I totally failed to use Twitter in any reasonable way.
I used it for years, trying to follow interesting people or artists but in the end, it was just an amplified echo chamber of myself.
Everyday there was the shitstorm of the day. Absence of nuance was the norm (nuance is not prone to RTs, I believe).
Everyone there is trying to push its personal fight, which, while I generally agree with, is never the reason I come to Twitter. Yes I want the world to change about [society topic] but no, Twitter is just not the place for that.
In the end, I was mindlessly scrolling through rage and polarized opinions while I was coming to learn / love / occupy myself.
Maybe I did something wrong, maybe it was not for me.
I closed my account. I don’t miss it but each time I read an article like this I happen to think that maybe I missed something wonderful about Twitter.
> Everyone there is trying to push its personal fight
Unfollow those people.
Twitter can be a good place for discussion, but you have to take control of your follow list. I think a lot of people end up following the most prolific Tweeters in their domain rather than the most interesting (who often post infrequently). The prolific Tweeters reach for drama to bait people into engagement.
If you don’t make a point of unfollowing the empty drama-producing Twitter users, your timeline will eventually fill up with their drama.
The real problem of Twitter IMO is their retweet feature. This feature fuels hate and unfair attacks.
You should never be allowed to take a message sent to someone’s audience and transfer it to your audience. You should only be able to engage with their audience.
The only reason I imagine this feature exists is because it generates engagement and revenue for Twitter.
It's strange, but my personal experience could hardly be more different. I mainly use it for work in the gaming sector and, to a smaller extent, tech. I occasionally see rage and strong opinions, but it's a very small minority. Most of the time, it's useful, informative content. I do hide trending topics, which I think helps, but even before I did, my experience was nowhere near as negative as yours.
Twitter is good for a few things, but they all have alternatives.
My healthy uses for Twitter (as opposed to my using it as part of my studying of the impacts social media has on its users/trolling/shitposting) are:
1. Local events, governments, and establishments. It's a great way to get information on things like road closures, last minute weather adjustments, ideas for places to go around town, etc.
2. Professional orgs or academics in areas that I'm interested in. I prefer organizational Twitters because there's usually some sort of social media policy preventing them from Tweeting about politics.
It was like this for me until I muted any word that was remotely political. All of a sudden it was like a toxic fog had been lifted and I could see clearly again. The article really undersells the importance of muting words. It changes everything.
Twitter is fantastic for me. Meet interesting people from all walks of life, interact with them. Just one example: I posted a (very crappy!) rendering of a piece of music yesterday as a New Years wish and got a super nice response from the original artist within a couple of minutes. In real life that would never happen.
My tip for using Twitter: just be yourself, and treat your timeline as your livingroom. If people are rude toss them, if they use your livingroom as their platform then toss them too. That way the atmosphere stays nice both for you and others.
I'm going dark on social media this year, twitter especially.
There are some amazing posts on twitter, but how much crap do you have to wade through to get to them? Nuzzel was great at filtering down to the most relevant article, but twitter caught and killed that company, it's acqui-hired CEO promising to move some features into twitter but they never materialised. Twitter wants me to consider the uninformed and the informed alike, just so they can monetise my eyeballs, and in 2022 that's just a waste of our time.
I think of my information diet as a classic signal to noise problem. My goal is to unearth thought provoking articles, twitter it might take an hour of slog to get one nugget, whereas hacker news offers about one per minute, and at the other end feral wastelands like the youtunbe comments section you would be lucky to get one gem a month.
All of which is my round about way of saying that I love HN! The comments here are often more insightful than the article, and I feel that time spent here is actually time well spent. Happy new years to all the hackers, makers and grinders out there. Don't go changing!
My number one gripe with Twitter is that a link to a tweet is not a simple static HTML page. Instead (guessing here, haven't inspected) you get a page that loads some generic JavaScript, that reads in the URL and extracts that you are, in fact, trying to read a tweet with some ID, and then goes on to load the contents of that tweet by doing an "API request" to fetch its data (probably as JSON), and when the response comes in, finally the tweet's contents are turned into HTML and inserted replacing the dreading spinner gif.
