[HN Gopher] I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it ___________________________________________________________________ I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it Author : affectsk Score : 92 points Date : 2022-05-15 22:50 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (martinboss.com) (TXT) w3m dump (martinboss.com) | handsaway wrote: | This is... an almost obsessive level of thinking about Twitter. I | don't know why you would force yourself to use something you | clearly didn't need. | | I do find it funny that he found a community of people focused on | getting followers on twitter to tweet to about twitter. | | This has reinforced my decision to avoid this website at all | costs. | Underphil wrote: | Some people _really_ struggle with FOMO. | affectsk wrote: | Gotta learn from the experts! | rektide wrote: | > _Finally, I felt irrelevant on Twitter._ | | This is like the first boss of tbe internet. Glad someone can at | least confess to this, clarify this point. Understanding & | welcoming this is a key pivot. | | People will slowly trickle in & follow you if you contribute. The | reward ks highly chaotic, statistical, makes little clear sense. | But just showing up & saying reasonable things is a pretty lock | long term win. | affectsk wrote: | Yep, and the cool part is you don't need a lot to start feeling | relevant. | | At least I didn't. A few weeks of consistently showing up and | interacting with the same people made them start recognizing | me, and that was enough to stop feeling like I'm just tweeting | into the void here. | | Now a few months and a few hundred followers later I'm finally | at a point where I can simply ask "my" Twitter for feedback or | share a thought and actually get some engagement. That felt | like going from 0 to 1, and it was the hardest part. | | A few hundred followers is still nothing in the grand scheme of | Twitter things, but it's enough not to feel irrelevant since | they're genuine and actually engage with me. | rodgerd wrote: | > Yep, and the cool part is you don't need a lot to start | feeling relevant. | | "Being relevant" isn't really my goal on Twitter. Chatting to | people is. Sometimes I get to learn stuff. It's supposed to | be _social_. | sshlocalhost98 wrote: | Yes, I agree on this. I am writing machine learning topics on | twitters and researchers flock to my blog and comments. Great | to see collaboration | affectsk wrote: | Yep, I've found that if you're really good at what you do | and/or have a narrow enough niche you'll have a much easier | time getting people to interact with you. | | If you're just alright and/or don't have a narrow niche, you | need to give them more reasons to follow/interact with you. | This is my case. I don't consider myself an expert in | anything, and being a generalist I'm interested in a lot of | stuff. | | So even if people don't find my tweets or articles unique or | extraordinary, many of them tend to stick around because of | my personality. At least I got that! | sshlocalhost98 wrote: | Awesome! | lewisl9029 wrote: | So I had a Twitter account since 2009 but never really used it | till a few months ago. I have some mixed feelings about it. | | On one hand, I really love the consumption side (following people | and reading their tweets): being able to follow interesting | people and populate my feed with all kinds of great posts about | topics I'm interested in. I've honestly been learning a lot and | getting exposed to a lot more perspectives I'd never have been | exposed to from just passively scrolling over the past few | months. This alone makes it more than worthwhile in my books, and | makes me wish I started using it sooner. | | On the other hand, the production side (actually posting my own | tweets) almost always feels like shouting into a void given my | rather tiny follower count. I've done it enough times with the | same outcome to the point that I've mostly given up on actually | posting my own tweets, and have toned down my engagement on the | platform to just replying to other people's tweets and retweeting | things I find worth sharing. | | I'm not saying this needs to change, it's the system working as | intended. I imagine people with high follower counts probably get | enough engagement on their tweets to make it a completely | different experience, and it's totally fair. They've spent years | building up an audience, I haven't, and the difference in | reach/engagement is a natural consequence of that. | | Though this is why HN still feels so special. Everything I write | here stands on its own merits. Good comments rise to the top and | bad ones get ignored/downvoted into oblivion. The algorithm | doesn't care about who's writing it. Sure, it's not a perfect | meritocracy. Famous people in the community will still get their | usernames recognized and noticed/upvoted more often as a result, | and the downvote-for-disagreement culture breeds a lot of | groupthink. But I still love this place despite all of its warts. | conductr wrote: | I've tried it and I just have no desire to scroll, or contribute | to, another endless feed. My inbox is bad enough. I'm ok missing | out on it. I never once said, "dang, if only I was a daily | twitter user I would have [insert any type of benefit to my | life]". | wly_cdgr wrote: | Bro, just do whatever you want, these places are for doing | whatever you want. Engagement numbers are irrelevant, we're all | just screaming into the void at all times | | Also, to contradict myself immediately, Facebook is most | definitely not for family, Facebook is for making friends with | Bulgarian anarchists and for fucking busted e-girls | wrs wrote: | I still don't get it. Why would I want to talk to my friends in | _public_? In a medium specifically designed to propagate out-of- | context sound bites? Surrounded by trolls of all ideologies? I | stopped posting anything on Twitter because there was nothing to | say that's worth the risk. | Underphil wrote: | Yeah, I hear you. I _do_ get Twitter but am still not | interested in what it offers. To each their own, I say. | lupire wrote: | Because public is _easy_. You don 't have to make coordinate | plans of who to include where and when. | | Twitter is like a pub that people are always at. | criddell wrote: | Twitter is sometimes the best way to reach customer service | people who can actually help you with your problem. For me, | that's my number one use case. | thebradbain wrote: | I _love_ Twitter. I think it's the only social media website that | rewards "power users" (to a fault). It has a horrific onboarding | experience that I imagine leaves many would-be regular users | stuck in a "now what?" rut. | | Its moderation is _too_ lax (no, really, it is. Try posting some | of the things * waves hands * "both sides" complain about on any | other mainstream social media network - Facebook, Instagram, | TikTok - and they'll be near-instantly removed there yet likely | allowed to remain on Twitter. This goes for pornography, bots, | extremist tweets, targeted harassment, slurs -- even with good | account-following hygiene, you'll see these things at the top of | tweet replies, possibly promoted into your feed as a "viral | tweet", etc. This discussion about "censorship" wouldn't even be | a discussion if Twitter just more strongly enforced its | guidelines it already has established. As it is, my opinion is | that every decision to remove something seems personal only | because you'll see so many other tweets obviously breaking the | rules, leading one to wonder "why me") | | Yet still, despite it all, it's the only mainstream social media | network where it actively feels like, to me, being part of the | conversation. In the same people say reddit is about the | communities you curate, so is Twitter -- but in my experience, | even moreso, because the majority of people on it (or at least | those in my circle) are real people, not hiding behind avatars or | usernames. | m1117 wrote: | Twitter is crazy and amazing. I stopped using it and a year ago I | came back, its getting better! | dhosek wrote: | I rejoined Twitter earlier this year after a bit over a year off. | This time around I focused on the stuff that I liked: interacting | with other writers, so my college friend who teaches at the Naval | War College and tweets a mix of politics and cats, I don't follow | this time around. And a lot of prominent Catholic figures that I | used to follow, I don't because a lot of Catholic Twitter is | arguing about stuff that I don't want to deal with in what is | ostensibly my relaxation and socialization space. There are only | a handful of people in my feed who I've met, but it is much | better the way it is. I'm also liberal with my use of the mute | and block buttons (I keep blocking ads for clickbait sites but | the Twitter algorithm hasn't caught on to that yet). | jsemrau wrote: | I never liked Twitter as a platform. We use it as a free instant | news datasource for out investment platform (finclout). For that | it works well. | | IMO the benefits are : 1. Relevant traders are posting | interesting insights. 