Twitter Spam Chaos
Twitter's changeover last week to x-dot-com has been chaotic, at least for me. Most importantly, the quality filters have completely stopped working, swamping my timeline with engagement farming. Considering how many of those spammers are asking for common password-reset questions (like “what was the name of your first-grade teacher?”), I'm calling it engagement “pharming.”
Happily, there is a great, open-source add-on that tames the Twitter spam. It's called “Old Twitter” and you can install it on Chrome, Chromium, and Edge for desktop from the Chrome web store. By default, it shows you only tweets that were liked at least once by someone you follow. (It's not currently working on Firefox.) [Edited to add: If you delete cookies on browser exit, you may have to disable Old Twitter before logging in, then enable it and refresh the page. It's worth the additional step to clean up the timeline.]
I hope this helps my friends to stay in contact with me. Remember, my Mastodon and social links are always at the top of this blog.