My number two is that it's simply frustrating as late-comer, seeing all the established users talking to each others, while you must try to shout witty replies into the void in hopes that some of them are worthy enough for any of the cool kids to engage.
When I signed up for twitter many years ago as a student, I used it to follow tech people. It was nice to learn new stuff. But it also felt very limited. Who to follow? What's just noise? How can I follow someone's tech tweets and not personal tweets? How do avoid political rabbit holes? And why should anyone follow me back? Myself retweeted random stuff I cared about, wrote some personal tweets etc. So I ended up abandoning twitter for many years as I kinda didn't find a use case for it.
Last year I made a new profile, though. Not a personal one, but dedicated to a single cause. It's much more fun to have this hyper focused profile. People follow me because they know what they get. I interact only with related content etc.
But the interface is confusing. Very hard to follow discussions when they branch out. And can't follow new comments on something. The notifications are impossible to make sense of, and I don't even get that many. I had to learn the etiquette on how others in my area uses tweets, retweets, quote tweets etc, and I still don't understand it all.
I gave up twitter, facebook and most all other social media about a 18 +/- months ago (though was never a big user to begin with) - it is truly a cesspool (and yes, I realize that HN is a minor version of social media).
I even went so far as to modify my hosts file so that I can't even get to twitter, facebook, instagram or LinkedIn (and several other places), just to resist the urge to follow a link that would bring me down the rabbit-hole.
Once you realize the entire business model of these social media giants is pretty much like a boxing match promoter - i.e. get the two sides to hate each other, and watch the groups fight it out online (and sell ads to make a profit).
It is not a coincidence that Americans are now strictly divided about just about every topic - and it has become pretty acceptable to wish death on anyone that disagrees with you on anything - that was not a mistake by Zuckerberg/Dorsey et al - that was by design. The more people hate each other, the more willing they are to get into the mosh-pit of social media and fight it out - while FB/Twitter sells advertising to the event.
Never forget: Zuckerberg/Dorsey and many others got rich by dividing Americans and amplifying the hate on both sides to be able to sell even more ads while they fight it out online.
It doesn't talk about what the return on (time) investment is. I've made several concerted efforts over the past 10+ years to use Twitter, with various accounts on various subjects, dutifully regularly posting, following, unfollowing etc. as per recommendations in articles such as this, but all I've ended up with is the sense of having wasted an enormous amount of time and got nothing worthwhile in return. I don't think I've being using it incorrectly, and I'm starting to think that actually might be the attraction for many people. The received wisdom seems to be that people are being manipulated into squandering their time on the social media platforms to view more adverts and increase their profits (with the underlying assumption that the time would have otherwise been spent on more fruitful pursuits), but I'm starting to wonder if many people actually want to waste their time for whatever reason, e.g. to escape the bleak realities of their grim existences.
> I've made several concerted efforts over the past 10+ years to use Twitter, with various accounts on various subjects, dutifully regularly posting, following, unfollowing etc. as per recommendations in articles such as this, but all I've ended up with is the sense of having wasted an enormous amount of time and got nothing worthwhile in return
Same for me. I did try to avoid any drama and keyboard wars, but it's simply not possible with how often the algorithm pushes political topics into the trends.
I'm thinking about blocking it in my router, i don't think i'll be missing out
When you approach it from that angle it must be super frustrating, but if you don't look at everything in life from an ROI perspective then it gets a lot easier.
I try to be a 'force of good' on whatever platform I join, over the years my focus has shifted considerably and that in turn made me decide to quit certain social media websites (for instance: fieldlines, slashdot), and join others. I'm not the most social person in person (to put it mildly) so this allows me to compensate for that to a certain extent.
The notion that some people want to escape the bleak realities of their grim existences is not particularly new. One just has to look at the history of alcohol consumption; for parts of history, a lot of people were drinking quite a bit. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_alcoholic_drinks#Me...
Sure, people also use Twitter for that. And almost everything else. As a kid that was surely a big part of why I read huge quantities of SF novels.
