How to avoid distractions while using Twitter

TLDR: use uBlock Origin

block stuff with uBlock Origin#

uBlock Origin is a browser plugin, which I use mainly as an adblocker. But you can also use its “picker mode” to block custom elements from a website.

I used it for example to block out “Trends for you”

But it was not working correctly every time.

I tried this: https://schleiss.io/fixing-twitter-design-with-extension/ but it didn’t work.

So I found an even better solution:

Go to the uBlockOrigin dashboard, you should see something like this:

This is what you want to paste in there (you can change the date)

! 2021-01-08 https://twitter.com
twitter.com/i/api/2/timeline/home.json
twitter.com/i/api/2/guide.json
twitter.com/i/api/1.1/users/recommendations.json

It will prevent feed from loading (home.json), will block “people to follow” (recommendations.json) and trends(guide.json)

Then you can use uBlockOrigin to block out “Try again” parts for a cleaner look.

This is the final effect:

So … how to view tweets?

Lists#

Lists! I have a tonne of them.

I group people into lists and use them as needed. You can even use lists created by other people. If I look for great curated lists, @michael_nielsen lists are my go-to.

https://mobile.twitter.com/michael_nielsen/lists

Instead of using “Home”, I’m using one list, here called rev_list, which consist of 50-60 people. People whose tweets I don’t want to miss. But I think about 20-30 of them are active, so there isn’t a lot of tweets.

Visiting it once per day, it takes about 15 min to scroll through not-seen tweets.

If you MUST use “Home”, just disable uBlockOrigin.

I found, that using “Home” rarely gives good results! Twitter algo really flexes its recommendation muscles 💪.

BONUS - How to research stuff using Twitter