of this was previously limited by X until a mass exodus to platforms such as Mastodon and BlueSky. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/24/twitter-rival-mastodon-rife-with-child-abuse-material-study-finds/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/24/twitter-r... [2] https://archive.is/SNYcK#selection-423.0-423.53 https://archive.is/SNYcK#selection-423.0-423.53
- yellow_lead 2y agoIts impressive how fast this is. I don't use twitter anymore (for the same reason as your use case), but nice job!
- wkat4242 2y agoIt's groq, they have amazing custom built hardware.
- danielpetho 2y agoyes groq is really amazing. there is another player i've found when making this -> https://inference.cerebras.ai/ https://inference.cerebras.ai/ never tried their api tho
- LeoPanthera 2y ago[flagged]
- blueflow 2y agoNo way "drawing lines" between you and other people could backfire.
- spookie 2y agoLet's not promote divisions. Unless you meant: "people should stop using social media in which there are monetary incentives to be sensationalist", which I definitely agree on. I would love if we had more civilized discussions on the web, we would understand eachother better that way. But it's an impossible ask.
- tempfile 2y ago[flagged]
- danlugo92 2y agoCalling everyone Hitler /creates/ Hitler. So be careful.
- croisillon 2y ago[flagged]
- palmfacehn 2y agoIt should be possible to distinguish between the responsibility of an outcome and a poor strategy that drives further polarization. Most will agree that an individual actor is responsible for his own actions. That doesn't mean we should dispense with empathy and engage in divisive rhetoric.
- tempfile 2y ago[flagged]
- eddieh 2y agoIt was much easier and healthier for me to just leave Twitter (never gonna call it the other name). In fact, I’ve left nearly all of social media. It would be nice to get away from all algorithmic content feeds. Maybe someday.
- nomilk 2y agoSocial media apps have downsides, but I find the algorithmic short videos on facebook ("reels") quite incredible. The algo seems to suggest mostly science; niches I would never have known about, let alone had an active interest in, had the algo not suggested them. I suspect experiences using social media apps differ wildly from person to person.
- vintermann 2y agoI had an amazing experience with Facebook shorts! What happened was I... I had an amazing experience with Facebook shorts! What happened was I... I had an amazing... (hits the close button)
- nomilk 2y agoThat misses the point. Consider an analogy with a knife. If someone quits using knives simply because they had previously cut themselves, and someone says: “wait, there’s at least one useful application for these things”, and demonstrates the useful application, that could be enough for that person to discover how useful knives can be when used right. Exact same goes for any tool that can cause both harm and benefit, like social media apps.
- vintermann 2y agoWhat do you think my point was? I was just making fun of desperate engagement baiting Facebook short videos that of people just about to get kicked by a camel or whatever, looping right before whatever they're baiting actually happens.
- enaaem 2y ago
- jamesrcole 2y agoI think this is a glimpse of the future. I can imagine ever-greater amounts of information overload, and AI used everywhere to filter it to manageable levels.
- freehorse 2y agoThis sounds like an extreme waste of resources in all sides.
- bryant 2y agoExtreme is right; I can only imagine the waste of power. It's probably exponentially worse than the waste of gas by postal services for delivering junk mail. Except I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about it in the US because of first amendment rights.
- freehorse 2y agoPeople (or "people" aka bots) do not write bs because they can. They write because they are incetivised to do so.
- input_sh 2y agoLLMs in a nutshell. Also see: people using them to write artificial garbage and then readers using them to summarise the said garbage.
- wkat4242 2y agoAnd on the other side AI being used to create more of it and to find ways to bypass the filters.
- anthk 2y agoJust leave out Xitter. Read blogs over RSS and gopher phlogs (SDF, bongusta...) Also, Usenet and Dove/Fidonet (you can get them over NNTP news://cvs.synchro.net:119) have more polite discussions on politics.
- palmfacehn 2y ago90% of my feed is just AI generated art. The mute button seemed to work on the baiters.
- tomalbrc 2y ago*AI generated pictures
- dewey 2y agoIf you have to fight this much to use a platform...why bother?
- danielpetho 2y agothe network effect is still strong. it feels like a huge chunk of (recent/real-time) tech/design discussion happens there. but could be just me. i'm still warming up on bluesky/threads.
- pwdisswordfishz 2y agoWhy do you insist on perpetuating it?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wkat4242 2y agoUm yeah good idea in principle but for me if I don't want to see the bad content it's better to just not look at it. The hate is everywhere, even on positive posts in the comments. But good idea yes.
- danielpetho 2y agoi agree. but sometimes my lizard brain just can't resist the temptation and i will stop to read the tweet/start a video. and the algorithm already could think that i'm interested in this type of content
- gigatexal 2y agoWould instantly use it if I could also have it filter Elon’s tweets and his fans and followers.