But that doesn't mean that the only point of having a beer or reading a paperback or using Twitter is time-wasting escapism. I learn a ton from Twitter, getting insights and experiences from people I never would have heard from otherwise. Other people get real community out of it. Still others find it professionally useful: networking with colleagues, finding jobs, keeping up with their fields.
So maybe you're using it wrong and maybe it's not for you. But your inability to get something out of it doesn't tell you much about the experience of a lot of people.
I've bounced in and out of Twitter. I still can't get over feeling like my connections with people are mediated by an algorithm. Like, I will be talking to X, Y and Z today because they posted and the timeline thought I'd like it. It felt so one sided too. I would comment and like their stuff much more than they would for mine, and it just felt, wrong... Like I was waaay too focussed on them, but sometimes that's all my timeline would show me.
Also there's people I really wish it wouldn't suggest me to IRL that it does frequently. I don't want to block these people, for the implication that has socially. I have for one but it was a Big Deal. I'd rather it not serve us to each other as often.
> You are the one who chooses whether to enter the hellsite or the heavensite.
That's naive because pushes the narrative that corporate run social media are just a neutral platforms with no agenda. That's simply not true. The algorithm™ is optimised for retention and the best way to retain is, unfortunately, echo chamber and provocation.
> I started using Twitter on a regular basis as an experiment in early 2020.
Ah okay! I didn't read after that point, maybe the article should start with this quote.
Yeah. I was out on the article after the heaven or hellsite line.
To build a reasonable case, defenders of social media must at least acknowledge the toil and difficulty of making your feed anything but a rage inducing time sink, as well as the fact that the sites themselves are not your allies in doing so.
I loved the section about search tips and the vim-like shortcuts for moving up-down.
I decided to try building an audience to sell my ebooks better last August, but the connections I made with fellow authors was the better outcome (similar to what's mentioned in this article). It has also helped me to become better at highlighting single concepts instead of users losing focus when faced with a wall of features.
You can use Twitter as a useful source of information and news while avoiding the time-wasting and toxic aspects, and sidestepping Twitter’s manipulative algorithms. The key is to make strategic use of lists and never look at your timeline:
> If they mirror your interest, you two can take it up to the next level. If there’s someone you want to become friends with:
> 1. follow them
> 2. reply to and interact with their tweets
…and, based on first-hand experience, get blocked.
Presumably, because the other advice given by Twitter users to Twitter users today is “block based on a single tweet”. This makes Twitter excellent if you have a witty personality with a preexisting crowd of followers or friends, but otherwise the time and effort you spend trying to connect goes into the void.
That’s why I prefer HN instead. It doesn’t lend itself to profiling others, following and blocking is not the perpetual drama, and contributions to discussion are the focus.
I love Twitter, it's helped me reach a lot of people for personal and professional work. Two things that annoy me about twitter.
One, it seems to weight tweets by newer follows higher. I keep my follow list to pretty exactly people I want to hear from. But often I see I've missed tweets from people I followed 100 or 200 follows again. I hate this!
Two, it doesn't seem to do a good job normalizing tweet frequency across accounts. So I can't follow big tweeters like foone because my time line gets destroyed by their many (but still good) tweets.
I started using Twitter very early, in 2006, and was fun for a while. But I don't remember exactly when the timeline and recommendation changes totally ruined it.
Apart from
the main timeline they used to only show tweets from people you follow liked which was OK, at least acceptable. I still see these time
to time but became selective? I see it from some accounts but not all. A person I follow stopped tweeting and I thought something happened but alas they are still active liking tweets but I don't see those anymore on my timeline, yet I see from other accounts... for whatever reason
Then they started showing random tweets from people you follow follow. That's when I started to use the site less and less because most of the time my interaction was clicking on "not interested in this Tweet". Totally out of context stuff I don't care about.
Final nail in the coffin was the topics. Just randomly filling your timeline with random tweets because I assume some AI thought I might like that but it's worse than the Youtube recommendations. Just because I like ONE Tweet the AI started promoting everything related to that content or the account made it.
