Tips From The Blog XII: Improving your Twitter experience

By computing, fun

This is a quick set of tips to improve your Twitter experience. YMMV on these tips. Plus I can see Twitter changing things so that they no longer work, but this advice is correct as of today.

I see a lot of people on Twitter complaining about two things:

  • Twitter changing the tweets shown from “latest first” to some algorithmic order that irritates everybody
  • Promoted tweets, ads, suggestions of who to follow etc etc

These things seem to plague Twitter users if they are using the web interface or the official app, if they are looking at “Home”.

Tip 1 – use a client

If you use Tweetdeck, the promoted stuff disappears and the tweets are always shown in “latest first”. It is available as a desktop app.

Alternative apps for mobile devices were kind of strangled by Twitter some time ago. However, apps like Twitterrific also allow you to look at the raw Twitter. I stopped using Twitterrific after push notifications were disabled by Twitter to encourage everyone back to their app. So…

Tip 2 – use lists

If you use the official Twitter app, you will have the same problems as described above. The solution here is to set up a list and add people you’d like to follow. When you view the list, you get the content “latest first” and it has no ads or sponsored stuff.

Tip 3 – the hack

It is possible to use mute words to prevent unwanted content making its way into your feed. Below is a list that was recently shared on Twitter:

Here is the list for easy copy/pasting

generic_activity_highlights
ActivityTweet
suggest_activity
suggestactivitytweet
suggest_activity_feed
suggest_activity_tweet
suggestpyletweet
suggest_pyle_tweet
suggest_recycled_tweet
suggestrecycledtweet_inline
suggest_recycled_tweet_inline
suggest_recap
RankedOrganicTweet
suggest_ranked_organic_tweet
suggest_ranked_timeline_tweet
suggest_grouped_tweet_hashtag
suggest_sc_tweet
suggest_who_to_follow

This is a hack since these hidden words are likely to change, but if you are desperate and don’t want to use a client or lists… go for it. If you go to Settings and add each line into Block Words, select from everyone and select forever.

Don’t forget to also tap the stars icon on your home screen and tell the App you want to see latest tweets first. It reverts after a few days. If this is too annoying, use one of the other tips above.

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This post is part of a series of tips.

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