2. Community engagement. 3. Up-to-date | information. | | Besides that I try to stay away. | jpswade wrote: | Twitter is simple, its purpose is to broadcast in short form. | Like newspapers, magazines and radio and TV before it. | | Twitter's power is its reach. | egypturnash wrote: | Damn this sure is a lot of thinking about how to Twitter. I just | started following my friends after their Livejournal posts turned | into incoherent auto posted collections of the day's Twitter | replies and that was basically it. | | Well until the past few years when it suddenly became POLITICAL | RAGE MATCH and I started running a Mastodon server for myself and | some of my friends... | zaphar wrote: | I've been using Twitter since it was invite only. I'm not a | Twitter personality, I don't have impressive follow counts or | viral tweets. I do tweet but mostly only so I can interact with | my feed. | | I've left every other social network. No longer on Facebook. No | interest in Instagram or TikTok. But Twitter I've continued to | get value from. This is entirely because I'm able to curate my | feed. My rules for twitter engagement are: | | 1. Never look at the algorithmic feed. Switch to most recent or | use https://tweetdeck.twitter.com for list consumption. | | 2. Unfollow anyone who consistently pulls you into Twitter | cesspools. | | 3. Follow the people who you find interesting and who doesn't | break rule #2 | | 4. Use the mute and block buttons as frequently as you need to. | | 5. Block retweets which aren't quotes. | | Everyonce in a while someone will link to a tweet in a different | forum and I'll take a look. 90% of the time I'm shocked at what | the author of that Tweet's experience of Twitter is like. My | experience is 180 degrees different. | spike021 wrote: | This process is basically what I've done for years. I don't use | tweetdeck though, I just manually curate my lists in twitter's | own UI. Mostly works. Some stuff slips through the cracks but | my expectations are just set such that nothing will ever be | perfect. | affectsk wrote: | Great tips, although I do like the algo - works great for | discovery! | | Other than that, it really is about how you curate it. Follow | the people you're interested in, engage with the content you | find useful, tell Twitter you don't like something by | muting/blocking/notinterestedin-ing and you're good. | | In that regard it's not unlike any other social media: if you | don't tell it what you like, it'll show you what it things you | want to see, which won't necessarily be something you'd want to | see. | dominotw wrote: | Problem is that most people don't have the monumental willpower | to not get dragged into a cesspool in a moment of weakness. | Sakos wrote: | > I've left every other social network. No longer on Facebook. | No interest in Instagram or TikTok. But Twitter I've continued | to get value from. This is entirely because I'm able to curate | my feed. My rules for twitter engagement are: | | This also worked for Facebook back when I still had an account. | All the posts I saw were ones directly related to my interests | and local events that I was interested in. We have a lot of | control over how social media presents us with information, | just most people don't bother trying to make it work for them. | HappyDreamer wrote: | > just most people don't bother trying to make it work for | them | | Could one say that that's why TikTok is so popular? It works | although people don't spend time configuring it? | Nav_Panel wrote: | Re (2), I always soft-block (block and then unblock) rather | than unfollow, mainly because I view my twitter feed as a | collection of friends, and I'd rather "terminate the | relationship" than make it one-sided. If I want to preserve the | relationship but find them annoying, I'll mute them. | zaphar wrote: | I do this two, but I have sort of two mental categories. The | people who only occasionally pull me in. I just mute or block | then unblock. Then there are the people who consistently try | to pull me in and view it as their duty to do so. Those I | just unfollow, it's not worth the effort to keep them in my | feed. | colpabar wrote: | I think the fact that you got in early and are now a pro at | using it is why you don't hate it. twitter seems like such a | simple platform that _should_ be great, but as someone who has | tried it out a few times over the years, it just seems | horrible. As soon as you create your account, you are bombarded | with whatever outrage-inducing topics are popular that day, and | the recommendation system on who to follow seems pretty biased. | | All of the things you listed seem like they should be the | default. But they aren't, which means 99% of people do not even | know they are options, and so the site is dumpster fire for | most people. | zaphar wrote: | This is fair. Most of my rules amount to working to keep | twitter looking like it looked when it first started. Which | sort of leads you to question what value all the features | twitter has introduced since really give me as a user. | | I like spaces and find those useful but the algorithmic feed | has close to 0 value for me. I'm not sure how twitter makes | money and survives as a company without it though. Can | twitter succeed as a pay to use platform? I don't know. | Sakos wrote: | I started using it when the Ukraine war began. All I see is | news out of the war. Nothing sensationalized or toxic or | anything. You can avoid a lot of the cesspool if you put in a | tiny bit of effort. | tonguez wrote: | this advice from twitter users is always the same and its | always so bizarre. just invest thousands of hours into | cultivating your own feed through the following process: every | time you get insulted by some child/idiot/bot, just select the | account of that individual person then block them or mute or | unfollow. do this thousands (or millions?) of times for every | individual person on twitter. jesus christ i cant think of | something more unappealing. | | the worst part of this is the more you invest into making it | useable, the worse it is when big brother blocks/mutes you; the | more enmeshed you are into this MCI tool for manufacturing | consent. it sounds like the type of person who would be into | twitter is the type of person who likes to spend a lot of time | researching which credit card gives the best 2% cash back or | whatever. genuinely just gross and boring to the point of being | repulsive to most people on earth | beepbooptheory wrote: | How are bots insulting you? That's just impressive more than | anything. | MuffinFlavored wrote: | > you into Twitter cesspools. | | What % of the userbase is "Twitter cesspools" and how do you | define that? What exactly is a "Twitter cesspool"? Viewpoints | that don't align with yours? Radical politics? | | Is Twitter _the_ platform of giving the 10-20% most fringed | members of both political parties a voice? Why does what they | post get "upvoted/liked/retweeted" enough to the point where | it gets visibility instead of being drowned out? What kind of | content are they posting exactly that is "ok" to not be removed | by moderation policies, but you define it as "cesspool" | material? | lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: | >> you into Twitter cesspools. > how do you define that? | | I'd imagine it's a personal definition and could be | reasonably substituted with "you don't want to hear from." | for the same effect. | zaphar wrote: | Threads that are full of flamewars, name calling, and outrage | farming is my personal definition of cesspool. I follow many | that hold opinions I don't agree with. As long as the | conversation is civil I'm perfectly happy talking. But if it | drags me into an internet flamewar where I am expected to | pile onto someone else out of manufactured outrage then count | me out. | desas wrote: | > What exactly is a "Twitter cesspool"? Viewpoints that don't | align with yours? Radical politics? | | This is a very presumptuous response. | | A more charitable interpretation might just be where | discussions are happening that you're not interested in on | twitter. For example, 'this person keeps getting embroiled in | twitter arguments about covid', so I'm going to unfloow them | because even though I agree with their opinions, I'm not | interested in the inevitably heated and pointless discussions | leaking into my timeline. | snthpy wrote: | Does TweetDeck still work? I mostly stopped using Twitter when | TweetDeck was acquired by Twitter and they shut down the | Android client. | | Before that I had different curated lists and then it just | became a mess. | erk__ wrote: | Tweet deck works well though only in the browser now. I use | it extensively for keeping a seperation between my messy feed | and my lists | polynomial wrote: | > 5. Block retweets which aren't quotes. | | What's the reason for this? I didn't even realize you could do | that. | zaphar wrote: | Just plain retweets tend to be viral tweets. And while some | of them can be fun they also have a tendency to be low- | content, high rage-factor tweets. | | In tweetdeck the block retweets setting blocks them. Retweet | with quote isn't counted as a retweet. | Sakos wrote: | > Just plain retweets tend to be viral tweets. And while | some of them can be fun they also have a tendency to be | low-content, high rage-factor tweets. | | All the retweets I see are high quality and interesting. | This heavily depends on who you're following, tbh. | wnevets wrote: | > 2. Unfollow anyone who consistently pulls you into Twitter | cesspools. | | There are certain cesspools I like checking out. For example | Grady Booch dunking on cryptobros is still funny to me. | sriram_sun wrote: | Create lists, but don't follow those folks. You'll probably | miss timely rebuttals, but only click on "politics" or | whatever when you want to waste (additional) time! | hermitdev wrote: | > Grady Booch dunking on cryptobros is still funny to me. | | Wait, what? Grady Booch, the UML guy? This, I need to the | see. | wnevets wrote: | He is constantly getting blocked after calling them out. | | https://twitter.com/Grady_Booch/status/1526615686151217152 | emkemp wrote: | Completely agree, and I'm surprised more people aren't using | Tweetdeck. | notacoward wrote: | I feel like a lot of people complaining about Twitter only | experience it through the twitter.com web interface. I'd hate | it too if that was my only experience of it. Using Tweetdeck | and/or just about any mobile client is _worlds_ better. You | don 't get so much random dreck, which makes it much easier | to see and engage with people you actually know or like. | | As far as I can tell, using any social-media site other than | with a friends-only reverse-chronological feed is just going | to be a bad experience for anyone who values real engagement | (i.e. not influencers or wannabes and not passive | disinformation consumers). Also, any social-media site | without a block button and a culture encouraging people to | use it is broken too. | recursive wrote: | If that's really the only way to make twitter good, then it | seems like a reasonable complaint that twitter is not that | way. If twitter can't be bothered to make their own product | tolerable, I don't feel any compulsion to do it for them. | | I say this as someone who briefly attempted to dabble in | twitter on a few occasions. I have an account. I've tweeted | a few times. I now check it probably a few times a year. | nemothekid wrote: | Tweetdeck isn't anymore accessible than Twitter; It's for | powerusers. It's better than vanilla twitter the same way | an F1 car is better than a Toyota Camry. If you can't | grok a Camry, then jumping into an F1 isn't going to make | your experience better. | | Twitter's strength and "problem" (to me), is that its | just a firehose of senseless data and you have to | manually figure out what you want. I only started | enjoying Twitter, by accident, when in college I | blacklisted Facebook, Instagram and Reddit on my | computer. That said, over the years I've come to prefer | it's arguably web-1.0 style of discovery to the curated | feeds of today. | | I don't think Twitter needs the instant gratification | hooks that other platforms have. Sometimes you login, and | there's nothing going on. | lapcat wrote: | There are web browser extensions that are pretty good at | improving the web site. | tmalsburg2 wrote: | I settled on a similar approach. I used to liberally follow all | sorts of accounts that seemed even remotely relevant, but | signal to noise was abysmal and there was way too much drama. | Several times I was on the verge of quitting, even though | Twitter was quite useful for promoting my own work and that of | my students. But recently I decided to try a new approach and | systematically unfollowed a lot of accounts. Now I stick to the | following diet and it produces a much more healthy and | interesting feed: 1. No politicians 2. | No journalists 3. No institutions 4. No companies | 5. No entertainment 6. No anonymous accounts 7. | Some notable exceptions in all the categories above 8. | Mute words to taste | | What's left is mostly genuinely interesting people who post | about things they understand and truly care about. | | I primarily browse the chronological timeline _without | retweets_ courtesy of a nice search function hack (you must be | logged in for this to work): | | https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20exclude%3Are... | | The algorithmic timeline has a bad reputation but it's actually | useful for stuff you missed. But I only check it after looking | at the chronological feed. | | I also like and mostly follow these suggestions for using | Twitter effectively: | https://twitter.com/AlanLevinovitz/status/151946437478365184... | walleeee wrote: | with 6 you miss some good accounts, anonymity is not always a | bad thing | tom_ wrote: | This is covered by rule 7. | walleeee wrote: | Ah, somehow I missed that. | pronoiac wrote: | You can turn off retweets for accounts that you follow, btw. | I use lists in a third party app for a chronological feed. | PKop wrote: | I don't understand the anonymous accounts rule. Some of the | most interesting and insightful people on Twitter are | anonymous. And we could say the same about Hacker News. Do | you think this website would be better if we all had to use | our real names? | wallacoloo wrote: | i'm frequently confused by people referring to "anonymous" | accounts on Twitter. every Twitter user needs a handle, so | it's not really possible to use it anything less than | pseudonymously AIUI. | | by "anonymous", do most people mean pseudonymous users who | haven't established an identity (i.e. few to no posts, or | no bio, or egg avatar)? or do most people mean to capture | _all_ pseudonymous users under that "anonymous" label? (in | which case, how does one evaluate if the user is | pseudonymous or using their legal name? even blue-checks | can be pseudonymous). | mikkergp wrote: | This begs the question to me, is there a way to "fix" | Twitter, without greatly reducing its impact? It seems to me | some people talk about making Twitter "the" public forum, but | most of the fixes to Twitter seem to be about how to make it | work for your niche. Which is great! Things shouldn't have to | be big or making billions of dollars to be good. But "No | politicians, no journalists, no institutions" doesn't sound | like a public forum to me, and I can't imagine some people | would buy Twitter in order to dramatically shrink it. | rodgerd wrote: | The only talk of "public forum" comes from people who are | desperate to force others to listen to them. I don't need | TERFs and neo-Nazis in my feed, but they want to be there. | dragonwriter wrote: | > The only talk of "public forum" comes from people who | are desperate to force others to listen to them. | | Occasionally, it's used by other people properly to refer | to a space used by government for official purposes; I | suspect much of the other use is dual purpose, that is, | it intends to discredit the proper use as much as to | advance a more overt purpose. | kinow wrote: | That's pretty much how I use any social media. | Unfollow/block/mute. Works on reddit too. | berberous wrote: | People shit on the algorithmic feed, but I love it. I'm too | busy to wade through bad/boring tweets, and don't want to spend | all day scrolling. I can check it once or day or less and the | algorithmic sorting surfaces the best content right at the top. | | That said, I don't really need a smarter algorithm than "show | my tweets with a lot of favorites". | | Just like a prefer to have Reddit sort by best vs new. | fluidcruft wrote: | My experience is that the algorithmic feed just wants to | firehose 99.9% sensationalist trending muck I don't want from | people and topics I don't want to follow or read about on | twitter. | meowface wrote: | For me the absolute worst of the worst is the "More Tweets" | list under certain tweets. It's basically designed to be | the most sensationalist, polarizing, "hot take"ist bullshit | imaginable. I'm not sure I've ever read a single thing | worth reading in that section. | | A rather meta example: scroll down to the "More Tweets" | section under this recent Elon Musk tweet - | https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525738556102164480 | | I don't know what it might curate for each person reading | this, but I'll bet you'll see what I'm talking about. | mlindner wrote: | I think this is a difference between the desktop and web | experience because I don't see any "more tweets" section. | If I scroll, I just get autoloading of more replies to | the tweet. | code_duck wrote: | Not sure whether you're on desktop or mobile, but I only | get "More Tweets" on the mobile website if I'm not signed | in. Otherwise it's as you describe, only replies. | rockinghigh wrote: | These are tweets Twitter wants to hide because they are | deemed toxic. | meowface wrote: | Sorry, to be clear I'm talking about the "More Tweets" | list at the bottom. What you're referring to is the "Show | more replies" link which requires a click to unroll. | aeturnum wrote: | I also really like the algorithmic feed. Though it's | interesting that you like it because you check it | infrequently - for me, it works because I check it often, so | it's "close to chronological but with extra surprises" which | I like. | | I think the algorithmic feed actually does a good job of | promoting the things Twitter does well and I wonder how many | people who hate it actually just disagree with the Twitter | devs about how the service should work. | jklinger410 wrote: | People like to trash on algorithmic feeds, but they secretly | love them. YouTube for instance compared to Odysee. | klyrs wrote: | People like to trash on heroin, but they secretly love it. | But people quit heroin too, because of the harms. | affectsk wrote: | I'm actually with you on this one! | | In my case, the algo is pretty good at surfacing useful | tweets and people: both new stuff that I find relevant, and | tweets from the people I'm following that I missed. | | So I generally use lists to interact with different groups of | people I'm already interested (including the ones I'm | following) and the homepage is great for discovery. | VectorLock wrote: | I've been a long-time Twitter user and I recently switched to | "See latest Tweets instead" and I had the same conclusion, | the "algorithm" was actually doing a decent job of surfacing | new stuff for me that I liked. I missed it pretty quick and | switched back. I think doing the manual curation to tell the | algo what you _don't_ want to see helps immensely. | kosasbest wrote: | I have a public Twitter account where I barely tweet or browse | Twitter. Gained 1000+ followers over the years and many of them | are good friends. I grew my following by simply interacting with | others and helping out with problems people were having. I try | not to tweet something I would regret posting in the future, as | this is my public persona and I'm committing to a permanent | record so to speak. Even if I delete a tweet, anyone can | screenshot it and circulate it online so I'm on my best behavior. | | I have one other account which is private (where I don't tweet). | I don't follow anyone, and if I get follow requests, I decline | them. I browse Twitter using their Lists feature, which I've | curated heavily over the years. All my lists are private so if I | accidentally get a follower, they can't see the lists I've made. | All my lists are high signal and I've blocked ~250 accounts that | regularly piss me off. I mean, some people just always popup in | my feed that are full of rage and bile, so blocking those | accounts is great and I enjoy browsing Twitter because of this, | since all the bad faith actors have been weeded out. | wcerfgba wrote: | There are two main things that put me off trying to use Twitter: | the character limit, and the closed nature of the platform. | | The character limit is a completely backwards concept to me. Yes, | it encourages people to be succinct, and yes, it creates a space | where short-form content feels like a valid contribution. But | almost every tweet I get linked (through friends or other | websites) that's interesting is either a pointer to another | website, or a thread. In order to say anything useful on Twitter | and actually have a conversation there, people have to butcher | their prose into a thread of sometimes garbled sentences. For me, | it's not pleasant to read and it's even less pleasant to write. | People work around the limitation by creating images of long-form | text (great for accessibility /s) or, like this piece, writing | their contribution somewhere else and then just linking it on | Twitter. | | Being a closed platform isn't just a philosophical issue. It | means I don't feel like I own my content. It means I am at the | whim of the company's dark UX patterns aimed at driving | 'engagement', like forcing visitors to log in to view a thread. | | Why would I want to participate in a platform that is so hostile | to allowing me to have meaningful conversations? | | I have my own website/blog where I have complete control and | ownership of what I write. My website is open, mobile friendly, | and lightweight, so anyone can go and read it without waiting for | a spinner or with a modal getting in the way. I have an email | address on there so any visitor can contact me. Occasionally | people email me and we have a chat. | | I network through email. If I discover someone's work and it's | interesting, I send them and email with more than 280 characters | explaining what I got out of it, sharing my own thoughts, and | pointing them at other resources and people they may find | valuable. Friends and colleagues reciprocate and send me | interesting stuff. Sometimes we have a video call and catch up | and discuss opportunities to collaborate. | | I sign up to people's newsletters, and subscribe to journal | alerts and mailing lists. My inbox is a steady stream of | interesting conversations and announcements. | | I skim Hacker News, Tildes, and MetaFilter for new links. I read | the comments because usually people are insightful and the | interface is clean and lets me focus on the content. | | I could probably get some use out of Twitter as a way to stay up | to date with specific people, if I wasn't so turned off by the | UX. A service that allowed me to follow people and then just | emailed me a daily or weekly digest of tweets from people I | follow (maybe ordered by some metric like retweet, which I also | don't grok) could be cool. | gverrilla wrote: | twitter is like a pyramid scheme of popularity. no thanks | soneca wrote: | A more informative title could be _"I finally got how to win on | Twitter"_ , because that's what this person wanted. They