It's just a mess. Wish we can "reset" our accounts or something to blank state
I never really got into Twitter. I could never understand the point of posts limited to 140 characters and my severe lack of self esteem means I live my life believing that nothing I say is worth hearing or in any way remotely interesting.
In saying that, every time I've tried to "do" Twitter, I just find myself in this space where I feel a mix of sadness, anger, hatred and other negative emotions because 95% of Twitter is either people assuming the worst in everyone, calling other people every horrible name conceivable or just generally being another awful person in a sea of awful people.
The fact that I've never quite "got" Twitter has meant that I feel no attachment to it, and don't care if I remove it from my life, so it's not like I'm losing any sleep over it. But, it also helps immensely that removing Twitter from my life is like cutting off a necrotising limb that you never needed to begin with.
No reason you should use it. But your characterization of the general content is unfair.
There are millions of positive, thoughtful people using it for things other than "being awful". I follow a bunch of people in the ADHD and autism communities and get a ton out of hearing what their lives are like and how they're dealing with things. I also follow a bunch of academics so I get to hear a lot about niche topics from people who are world-class experts.
Twitter will show you whatever it thinks you want. If you follow a lot of awful people and engage with a lot of awful stuff, it will make sure you get plenty of it. But if you switch to the "latest tweets" view and are careful about who you follow, you can get a lot out of it.
Also, as somebody who used to have severe self esteem issues, I really encourage you to find a therapist you like and respect to work on that. They, plus the underlying issues, can make almost anything unenjoyable. As long as we have biases toward seeing ourselves negatively, anything that invites us to be ourselves will feel negative.
Edit: Fresh from the top of my timeline, here's an example of the sort of positive niche content from the ADHD/autism communities, a discussion of experiences with medications for ADHD: https://twitter.com/HolSmale/status/1477308561256558595
You can use it as a write-only log. You have a clever thought or idea, or did something you think is cool? Share it, and you now have a public log for yourself, or for your friends. You don't have to look for interactions, Twitter is a horrible tool for that, but the interface makes it very simple to share a quick thought.
I'm like an alcoholic with Twitter. I can't use it in moderation (trust me, I've tried). Either I'm on it 24/7 or I'm completely out (haven't used it for the last ~6 months).
If it weren't for the benefits to my business (it's one of the best marketing channels), I would have deleted my account years ago.
have you tried another client without the endless scroll? Also unfollow or mute everyone who isn't posting things you find real interesting (and also some that post interesting stuff but posts way too much, those I move out to a separate list which I review sometimes) :-)
I find having a manageable timeline a super useful tool to catch up on interesting or important news. But every now and then I notice that even with a old-fashioned timeline I spend too much time and I look over who I follow and cull people who post too things I forget the second I've scrolled past and instead keep the people who post well-thought-out things infrequently.
I try to use Twitter, but I need two accounts, one for Norwegian and one for English.
I also cannot tell Twitter that some of my post are probably most interesting for programmers, others for people living close to where I live.
etc
There was some hype a few years ago about how artificial limitations created "interestingness": Snapchat and Instagram and Twitter were held out as examples, and I guess this was around the time Yo (with the single "Yo" button) was released.
But personally, while I saw the benefits of Snap and Instagram I have newer seen any benefit of Twitters model.
And yet it stumbles on, driven by network effects years after first WhatsApp, then Telegram and Signal and Matrix have explored and found niches around almost everything Twitter could have been useful for.
It seems like someone made a huge personal investment on twitter and is now trying to convince others to do the same in order to increase the value of whatever they achieved there. Maybe Twitter is amazing for you, that's great. You can keep it.
[+] [-] pjerem|4 years ago|reply
I used it for years, trying to follow interesting people or artists but in the end, it was just an amplified echo chamber of myself.
Everyday there was the shitstorm of the day. Absence of nuance was the norm (nuance is not prone to RTs, I believe).
Everyone there is trying to push its personal fight, which, while I generally agree with, is never the reason I come to Twitter. Yes I want the world to change about [society topic] but no, Twitter is just not the place for that.
In the end, I was mindlessly scrolling through rage and polarized opinions while I was coming to learn / love / occupy myself.