- danielpetho 2y agoyou might be able to craft a system prompt eg.: filter out anything that mentions or even slightly related to elon musk, his companies, etc. obviously it's never going to be perfect tho but your best bet is still blocking/muting people then
- DantesKite 2y agoSuch a great demonstration of the concept. I think it’s inevitable that we’ll start to see more sophisticated ways of organizing our social media feeds. I don’t think it has to be this binary decision where we either abandon social media altogether or expose ourselves to the most emotionally draining content possible. There’s likely many different unexplored metas as it were. I often joke that we should have a marketplace of algorithms we can subscribe to, where the sentiment “slider bar” can go from Hello Kitty Island Adventure positivity to 4Chan LiveLeak nihilism, if you so choose.
- danielpetho 2y agoyeah some kind of real-time tweaking would be also nice. sometimes i'm in the mood for topics i'm usually not following, but i would go back to my "default" space after a while. the problem imo is that there is absolutely zero control on most platforms. on x there is a button called "i'm not interested in this tweet" but obviously it doesn't do anything meaningful
- MattDaEskimo 2y agoThis is what the algorithm & tools of the platform is supposed to do for you. It's also what makes you valuable as a free consumer. If you want lumber, don't buy a house and strip it
- beAbU 2y agoI've found this [1] to also work really well to clean up the feed. 1: https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-deactivate-x-account https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-deactivat...
- buran77 2y agoI went that route for my account which I wasn't using anyway but only because I realized it's not "my account" and my control over it is way too limited. I logged in after many years of inactivity only to realize that despite only having a few friends, my feed was exclusively Musk and Tesla stuff. No amount of "don't show me this" helped. On one hand I found it exceptionally pathetic that any person would need to stroke their own ego to this degree at the expense of everyone else. But worse, it's clear that Twitter/X/Musk control my feed more than I do so the only way to win the game is to not play it.
- thih9 2y agoThe link leads to a Twitter/X support article for “How to deactivate your account”.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- insin 2y ago> i'm pretty tired of engagement bait and all the political nonsense on my x/twitter feed Getting rid of "For you" entirely and removing Retweets from the chronological timeline (default configuration for [1]) gets you 95% of the way there - you'll only get engagement bait and political nonsense if the people you choose to follow are the ones actively doing it, in which case… [1] https://jbscript.dev/control-panel-for-twitter https://jbscript.dev/control-panel-for-twitter
- danielpetho 2y agooh wow, this looks promising. thx!
- ksec 2y agoYes. I dont even use "For you". I dont even "follow" most people, just put them into a list and visit that list only. In hind sight I have been using X / Twitter like RSS for a very long time. I guess that is because coming from RSS and I dont know how Twitter work at first and I first thought why do I have all these random people on my feeds. I have lists for Software, Hardware, Politics, VCs, Economy, Art, and some other wired stuff. You can ignore 99% of Spam, bait etc and only focus on the signal.
- yomismoaqui 2y agoAlready implemented something similar but using Gemini Flash 1.5 https://twitter.cercaapp.com https://twitter.cercaapp.com
- danielpetho 2y agoneat! yes it's the same idea, tho for this one you need your own API key, which can be a bummer for some.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- haunter 2y agoI don't have to because I just use the "following" tab? I only see people I follow. Really don't get the point of this service
- danielpetho 2y agoi like the for you page since i can discover fresh/new work from others. otherwise how would i get to the point of following someone? (excluding when you find the person's account on an external site) but i feel you, the following tab is definitely a healthier/more controllable space
- geerlingguy 2y agoFor years before the algorithm-generated pages were defaulted, you would find new accounts organically—through retweets and conversations. I still do it that way, better to do a (very) slow roll and build up a network slowly than to follow the accounts Twitter's algorithm thinks I should follow (IMHO).
- andrewla 2y agoYour "following" feed contains content liked or retweeted/replied to by people you follow. At least, it used to -- since likes went private I'm not sure that you see this any more.
- strajk 2y agoNice! I'm glad I was not the only one frustrated by these and I actually made sth similar just this weekend, also using Groq cause it's super fast as u said. (but haven't published it cause I'm always frustrated about that part of sideprojects :D) https://x.com/Straaajk/status/1875492276715315405 https://x.com/Straaajk/status/1875492276715315405
- danielpetho 2y agosuper cool! i like yours better tbh as it looks much more granular in terms of categorizing re publishing—just do it! this project is also a rough mess, only a quick experiment, so i doubt anybody will care if it fails sometimes / not perfect, code is a mess etc.
- vanrohan 2y agoI'm also on a mission to clean the "For You" feed. I tried using local LLMs to do this real-time classification, but it's currently just too slow. Another way to reduce the spam, is to remove bot followers from your account, I believe these bots use "likes" (which are hidden) to boost content for the botnet owners. Most of these bots are easy to spot, 0 posts, and very bad follower/following ratios. I built this Chrome Extension for bot removal automation: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/x-bot-remover/aohkhfmnpbofebaljcienghochiiohno https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/x-bot-remover/aohkh... It would be way better if this was just done by X themselves, but why not try.
