How to trim twitter feed to just the people I follow?

March 8, 2020 9:28 AM

Recently twitter has started showing me several dozen tweets from people I don't follow, but fall under categories such as "liked by (person I follow)" or "user followed by (person I follow)".

Until now, this would happen infrequently enough that I could either tell twitter not to recommend me this type of content through the drop down menu in the upper right hand corner of the offending tweet, but this morning my timeline was about 60% full of content I didn't ask for.

Google results for this query haven't been much help, but I swore I had seen ages ago some advice on code you could run in an add-on/extension for Firefox that trims all the algorithmically suggested content. I just want a chronological list of content from the friends and artists I follow!

Is there any way to make this stop??

posted by Wandering_Boots to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Choose “latest tweets” rather than “home” at the top of your feed. “Home” is the default and it includes your follows’ likes. “Latest” does what you want.
posted by caek at 9:31 AM on March 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

Depending on how you access Twitter, the button to switch to “Latest Tweets” may appear as just an icon that looks like a cluster of four-pointed stars. Also, Twitter will sometimes switch back to the “Home” timeline without telling you. More details here.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:18 AM on March 8, 2020

Also, this is only useful to people who use the desktop version of Twitter (not mobile) but RealTwitter.com is basically a shortcut to just the latest tweets without all the replies (click on "latest" tab if you view it on mobile)
posted by jessamyn at 10:43 AM on March 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

If you're willing to switch interfaces, Tweetdeck will also get you a chronological timeline without any 'helpful' algorithmic interference.
posted by eponym at 11:17 AM on March 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Also mute the following: suggest_recycled_tweet, suggest_recap, suggest_who_to_follow, suggest_activity, suggest_recycled_tweet_inline, suggest_activity_tweet, suggest_pyle_tweet. That gets rid of all the crud.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:36 AM on March 8, 2020 [12 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you all!

I claim sanctuary's answer seems to have done the trick for now. I also noticed that it did indeed switch me back to "home", so thank you to all for reminding me to check.
posted by Wandering_Boots at 3:36 PM on March 8, 2020

There's a longer list though I'm not sure which ones if any actually do anything, but it's not like they're terms that would reasonably come up (aside from in a discussion of good terms to mute), so I don't see how it could hurt to mute them.
posted by juv3nal at 5:06 PM on March 8, 2020

I'm on Firefox, and I use two plug-ins that make Twitter SO MUCH more enjoyable: "Better Twitter" and "Fix My Twitter".
The latter gets you back to the old format of Twitter by changing the useragent string, and the former allows you to customize your experience with regards to other nonsense that takes up your desktop view.
Also, turning off retweets helps a great deal as well.
posted by Bill Watches Movies Podcast at 3:20 AM on March 9, 2020