Maybe I did something wrong, maybe it was not for me.
I closed my account. I don’t miss it but each time I read an article like this I happen to think that maybe I missed something wonderful about Twitter.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
Unfollow those people.
Twitter can be a good place for discussion, but you have to take control of your follow list. I think a lot of people end up following the most prolific Tweeters in their domain rather than the most interesting (who often post infrequently). The prolific Tweeters reach for drama to bait people into engagement.
If you don’t make a point of unfollowing the empty drama-producing Twitter users, your timeline will eventually fill up with their drama.
[+] [-] whiplash451|4 years ago|reply
You should never be allowed to take a message sent to someone’s audience and transfer it to your audience. You should only be able to engage with their audience.
The only reason I imagine this feature exists is because it generates engagement and revenue for Twitter.
[+] [-] oneeyedpigeon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mezzie|4 years ago|reply
My healthy uses for Twitter (as opposed to my using it as part of my studying of the impacts social media has on its users/trolling/shitposting) are:
1. Local events, governments, and establishments. It's a great way to get information on things like road closures, last minute weather adjustments, ideas for places to go around town, etc.
2. Professional orgs or academics in areas that I'm interested in. I prefer organizational Twitters because there's usually some sort of social media policy preventing them from Tweeting about politics.
[+] [-] masona|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] te_chris|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laputan_machine|4 years ago|reply
(For the pedants: no, forums like this are not social media.)
[+] [-] chakkepolja|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
My tip for using Twitter: just be yourself, and treat your timeline as your livingroom. If people are rude toss them, if they use your livingroom as their platform then toss them too. That way the atmosphere stays nice both for you and others.
On that note: Happy New Year hacker news.
[+] [-] OscarTheGrinch|4 years ago|reply
There are some amazing posts on twitter, but how much crap do you have to wade through to get to them? Nuzzel was great at filtering down to the most relevant article, but twitter caught and killed that company, it's acqui-hired CEO promising to move some features into twitter but they never materialised. Twitter wants me to consider the uninformed and the informed alike, just so they can monetise my eyeballs, and in 2022 that's just a waste of our time.
I think of my information diet as a classic signal to noise problem. My goal is to unearth thought provoking articles, twitter it might take an hour of slog to get one nugget, whereas hacker news offers about one per minute, and at the other end feral wastelands like the youtunbe comments section you would be lucky to get one gem a month.
All of which is my round about way of saying that I love HN! The comments here are often more insightful than the article, and I feel that time spent here is actually time well spent. Happy new years to all the hackers, makers and grinders out there. Don't go changing!
[+] [-] the_gipsy|4 years ago|reply
My number two is that it's simply frustrating as late-comer, seeing all the established users talking to each others, while you must try to shout witty replies into the void in hopes that some of them are worthy enough for any of the cool kids to engage.
[+] [-] Nezteb|4 years ago|reply
- Mute as many political/controversial words as I can. I currently have 193 muted words/phrases.
- Turn off retweets for every single person I follow. I don’t want to see them.
- If someone I follow consistently posts things I find uninteresting, I mute them instead of unfollowing so I can still find them easily if I want to.
- Never use the explore/trending tabs. To this end I have a local user script that completely hides the trending sidebar.
These rules have made Twitter exponentially more enjoyable for me.
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matsemann|4 years ago|reply
Last year I made a new profile, though. Not a personal one, but dedicated to a single cause. It's much more fun to have this hyper focused profile. People follow me because they know what they get. I interact only with related content etc.
But the interface is confusing. Very hard to follow discussions when they branch out. And can't follow new comments on something. The notifications are impossible to make sense of, and I don't even get that many. I had to learn the etiquette on how others in my area uses tweets, retweets, quote tweets etc, and I still don't understand it all.
[+] [-] ejb999|4 years ago|reply
I even went so far as to modify my hosts file so that I can't even get to twitter, facebook, instagram or LinkedIn (and several other places), just to resist the urge to follow a link that would bring me down the rabbit-hole.
Once you realize the entire business model of these social media giants is pretty much like a boxing match promoter - i.e. get the two sides to hate each other, and watch the groups fight it out online (and sell ads to make a profit).