wanted | to "win". | | That's not what I want. I "got" Twitter from my first time using | it. I wanted to follow a mix of diverse people around topics that | interested me and be informed on new and old things about these | topics. And I never minded reading personal stuff from those | people. I actually enjoyed to learn about their other interests | or funny remarks. | affectsk wrote: | Low-key yeah, I do want to figure out how to win, but I haven't | gotten there yet. | | Your way of "getting" it is perfectly fine, too - if that's | what you want out of it. Right now I do enjoy reading people's | personal stuff, but they have to be the people I care about at | least to some extent. | | So what I wanted out of Twitter was the ability to be heard, | not just to listen. That's the part that I kinda figured out. | Winning is a different story. | munificent wrote: | I find it strange when people make broad declarative statements | about a social media platform. There is no singular Twitter | experience any more than there is a singular "America" experience | or "web" experience. Twitter is a vast heterogeneous sea of semi- | overlapping distinct communities. My Twitter is not your Twitter. | I'm happy the author "got" their Twitter but they way they got it | isn't how mine works. | | My mental model for Twitter is basically like a giant cocktail | party. Imagine you're hanging out and you want to find a couple | of cool people to talk with. You've maybe got one or two people | you know around but you want to meet some new ones. So you throw | out a joke or tell a story to them, but maybe just a little bit | louder in case it perks someone else's ear up because you have | something in common. | | Over time, you find yourself in a corner of the room surrounded | by your tribe, having fun, telling anecdotes and connecting. | Throughout the night, people come and go in the group, but it has | a vaguely stable vibe of certain common interests. Every now and | then someone totally random wanders by, joins the conversation, | gets a little confused when they don't get the weird in-jokes, | and wanders off. | | It becomes a great evening because you discovered some new people | you have a lot in common with. | | That's Twitter for me. | [deleted] | kstenerud wrote: | I still don't get it. Nothing in this article makes sense to me, | either. Not to denigrate the author - I'm sure what he posted | makes a ton of sense, just not to me. | | I made a twitter account shortly after it first started, made a | few tweets, and then it languished and I think it's probably long | deleted by now. Last year my wife made me another one because | "you need it to promote your OSS stuff". Okay so I made a few | tweets ... aaaaand it's been sitting dormant for months. | | I just ... I dunno how to even describe it. Can't see the point, | maybe? Can't build any enthusiasm to get involved? Find it about | as interesting and engaging as cutting my toenails? | | But it's been the same with facebook and ... I think it was | instagram or one of those newer ones - the one with the icon that | looks like a ghost. It's such a hassle to use them! HN is the | only place I ever post anything, and even that's a few days of | posting stuff and then weeks of nothing. | | I mean, I do understand how it can be beneficial to work those | social networks for your projects and passions and such, but | yeeesh what a slog! | time_to_smile wrote: | > "you need it to promote your OSS stuff" | | I have found this to be the biggest myth of Twitter: it is | nearly useless for content marketing. | | A long time ago (so it's possible this isn't true any more) I | did some analysis on a pretty large number of domains and found | that Twitter had virtually no impact on traffic. There were | brands that had a large twitter following, but in nearly every | case I could find this was because a popular brand happened to | have an audience that also was active on Twitter, not because | Twitter activity helped to grow their brand. | | I also had/have (much more recently) a Twitter account with > | 5k follows, that was pretty active (i.e. I didn't just game | Twitter to grow followers, something I have done in the past, | which is a separate issue). I had a couple of Tweets with more | than 1k likes, many with more than 500. First off, most really | viral content is viral because it has nothing to do with your | "brand", so that gets no traffic. However, even tweets that are | relevant, linking to specific articles etc. only get a small | blip in traffic and no visible long term improvement. | | _tl;dr in both my research and anecdotal experience Twitter is | not a good marketing tool_ | | Twitter can be good for communicating with your users/audience | if they happen to already be there, but it won't grow your | brand. | | Twitter can be useful for meeting people. I have a small number | of friends that I have met there. | | But as a marketing tool it is a complete waste of time. | lapcat wrote: | > I have found this to be the biggest myth of Twitter: it is | nearly useless for content marketing. | | I've found Twitter to be essential to my business. Perhaps | you're looking at it too "directly", in terms of traffic | analysis. What's important in my opinion is "worth of mouth" | advertising. You have a circle of friends on Twitter, your | friends recommend your product to their friends, and so on. | If your Twitter content is interesting and valuable, you | might even get members of the media to follow you. Or at | least members of the media might be following one of your | followers and happens to see your product that way. | time_to_smile wrote: | I'm genuinely curious if you've measured this, and how you | determined the impact of twitter on your business. | | It's certainly possible that other people have different | success with twitter. | | In my case I was looking over thousands of websites traffic | history primarily concerned with long term patterns of | growth based on activity among different social channels, | SEO, news aggregators etc. The vast majority of sites | primarily saw permanent growth in traffic as a function of | SEO success. One high ranking article can get you a | increase in average traffic that can last as long as you're | on top. The only sites that didn't benefit from SEO are | buzzfeed-style sites that exist solely from a constant | stream of traffic coming from new articles in news | aggregators. But Twitter doesn't generate a substantial | burst in traffic that reddit or other sites do. Plus if | you're popular on reddit, you will be reposted to twitter | without any effort. | | I should add that when I discovered this I was unhappy | about it, as I was currently spending a lot of time on | Twitter promoting my own project. I really enjoyed twitter | at the time, and it _felt_ like I was succeeding. I wanted | all my tweeting to be a valuable activity. After doing the | numbers I periodically would just stop using twitter for | months with zero impact on website traffic. | lapcat wrote: | > I'm genuinely curious if you've measured this, and how | you determined the impact of twitter on your business. | | Well, Twitter is basically my only form of promotion. :-) | | I've tried a number of forms of advertising, the results | of which I can measure directly, but I've lost money | every time, so I usually don't bother with that. | | There are times when I can measure Twitter's impact | directly. For example, I once had a very viral tweet that | immediately resulted in a massive sales week. Admittedly, | that's pretty rare though. | jklinger410 wrote: | > I did some analysis on a pretty large number of domains and | found that Twitter had virtually no impact on traffic. There | were brands that had a large twitter following, but in nearly | every case I could find this was because a popular brand | happened to have an audience that also was active on Twitter, | not because Twitter activity helped to grow their brand. | | How did you perform this research? | time_to_smile wrote: | Many years ago at a small private company that had access | to thousands of Google analytics accounts ranging from | recognizable name brands to people just trying to get | started. You could actively watch small brands