Hi!

Just a quick warning: the first part of this email might border on what some call "a rant", if you're only interested in PHP news, just scroll down!

Two months ago, I decided to give Twitter Home another chance: the timeline that Twitter fills using their algorithm instead of just chronologically showing tweets of people you follow. I wanted to discover interesting new people to follow and I figure Twitter would fill my feed with tweets related to my interests; based on what and who I liked, retweeted and followed over the years.

I was wrong.

After two months, I now only see tweets of:

• self proclaimed "tech-gurus" who don't have much, if any, up-to-date experience with real-life projects and clients;
• people trying to sell me their latest products;
• people showing off their new MacBook pro;
• people going our of their way trying to spread "positive vibes" to the point that it becomes a little cringey;
• people who think threads are an efficient way of communicating coherent thoughts and opinions.

And just to be clear, I'm not mad at any of them; most of those people actually tweet interesting stuff as well, but Twitter simply didn't show their more interesting tweets in my Home feed.

It turns out their algorithm is rather picky, especially when it comes to tweeting external sources:

Unfortunately for me, I find external sources (blog posts, news articles, etc) often the most relevant and insightful; and Twitter deliberately filters them out when discovering new people.

So after using Twitter Home for two months, I felt genuinely miserable every time I opened my feed. I knew that almost no tweet would interest me, and I'm sad that the Twitter algorithm doesn't work better for case. I'm sure Twitter is well aware of how their algorithm works, and I'm sure it yields the best results for the majority of their users, but I apparently don't belong in that group.

So, here's where I need your help: I really want to discover more interesting people online; people who write about PHP, webdev, and programming; people who dare to challenge ideas that we take for granted; content that makes us think outside our box.

But how do I find those people? Twitter clearly isn't the best platform and I find Reddit and HackerNews either too focussed or too broad. So what's left? Any ideas? I would very much appreciate your input!

PHP 8.1…

Only 5 more days and PHP 8.1 will be here! I'm very much looking forward to updating some of my projects and open source packages. Two weeks ago, I published one last, quick recap about PHP 8.1, you can check it out if you haven't seen it already.

I will send a special newsletter with the release of PHP 8.1, so keep your eye out for that one, and as always I appreciate it if you share this newsletter with people who you think might benefit from it!

See you in the next email, one dedicated to solely to PHP 8.1!

Brent