It is not a coincidence that Americans are now strictly divided about just about every topic - and it has become pretty acceptable to wish death on anyone that disagrees with you on anything - that was not a mistake by Zuckerberg/Dorsey et al - that was by design. The more people hate each other, the more willing they are to get into the mosh-pit of social media and fight it out - while FB/Twitter sells advertising to the event.
Never forget: Zuckerberg/Dorsey and many others got rich by dividing Americans and amplifying the hate on both sides to be able to sell even more ads while they fight it out online.
[+] [-] m-i-l|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schleck8|4 years ago|reply
Same for me. I did try to avoid any drama and keyboard wars, but it's simply not possible with how often the algorithm pushes political topics into the trends.
I'm thinking about blocking it in my router, i don't think i'll be missing out
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
I try to be a 'force of good' on whatever platform I join, over the years my focus has shifted considerably and that in turn made me decide to quit certain social media websites (for instance: fieldlines, slashdot), and join others. I'm not the most social person in person (to put it mildly) so this allows me to compensate for that to a certain extent.
[+] [-] wpietri|4 years ago|reply
Sure, people also use Twitter for that. And almost everything else. As a kid that was surely a big part of why I read huge quantities of SF novels.
But that doesn't mean that the only point of having a beer or reading a paperback or using Twitter is time-wasting escapism. I learn a ton from Twitter, getting insights and experiences from people I never would have heard from otherwise. Other people get real community out of it. Still others find it professionally useful: networking with colleagues, finding jobs, keeping up with their fields.
So maybe you're using it wrong and maybe it's not for you. But your inability to get something out of it doesn't tell you much about the experience of a lot of people.
[+] [-] cobertos|4 years ago|reply
Also there's people I really wish it wouldn't suggest me to IRL that it does frequently. I don't want to block these people, for the implication that has socially. I have for one but it was a Big Deal. I'd rather it not serve us to each other as often.
[+] [-] atmosx|4 years ago|reply
That's naive because pushes the narrative that corporate run social media are just a neutral platforms with no agenda. That's simply not true. The algorithm™ is optimised for retention and the best way to retain is, unfortunately, echo chamber and provocation.
> I started using Twitter on a regular basis as an experiment in early 2020.
Ah okay! I didn't read after that point, maybe the article should start with this quote.
[+] [-] freewilly1040|4 years ago|reply
To build a reasonable case, defenders of social media must at least acknowledge the toil and difficulty of making your feed anything but a rage inducing time sink, as well as the fact that the sites themselves are not your allies in doing so.
[+] [-] mwfogleman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asicsp|4 years ago|reply
I decided to try building an audience to sell my ebooks better last August, but the connections I made with fellow authors was the better outcome (similar to what's mentioned in this article). It has also helped me to become better at highlighting single concepts instead of users losing focus when faced with a wall of features.
[+] [-] leephillips|4 years ago|reply
https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/
[+] [-] goblin89|4 years ago|reply
> 1. follow them
> 2. reply to and interact with their tweets
…and, based on first-hand experience, get blocked.
Presumably, because the other advice given by Twitter users to Twitter users today is “block based on a single tweet”. This makes Twitter excellent if you have a witty personality with a preexisting crowd of followers or friends, but otherwise the time and effort you spend trying to connect goes into the void.
That’s why I prefer HN instead. It doesn’t lend itself to profiling others, following and blocking is not the perpetual drama, and contributions to discussion are the focus.
[+] [-] eatonphil|4 years ago|reply
One, it seems to weight tweets by newer follows higher. I keep my follow list to pretty exactly people I want to hear from. But often I see I've missed tweets from people I followed 100 or 200 follows again. I hate this!
Two, it doesn't seem to do a good job normalizing tweet frequency across accounts. So I can't follow big tweeters like foone because my time line gets destroyed by their many (but still good) tweets.
Anyone have a solution for either?
[+] [-] wpietri|4 years ago|reply
For the latter, consider putting those big tweeters on lists instead of following. You can check in on them occasionally via the list.