grow big | over history and in all cases it was clear that twitter | success (in terms of traffic from twitter and follower | count) trailed brand development. | | This was also not universally true of all social media. | Facebook for example did precede growth in quite a few | cases. | | I also want to repeat the caveat that this was quite awhile | back, so I wouldn't give it too much credence for today. | | However my Twitter critique also grows out of several | cycles of activity and inactivity over many years running a | reasonably high traffic (for it's niche) blog and seeing | these same observations. Twitter activity only caused minor | bumps in traffic, and never correlated with a shift in the | baseline readership. | | Others here claim different experience, and it's quite | possible they are correct. I have found personally that | it's very easy to conflate the "feels good" of getting a | lot of likes/follower/etc with the illusion that "this is | working". Twitter is like a micro HN front page, only at | least with HN you'll get a pretty ego inflating spike upon | success (which is in practice is bad for marketing because | it makes it easy to focus on the things that feel good over | the things that work). | | For better or worse the best source of consistent increases | in traffic was (and from my experience still is) SEO. A | high ranking post will have the highest probability of | shifting your baseline traffic up. | affectsk wrote: | Yeah, I wouldn't rely on it as a primary marketing | channel in most cases, especially if I had to build it | from the ground up. | | Conflating "feels good" with "this is working" is right | on point, too. | | I'm sure it works better as a marketing channel for | specific niches, though (just like Instagram works best | for certain types of brands). | | Other than that, it's just a good place for all kinds of | organic engagement in general if that's where your | audience is. Not necessarily marketing. | is_true wrote: | I use it to follow people that share technical content about | topics I'm interested in. If I see they use it to share | political opinions or personal life stuff I just unfollow them | maxsilver wrote: | Twitter is the only major social network that I actually 'get'. | | Instagram is great, but it only works if you take good | pictures. You have to be pretty, or a photographer. It's super | great for that, but minimum effort needed per post is high, so | engagement sort of has to be low. | | Reddit is great, but it's not really 'social' so much as it's a | generic-access to monopolized forums. It feels like a catalog | of phpBB forums from the 2000's. It's great for general | knowledge stuff (if you are like, 'fan of videogame series' or | 'long-time active in trains' or such, Reddit's great). But it | doesn't feel social, I don't know anyone from reddit, I've | never met a person from Reddit. | | Facebook is bad, and is also too "real" (pretend real, Zuck's | definition of real). If your personal persona, professional | persona, immediately-family persona, and extended-family | persona are all exactly identical, then Facebook seems great | for you. Personally, I hate it, everything I post gets sent to | my parents and grandma, and like half of my company org chart, | which means I can't write anything real on there, even though | ostensibly they are all my "friends". (Am I going to unfriend | my work friends or my extended family?). Sure, you can 'scope' | your posts, but then people can eventually tell they're scoped | poorly and complained. And the people who are on there, are | predominantly people full of terrible political views that no | sane person should ever hold -- I do not want to have to spend | every waking moment telling folks, "yes, humans should have | rights. People are not property." and so on. | | Twitter is pretty good. It's _techie enough_ that my parents | and grandma can 't "get it", and aren't tempted to make an | account. It's _techie enough_ that most of my professional | contacts are on there, but there 's a cultural assumption that | (as a tiny account with few followers) I can be my authentic | self and not get completely in trouble. (I can say something | like, "attending a Pride parade" and have that sit next to | "released a new version of my cool rubygem" and not get in | trouble professionally over it, or have my parents yell at me | -- both real things that would 100% happen if I posted that | same blurb on Facebook). There's no assumption of Twitter | implying friendship (I can follow people I've never met, who | I'm not 'friends' with) but close relationships can still grow | without having to label it (I can be 'mutuals' with someone, | without trying to imply they are my friend). | | If your net is too wide, you can set up a private "alt" account | and lock it, so your closer friends/contacts can see stuff that | might otherwise get you in trouble with the broader community | -- and since it's a different account, there's no assumption | every follower of the one should see all of the other too (it | gets around the facebook/scoping problem that way) | | Twitter gives you a really good pulse about what people _want_ | to care about _publicly_ which is useful information (so much | as you don 't mistake it for what people _actually_ care about, | or for the sum total of _all_ they 're thinking). | | Generally speaking, Twitter is the only major Social Network | that still feels...well, _social_. | affectsk wrote: | That's exactly how I feel about it! Couldn't have put it | better myself. | | Posting on Facebook, LinkedIn or even Instagram feels like | making a statement. I can't just throw a random thought or a | picture in there, it feels out of place. | | On the other hand, Twitter is a lot more casual. It works | perfectly for stuff you wouldn't think twice about. Thoughts, | jokes, ideas, pictures. Doesn't matter. | | And yes, it's perfect for socializing. Little difference | between tweets and replies means you can easily spend most of | your time not posting anything and just replying to other | people's content and get value out of it. | azemetre wrote: | I honestly agree, I absolutely hate how twitter is used in the | dev sphere too. There will be ample discussions about the | future of a library only made on twitter never referenced | elsewhere. | | It's maddening. So maddening that I'm slowly becoming | delusional about the web's future. | oh_sigh wrote: | The problem might be - it sounds like you're using your twitter | account for marketing, not interacting with people. Personal | twitter accounts can actually be good places to do self | marketing, but you need to put in the work to actually grow | your network first, because you don't generally grow it from | marketing itself. | | Basically, first you need to follow a bunch of people that | interest you, and interact with them in some manner. Do this | enough and you will get followers back, and people will start | interacting with you, and that will draw more people in, etc. | baisq wrote: | Others read what you post and you read what others post. What | is there to get? I can understand not liking the format or | similar concerns, but if you don't get Twitter... did you not | get irc also? | mrtksn wrote: | The author himsel doesn't have any considerable following, the | article is more like collection of thoughts and hypotheses. | It's not that it's bad but IMHO shouldn't be considered | authoritative. | | There's this phrase "medium is the message" and I think it | holds very well with Twitter. The message is outrage. The | message is, be angry and be afraid and be insecure or no one | cares. | affectsk wrote: | If you're there to go viral then sure, outrage can work - | just like it does anywhere else. | | But I'd argue most people aren't there to go viral or cause a | ruckus. And in that case you can have a great time on Twitter | with a relatively small following. | | (Not to say I would mind having more followers, of course - | but it's not the goal) | affectsk wrote: | It's primarily about what you want out of it. | | The first few times I tried using Twitter to promote my stuff | and failed miserably. If you're there purely for promotion you | won't get far, and it's definitely not the