#Help. There's a STRANGER in my Twitter timeline

Twitter has admitted to fiddling with users' timelines, sparking the sort of social media backlash which is fast becoming a wearying fixture of modern life. The chirpy chaps of Twitter claimed the "spirit of experimentation" made them decide to wodge unwanted tweets in users' feeds. Seeing stuff from people you don't follow …

[Jim 48]

"Worried about what you see on Twitter? Turn off the computer and do something else. Problem solved"

Why Don't You

[Anonymous Custard]

"But there are times when you might miss out on Tweets we think you’d enjoy."

"But there are times when you might miss out on Tweets we think you’d enjoy."

<translation>And here's a message from our sponsors...</translation>

[VinceH]

Re: "But there are times when you might miss out on Tweets we think you’d enjoy."

"<translation>And here's a message from our sponsors...</translation>"

Nah, they do that already - they're called either sponsored tweets or promoted tweets, I can't remember which.

[IHateWearingATie]

I don't pay anything for twitter...

... so I am the product.

I just can't get worked up about stuff like this - they need to make money to keep the servers running and I don't want to pay. It it gets too annoying I'll leave and probably do something more useful that read live tweets from Formula 1 races (which is all I use Twitter for really).

[Andy Non]

They've not implemented it very well.

I make limited use of twitter as a source for science news and treat it like just another news website. Today I noticed a STRANGER in camp! Shock horror! I've no idea what their apparently science related tweet was about though... it was in Spanish.

[swschrad]

Get rid of the nonsense

how about that ad for General Genocide? click their icon, look for the gearwheel, click it, and select BLOCK OR REPORT. in the past, I have been clicking BLOCK. I am now also going to click REPORT, and join me in flooding the twits who are censoring the reported users until they stop this fulminating foolishness.

[chivo243]

I must be too old

Even with my limited attention span, I've never understood all the titter around twitter.

I'd tweet, but don't have an account and my next pint is waiting ;-}

[JDX]

Re: I must be too old

That would've made an excellent tweet.

[Mark 85]

In the overall scheme of things...

Twitter = meh

Facebook = meh

Social Media in general = meh

Why get worked up about it. If you use it, you're the product and are going to get used and abused. It's the way of universe.

[Ian Michael Gumby]

They have no choice...

Twitter is a publicly traded company with a 30Bil USD market cap.

They have no choice but to do things to increase their revenues.

So sticking in placed ads in to your timeline makes perfect sense.

You of course can decide to leave twitter and of course short the stock.

[JDX]

I'm always getting emails "do you follow X" or "do you know Y" from them. I'd much rather see this in Twitter itself because then I'd only be bothered by it when I was using Twitter, which is not very often at all.

I think they have a point, that these days Twitter is how many people would find out about people they'd want to follow on Twitter. Well, by "many people" I mean "many Twitter users".

[Anonymous Coward]

But isn't the entirety of www-land just rubbish anyway?

"But the terse folk of social media are furious that their constant stream of rubbish has been sullied with yet more rubbish."

But couldn't you say this about 90% of the www-net? Certainly reddit, youtube, slashdork, HuffPo, etc etc etc... All the news sites. It's all just rubbish. Rubbish and shopping. And the other 10% is probably just pR0n.

Anything really useful is probably happening on a mailing list like the kernel mailing list, or on a developer IRC channel, or simply through email from one intelligent individual to another.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Re: But isn't the entirety of www-land just rubbish anyway?

But are there cat pictures on the kernel mailing list? If not, count me out.

Paris, because she's the closest thing we have to cat icon. :/

[Gene Cash]

"Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus" works a tweet, er, treat for me. I haven't seen promoted tweets or suggestions in a long time.

[A Cee]

"But there are times when you might miss out on Tweets we think you’d enjoy."

But there are times when /you/ might miss out on sledgehammer swinging in your server farm we think you'd enjoy.