- danielpetho 2y agoyeah, something local (and free) would be much better. i'm not even sure how expensive could this be if it would run all the time... re bot removal: thanks for it, will give a it a try!
- russdill 2y agoIt'd be nice if x would let you do what bluesky does, let you write your own algorithms and create your own feeds.
- danielpetho 2y agoah maybe i'm living under the rock, but how you could do such thing for bluesky? my feed is pretty boring there:d
- russdill 2y agohttps://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds There are of course a ton of custom feeds already out there.
- cynicalsecurity 2y ago[flagged]
- Extropy_ 2y agoDon't drive a car and thus never get a flat. Problem solved.
- mlnj 2y ago"Why keep using a rusted old car for which the manufacturer will not service it and has not spare parts for when there are better cars out there." Fixed that for you. Have been using BlueSky for the past few months. Has been great.
- pier25 2y agoI just moved to Bluesky
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bluesnews 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pwdisswordfishz 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- danielpetho 2y agosomeone asked the exact same question hah. i'd say because: the network effect is still strong. it feels like a huge chunk of (recent/real-time) tech/design discussion happens there. but could be just me. i'm still warming up on bluesky/threads.
- pluc 2y agoIf you don't want engagement bait or politics on Twitter.. why are you on Twitter? RSS is better to keep up to date on news, and if none of your friends are on Mastodon, get new friends.
- bearjaws 2y agoI think Twitter has two core users 1. People who want to debate / react to things / politics / just get angry apparently. 2. People who are like a town crier from times past, they want to be the first to know some event has happened and then go to their group chats & other social media to post about it.
- danielpetho 2y agoi disagree, or at least i don't consider myself to either of these groups. i think there is still a large enough group which is there to share work / projects
- MattDaEskimo 2y ago3. Those who just don't care about the sociological trends and impact of using, and therefore promoting Twitter
- andrewla 2y agoSorry, ignorant question -- how does one us RSS to keep up to date on news? With Twitter, I can see content from people I follow and from content referenced or highlighted by people I follow. People in this case can also include news organizations or other professional journalistic content. In addition there is the algorithmically generated garbage feed stuff that is mostly useful for seeing (potentially) interesting content that I missed on the main feed, but also contains a ton of content from people I did not follow and that people I do follow did not highlight or reference. Presumably this project attempts to reduce the garbage-ey ness of this feed, which I would appreciate.
- pluc 2y agoFor the next month, every time you find something interesting on Twitter, go to the source. Look for their RSS feed - if they don't have one, ask them to work on implementing one both via Twitter and via their contact form. I don't know if it's still the case, but there used to be RSS feeds for Twitter accounts too.
- Havoc 2y agoPrompt used seems to be here: https://github.com/danielpetho/unbaited/blob/main/extension/src/service-worker.ts https://github.com/danielpetho/unbaited/blob/main/extension/... Seems like a reasonable idea. I have doubts about an LLM being able to reliably detect when a tweet was made to *deliberately* trigger emotions. That’s setting the bar quite high on llm working out intent
- danielpetho 2y ago100% agree unfortunately, haha the default system prompt is quite weak, and could be much more specific / better. also, even as a "human" can't decide sometimes what is a bait...
- bentt 2y agoToo many replies are missing the point. This isn't about whether there are other ways to do this, or if X is good/bad. This is about using a local AI model to curate content we want to avoid/see. This is a big area of interest and I'm happy to see something on HN about it!
- ikanreed 2y agoBut, of course, it would be better if we could generalize and let users describe in conversational language the specific things they don't want to see.
- itslennysfault 2y agoIt's not a local AI model. It's using a groq.com API, but your point about people missing the point is still a good point.
- danielpetho 2y agoyes that's the main idea. i mean even llms wouldn't be necessary (this is just a possible direction), but just give me more control on my own feed
- derivagral 2y agoCool idea! I had something similar for using LLMs as an intermediary not for spam but for "boring" local news matching to your profile. Court stuff, town meetings on youtube, that kind of thing.
- danielpetho 2y agosounds interesting! tho that would be rather summarizing content i assume?
- andy_ppp 2y agoI want this for YouTube videos as well that can summarise the content and just take me to the things I would find most interesting in the video, almost like auto chapters that skip all the “and later we’ll be discussing really interesting thing X if you keep listening” filler. It would be great to filter all the noise out and create highlights package automatically that was 10% of the video length that can be watched separately.
- andrewla 2y agoTangential, but I think I speak for many when I say that we no longer need to specify "X" as a name for twitter -- just call it twitter and tweets and ignore the abysmal rebrand until the day that it gets reverted.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- j45 2y agoFiltering out is a nice feature. Highlighting each piece as such and teaching as what about it is bait, etc would make people stronger and more aware.
- pjmlp 2y agoI have been ramping down my use until I collect the info I need to follow specific people elsewhere, then I am out as well.
- ryan_lane 2y agoWhy do you use twitter if you want to log into a completely blank feed every time you use it?