best channel for | that purpose. (Especially if it feels like a slog to you). | | If you're there to interact with like-minded people AND share | something you're working on in the process, that's a different | story. Still takes effort, though. | the_gipsy wrote: | Ok, I'll let you in: you're either already famous, or you have | a huge curated network of bidirectional followers from the | early days. Then it works. | bombcar wrote: | Which distills down to: either you're famous or you're | famous. | PKop wrote: | It's a resource to learn and follow smart and interesting | people who know a lot about different subjects you're | interested in (lists are good for this purpose). _You_ tweeting | is not necessary at all to get value out of twitter. | | I've learned a ton about economics, geopolitics, history, | Bitcoin, finance, health and nutrition and software development | on Twitter (have lists for some of these, while much is just in | my main feed). | fluidcruft wrote: | Twitter for me works nicely once I started to think of it as a | sort of light/unstructured RSS replacement. I follow people who | don't chat a lot and mostly post announcements. But also I | follow people working in fairly niche topics. | SL61 wrote: | The thing with Twitter is you need a decent number of mutuals | (i.e. they follow you and you follow them) to get a decent | amount of high-quality interaction. On a new account with 0 | followers, most people won't see you. Even if you reply to a | popular tweet, most people will ignore your reply because of | your low follower count. | | I have two Twitter accounts: a pseudonymous one with a few | hundred followers where I talk about my hobbies, and a | professional one with a very low follower count where I talk | about tech. | | The first account is a lot of fun - I can post about something | and 5-10 of my Twitter friends (people with shared interests | who I only know via Twitter) will chat with me about it. The | professional one is giving me the experience you're describing. | A couple coworkers follow me and a few random people, but not | enough of an audience for anyone to see my tweets. It feels | like a waste of time. | | I consider it a design flaw that Twitter makes it so hard to | get your account off the ground. Sites like HN and Reddit allow | you to jump in the conversation on a fresh account, but on | Twitter you're just invisible. I got my first account up and | running thanks to some real-life friends following me, and I | can't imagine how to make my professional account stand out. | anyfoo wrote: | > The thing with Twitter is you need a decent number of | mutuals (i.e. they follow you and you follow them) to get a | decent amount of high-quality interaction. | | I did that for an eletronics-related hobby of mine. Took a | while, finally got it off the ground with some mutuals. | | And then it felt... weird. Like I was compressing down my | thoughts, for mostly performative purposes no less. I didn't | like communicating with my peers _that way_ instead of, say, | per email or even chat (IRC, Discord, whatever). I felt I had | to say "what was on my mind right now" instead of processing | anything beforehand, but without the more direct | conversational back and forth of chat. | | Another problem I noticed: Almost every technical account | with a minimum number of followers has this barrage of people | that are doing quips, making dubious statements, or just | asking simple or also dubious questions to almost every | tweet, where even the questions seemed performative. Even the | most kind and engaged originators seem to ignore them the | overwhelming majority of the time, probably because it's too | much to handle. | | It was not for me. Unlike blogs, it did not add anything to | my hobby. | affectsk wrote: | Yup, getting it off the ground was the hard part! | | My experience was exactly the same as what you've had with | your professional account. LinkedIn just made more sense for | professional stuff, so I stayed there. | | In my case having a separate Twitter account for hobbies | didn't make too much sense either since I didn't really have | any, haha. | | It wasn't until I figured out how to combine my personal and | professional stuff that I really "got it". And even then, | it's still quite a bit of work if you want to stay visible. | bekantan wrote: | I picked up Twitter in 2021 after a longer break. | | Today I prefer lists over following and have several prioritized | lists per interest, e.g. P0, P1, ..., Pn for programmers. | | When I want to see what's going on, I start with level zero. | | Very few people on my lists tweet every day. I enjoy reading | people who tweet about new insights within their current area of | interest - this rarely happens more than once per week. I aspire | to have such account myself. I don't mind staying silent if I | don't have something interesting to share. | mewse-hn wrote: | I'm 40 and never "got" twitter either. I started to dip my toes | in it very casually over the past year or two, but now the Elon | Musk acquisition got me to bail. | | I don't have much regard for people who consider themselves | "extremely online" because they spend hours in the vast echo | chamber of the twit-sphere - especially journalists. Everyone | knows the superior option is posting to weird esoteric message | boards with an orange bar at the top | criddell wrote: | Musk has said he wants to make Twitter a free speech hub once | again. On Twitter, people are asking him if he would take down | the video of the Buffalo supermarket gunman killing shoppers or | leave it up and so far I don't think he's answered. | | Musk wants to make changes, but it isn't clear exactly what | changes he would make. | WalterBright wrote: | I discovered that Twitter replaces having an email list for | business. You aren't spamming people, they sign up to follow you. | The idea is to keep your tweets interesting to people who are | using your products and services. | | A corollary is to not use it to post personal stuff or politics. | | I wish the technical people I follow on Twitter would leave the | politics out, I follow them for their technical insights. | huhtenberg wrote: | That's the way to use it for disseminating the information, | 100%. | | Been doing it for a while for several projects and it's a | fantastic broadcast tool to keep _interested_ people updated on | news they want to hear. The main trick is to never waver off | topic. | | This doesn't replace a mailing list though. Not even close. | There are simply parts of the target audience that aren't on | Twitter. So Twitter needs to be _combined_ with the newsletter, | the RSS feed, a dedicated sub on Reddit and what have you. | Together these result in a lot of reach. They also cross- | pollinate well. | bachmeier wrote: | > I wish the technical people I follow on Twitter would leave | the politics out, I follow them for their technical insights. | | I think this is a significant flaw in the design of Twitter. | You should be able to follow a subset of someone else's tweets | rather than the binary all/nothing we have now. | munificent wrote: | Honestly, it's a significant flaw in the design of humans. | | When interacting with a human, I did not sign up for them | being a complete holistic personality with hopes, dreams, | beliefs, history, etc. I just want direct access to some | personally chosen subset of their brain. Why do I have to | deal with their messy... ugh... _peopleness_? | bachmeier wrote: | > Honestly, it's a significant flaw in the design of | humans. | | Yes. And they do wonderful things with technology these | days that can help us get around those flaws. | lapcat wrote: | > I wish the technical people I follow on Twitter would leave | the politics out, I follow them for their technical insights. | | You need a very large muted keywords list. | altdataseller wrote: | It's a good supplement for an email list, but having it replace | your email list would be a huge business risk. What if they | implement some sort of algorithm change that dramatically | reduces how often your tweets appear in timelines? You control | your email list, but Twitter controls your twitter profile. | tootie wrote: | The addressable market of Twitter users is probably 1% that of | email. | xen2xen1 wrote: | Seconded. I've tried to follow technical / subject folks, but | the politics is constantly there. Maybe next try I'll block the | folks who crap out the politics so I don't follow them again, | which I've done multiple times. | WalterBright wrote: | It's not that _I_ mind them tweeting their politics that | much, it 's that I don't want them annoying my followers. | fortuna86 wrote: | It's an RSS feed for people. | fleddr wrote: | A lot of people are familiar with the 90-9-1 rule regarding | social networks. 