[+] [-] haunter|4 years ago|reply
Apart from the main timeline they used to only show tweets from people you follow liked which was OK, at least acceptable. I still see these time to time but became selective? I see it from some accounts but not all. A person I follow stopped tweeting and I thought something happened but alas they are still active liking tweets but I don't see those anymore on my timeline, yet I see from other accounts... for whatever reason
Then they started showing random tweets from people you follow follow. That's when I started to use the site less and less because most of the time my interaction was clicking on "not interested in this Tweet". Totally out of context stuff I don't care about.
Final nail in the coffin was the topics. Just randomly filling your timeline with random tweets because I assume some AI thought I might like that but it's worse than the Youtube recommendations. Just because I like ONE Tweet the AI started promoting everything related to that content or the account made it.
It's just a mess. Wish we can "reset" our accounts or something to blank state
[+] [-] pjc50|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shruubi|4 years ago|reply
In saying that, every time I've tried to "do" Twitter, I just find myself in this space where I feel a mix of sadness, anger, hatred and other negative emotions because 95% of Twitter is either people assuming the worst in everyone, calling other people every horrible name conceivable or just generally being another awful person in a sea of awful people.
The fact that I've never quite "got" Twitter has meant that I feel no attachment to it, and don't care if I remove it from my life, so it's not like I'm losing any sleep over it. But, it also helps immensely that removing Twitter from my life is like cutting off a necrotising limb that you never needed to begin with.
[+] [-] wpietri|4 years ago|reply
There are millions of positive, thoughtful people using it for things other than "being awful". I follow a bunch of people in the ADHD and autism communities and get a ton out of hearing what their lives are like and how they're dealing with things. I also follow a bunch of academics so I get to hear a lot about niche topics from people who are world-class experts.
Twitter will show you whatever it thinks you want. If you follow a lot of awful people and engage with a lot of awful stuff, it will make sure you get plenty of it. But if you switch to the "latest tweets" view and are careful about who you follow, you can get a lot out of it.
Also, as somebody who used to have severe self esteem issues, I really encourage you to find a therapist you like and respect to work on that. They, plus the underlying issues, can make almost anything unenjoyable. As long as we have biases toward seeing ourselves negatively, anything that invites us to be ourselves will feel negative.
Edit: Fresh from the top of my timeline, here's an example of the sort of positive niche content from the ADHD/autism communities, a discussion of experiences with medications for ADHD: https://twitter.com/HolSmale/status/1477308561256558595
[+] [-] dgellow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revorad|4 years ago|reply
If it weren't for the benefits to my business (it's one of the best marketing channels), I would have deleted my account years ago.
[+] [-] gnyman|4 years ago|reply
I find having a manageable timeline a super useful tool to catch up on interesting or important news. But every now and then I notice that even with a old-fashioned timeline I spend too much time and I look over who I follow and cull people who post too things I forget the second I've scrolled past and instead keep the people who post well-thought-out things infrequently.
[+] [-] eitland|4 years ago|reply
I also cannot tell Twitter that some of my post are probably most interesting for programmers, others for people living close to where I live.
etc
There was some hype a few years ago about how artificial limitations created "interestingness": Snapchat and Instagram and Twitter were held out as examples, and I guess this was around the time Yo (with the single "Yo" button) was released.
But personally, while I saw the benefits of Snap and Instagram I have newer seen any benefit of Twitters model.
And yet it stumbles on, driven by network effects years after first WhatsApp, then Telegram and Signal and Matrix have explored and found niches around almost everything Twitter could have been useful for.
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jollybean|4 years ago|reply
Negative toxicity is obvious, we know that's 'not good'.
But I feel even the novel useful bits of Twitter are 'mostly rubbish'.
The best Tweets are generally longer statements made by individuals, pointing to research more in the vein of 'microblog'.
In fact - what I think would be useful is a non social 'microblog' where people can make posts of highly relevant information of arbitrary length.
I don't think anyone other than journalists really benefit from Twitter.
I think that we should pretend as if it does not exist, and anything said or done there 'does not count' in terms of anything.
[+] [-] andresp|4 years ago|reply