This is exactly the problem: Twitter, unlike other platforms like Reddit and even Facebook, make curation impossible.
Want to follow someone who posts a lot of interesting things about JS? Be prepared to see posts they like about curry poodles. Oh here’s some worst-in-class topic recommendations barfed out by depressed ML, and you can’t turn them off. What do you mean you don’t like Roseanne Nostalgia? Here are some Binky The Clown Stock Tips.
Ironically Google's platform in their "circles" where an attempt (kinda) to solve that problem.
All social media should be topic, not user based IMO. This is the way the internet was originally, it was not really personality, or people based. you joined a forum about fishing, woodworking, programming, or politics to engage with other people on those topics. Off Topic things where either isolated to a specific area of the community or banned completely.
Today however we do not see to have topics on social media is it just a stream of everything about a person...
It's not the random posts, it's that the people you follow on Twitter are human (hopefully) and will post about things outside the core reason for following them.
I follow a bunch of sports writers on Twitter to keep up on my favorite teams and fantasy stuff. Invariably, on slow news days, they will post about their kids, cats, the weather, anything other than the teams they cover. I generally don't mind but will unfollow if the balance gets too far out of whack or if they get political in an untenable way.
YMMV as far as where to draw the line between content and fluff.
Fair enough, I was referring to the "Be prepared to see posts they like about" part of the argument where Twitter shows you random likes of people you follow in your stream.
It doesn't matter how agressive your filtering is, it doesn't matter how many accounts you mute, it doesn't matter how many words you block.
It'll still seep through the cracks because that's what Twitter wants.
I got to the point of 1000+ accounts and 1000+ words muted and it's still a bad place. To Twitter it is more valuable to them that I have to hear about the issues Twitter considers important than for me to have a healthy Twitter feed.
A global "Politics on/off" switch is 100% possible and they choose not to do it because they consider it more important for the world that I hear the correct politics than be able to just hear none.
Such a sad outcome for something that could have been magical together.
I was there in the Usenet days, and it was beautiful. I was there when Compuserve and Prodigy and Mozilla burst forth.
It's not the platform though.
We're seeing a retelling of the Eternal September story, and it's sad. Yeah, some historical context will be passed on, reframed for the new century. But there's a core philosophy that will never be "recovered." Because it didn't truly arise from sharing.
It's right there in the name.
Beware the tempers wasn't part of the original dream.
As you allude to, this is a very straightforward phenomenon. The founding population of the Internet is not identical in distribution to the population that now exists on it. Most people are small and vicious and incredibly stupid, and now the population of the Internet[1] looks more like "most people" than it did in its early days.
There's practically nothing to see here. If a bunch of chimpanzees join a club, it's not that interesting to note that there's suddenly shit being flung everywhere.
EDIT: just to be 3000% clear, given the current obsession with the topic, my comment and use of "chimps" has less than nothing to do with race. It's a reference to our entire species' primate past and the tendency to underestimate our similarity to those ancestors.
[1] Limit this to the developed world if you'd like. Countries that came online much more rapidly and recently, and continue to have large portions of the population come online every day, are dealing with a different but related set of problems.
A gun is dangerous. Twitter is dangerous.
Both are useful if used appropriately with the right training and safeguards.