90% is just lurking and never tweets, 9% might | occasionally tweet, and 1% writes most tweets, or more | accurately...writes the tweets that generate the most engagement. | | What not everybody understands is that this rule pretty much also | applies to every individual. If you have a 1000 followers, you | should very much assume that 90% never even sees your tweets. 10% | might see it, of which possibly 1% bothers to lift their finger | and like it. An even smaller percentage might make the gigantic | effort of typing a comment. | | These numbers roughly play out on the author's twitter profile | where the typical post has 0-1 likes with the occasional outlier | of 3-5 likes, and in general...almost no comments at all. So the | roughly 500 followers add up to this tiny amount of actual | engagement that you can substantiate to about 5 people. It's a | very rough guidance, but dividing followers by a 100 can't be far | off in trying to come to a meaningful following. | | If you think that's pessimistic, consider this extreme example: | | https://twitter.com/nytimes | | The NYTimes has a stunning 53M followers. When you scroll through | their feed, notice how the typical tweet struggles to even get | 100 likes or comments. There's the occasional outlier regarding | politically impactful tweets, but even those fail to impress. | | If we are to take their "typical" tweet and round that up to 100 | likes / comments, which is already optimistic, we're talking | about an engagement percentage of 0.0002%, or 1 in 5,000 | followers engaging. | | When you do this same exercise for somebody that truly gets | Twitter, Elon Musk (for better or worse), we're talking about | roughly 1 in 1,000 followers engaging. | | This doesn't even account for bots. And it also doesn't go into | the issue of actual engagement typically being of a very low | quality, hardly enriching. | | In my view, both Instagram and Twitter are not great for | community building or rich conversations. Good old forums, | reddit, HN, Discord and even Facebook groups are vastly superior | at it. | dynamic_sausage wrote: | Twitter is great for threads posting science-related curiosities, | you just need to follow the right people. Here are two awesome | accounts of general interest | | https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973 | | https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3 | | It also makes sense to follow experts in one's field. Gabriel | Peyre regularly posts computational math stuff of superb quality: | | https://twitter.com/gabrielpeyre | lizardactivist wrote: | I'm sorry to hear that. | par wrote: | If someone has to create such a long justification for why they | need to use twitter, i'm still not convinced it has any value. So | far in my experience twitter is primarily an echo chamber for | VC's to pat each other on the back. I even aggressively try to | mute/unfollow them, but engaging with any tech topic just seems | to force me into VC twitter. I don't really care for it. | oneoff786 wrote: | I've enjoyed Twitter as a way to find experts on Ukraine. But it | seems pretty niche. It only seems useful to me for extremely | recent events on unfamiliar topics. | [deleted] | matsemann wrote: | I've recently done the same. Had a dormant firstname+lastname | twitter profile for years. But made a new one for a niche a few | months ago. Only follow and interact related to that niche, and I | get lots of engagement on the stuff I post. 900+ followers | already. | | What I think makes a difference is that the name of my account | tells what you can expect. So if someone sees a comment from me, | the chance of them following me is higher as they know I will | only post related stuff, compared to following some random person | making a single great comment, and then getting all their other | stuff in your feed. | | I now also chat regularly on DMs with other people in the niche, | get recognized sometimes IRL and end up in conversations based on | it etc. So actually been some interesting months. | | Edit: I guess this also depends on the niche. For me that niche | is just a hobby, which means that most of my interactions are | pleasant. So pretty different experience compared to if one's | following controversial topics/figures. | isthmus wrote: | Yeah, it's a newsfeed timesink. It's just gotten better as the | feed has improved. | russellbeattie wrote: | Twitter is about writing a quick thought to get it out of your | system and hoping some of your followers actually sees it, which | statistically, they won't. I wrote an analysis 12 years ago about | it (below). With the passage of time it's clear that without AI | algorithms, Twitter (and other social networks) would be totally | useless, instead of mostly useless, as it is today. | | I didn't get how good AI was going to get back then so I assumed | Twitter (which was only 4 years old at that point) was a fad that | would eventually fade. Missed that call. Instead it became the | greatest tool for spreading misinformation that humankind has | ever created. Woops. | | I stopped using Twitter on January 20th, 2016 and deleted all my | previous tweets, likes and followers. I only have an account now | as a placeholder. I encourage you to do the same. | | https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-fireho... | affectsk wrote: | Enjoyed the article! | | Phased attention and transient information is exactly how I see | Twitter myself. Trying to stay on top of everything is out of | question. | | I think of Twitter as an ongoing party that I can drop by, see | what's up, chat with a few friends, make a few new friends, | have a little fun, move on until next time. | | This approach only makes sense when you have a "community" of | people on Twitter that you "belong" to. That's the part I was | missing back when I tried it originally. | TheRealNGenius wrote: | Ah yes, figured out Twitter... | | ...although to express this, you need more than 140 characters... | IG999 wrote: | joshu wrote: | twitter is a game. the main move is saying things that get a | reaction. your score is the number of likes/responses/follows. | getting follows let you get a bigger reaction. | pohl wrote: | I bet that, for most people, it's just a feed. Most Twitter | users probably just follow what's interesting and doom-scroll | without tweeting. It's only really a game for the minority that | wants to call attention to themselves. | RajT88 wrote: | I don't know if you really "get" twitter until you've had a | throw-away tweet from 7 years ago dredged up and used to try and | destroy you. | affectsk wrote: | I guess that's one benefit of not having started earlier! | madeofpalk wrote: | The best I've had is being suspended for a 7 year old "kill all | boomers" tweet :( | rodgerd wrote: | I auto-delete my tweets after three months so _shrug_ | pessimizer wrote: | _What is twitter?_ 1) Major-, mini-, and micro-celebrities making | declarations in a quotable form, and 2) their fans and anti-fans | either trying to figure out a witty way to compliment them, | ridicule them, or become them by adding to or topping their | declarations. | | _How to do twitter well?_ Specialize in a subject or two. Join | defacto voting rings through popular hashtags within your subject | 's community and subtle hot-keyword-of-the-day stuffing. Steal | jokes from nobodies. Reply to every tweet from a popular account. | Bait popular accounts into fights. | [deleted] | lupire wrote: | TL;DR: Twitter is useful if you want to read stuff or write stuff | (mostly short stuff), without any particular structure. | | Not sure what the revelation is ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-17 23:01 UTC)