My issue is that you can't exclude yourself from the algorithm. You post something even tangentially political, it immediately pops up in the feeds of people that have no connections with you at all and have the extreme form of views opposite to yours. The only way to prevent your tweets from being recommended to random people is to lock your account, and that makes it pointless to reply to people who don't follow you or to like their tweets because they don't see anything you do.
I myself always use the "following" tab. So I would like to stay in my bubble, thank you very much.
> The only way to prevent your tweets from being recommended to random people is to lock your account, and that makes it pointless to reply to people who don't follow you or to like their tweets because they don't see anything you do.
There may be a single feed, but it’s definitely a bunch of “disconnected communities”. That’s why half the people think HN is pro-AI and the other half thinks it’s anti-AI. Everyone gets the same feed but interact with different content on that feed and come to completely different conclusions.
Those are different individual values, not different communities. All of the conversation is co-mingled in the same threads that everyone sees. Everyone is expected to follow HN rules. 1 person can be a part of multiple communities.
An example of different communities would be subreddits. Reddit as a whole connects all of the communities with a front page, but each community is isolated from one another unless you choose to look over or someone else chooses to look into your community. Cross-community conversation happens from the overlap of subreddits followed between individuals.
That’s a silly definition. In real life everyone has access to the same street (feed) with the same shops/restaurants/bars/etc (posts), but people choose which of this they go to and they each have their own vibe. They don’t typically cross pollinate. So there are different “communities” within a “community”. Surely you don’t read and interact with every post, only those you are interested in.
It's not a silly definition. it's the definition. And it make far more sense than saying people are part of a community simply because they happen to have the same overlapping values, even if they've never interacted with one another. The whole point of a community is that it's where people interact with one another.
A neighborhood is a community. A commercial area you choose to shop in is a community. A forum is a community. A subreddit is a community. HN is a community. Not every person in each of those locations have the same shared ideals and values, though they likely have some overlap since they each choose to be in that location.
I myself always use the "following" tab. So I would like to stay in my bubble, thank you very much.