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.
I fail to understand how a format that limits 'discussion' to a few sentences at most per post can be a good medium for anything other than dumbed-down one-liners.
Even the most basic format for expository discussion, the simple paragraph, structured as introduction - content + examples - conclusion, won't fit on Twitter. It's a format designed to eliminate nuance and discussion, not to promote it. That means using Twitter constantly makes people dumber, i.e. less able to follow a complex argument or look at an issue from multiple points of view.
Someone who'se been Twitterized and Facebooked is someone whose communication skills have been reduced to one-liner blurbs and who lives in a closed siloed environment.
I used to think that was the case too, but it’s not universally, it depends on the person.
For some people, Twitter’s forced short-form focuses their content, cuts out all the bs, and reduces it down to its essence. It prevents them from being overly wordy, and is one of the best available antidotes to modern information overload.
And if the essence of subject is fundamentally nuanced, the twitter discussion still can be too, though it may take multiple tweets to address all of it (a tweet-storm).
If a subject requires long-form, then people tend to write that in a blog post or a paper and link it on twitter, and then discuss whatever aspects of it their followers have questions about.
But again you have to do what the OP article says, and only follow people with shared interests and who meaningfully engage with their followers, and don’t just use Twitter to broadcast stuff without then discussing it (eg accounts with less than 1000 followers).
Perhaps there are some uses that make sense, in terms of weather reports or things like that. However, in terms of "reducing it down to its essence", some propaganda expert (Ivy Lee maybe, or others) of the 1930s said something like this:
"Propaganda consists of taking a complex idea, simplifying it down to the point where a small child could understand it, and then repeating, repeating, repeating."
Twitter is the ideal platform for that kind of approach, isn't it? I don't think it's healthy for people to spend a lot of time on Twitter for reasons like that.
Sure, but you have to follow the other advice of following people who are 1) subject matter experts and 2) engage with their followers regularly. Propagandists typically aren’t SME’s and don’t engage in discussions with their followers.
One of the problems is that people have this innate inane drive to "be their whole selves" online these days. This leads to someone whose basketball commentary you enjoy also posting ragebait about the technology industry on the same account. I'd rather follow specific topics than whole people.
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.
No. The reason it exists is because people like to share things they like. If you removed that button people would copy and paste or screenshot and share.
> If you removed that button people would copy and paste or screenshot and share.
I’m not sure if this would really be worse; it would slow down viral retweets and could induce users to add context or reframe the shared item to better suit their audience.
I mean, imagine what it would be like if someone in real life just constantly repeated things their friends said, word for word, to everyone in the room. Yes, people do sometimes parrot things from other people, but more often it’s modified, filtered through their own understanding and viewpoint, adapted to the present context and audience, and selected for relevance and appropriateness.
Funny story; before there was a dedicated button, people did precisely this. You'd see tweets of the form "RT @Someone (their message)"
The "adding context" bit didn't really happen, because quoting the tweet ate your own 140 character limit, and a viral RT is always going to get more exposure than your explanatory reply.
I never said it would be worse. Just that it would happen.
But I don’t think that people wanting to reshare in a digital context would bother with the work of rephrasing. They already have the opportunity to add their own thoughts to a tweet they reshare. I suspect it would be practically the same.
People like to share things they hate, especially on the Internet of the last decade
My national subreddit was a perfect example of that, most of the posts were posted by people opposing what was said in the linked article and willing others to rage about it too.
Maybe the people you are referring to are professional trolls? At this point I have little doubt any popular website is infested with them. Globally. It's so much worse than even a decade ago
>If you removed that button people would copy and paste or screenshot and share.
And this already happens, often between people who've blocked one another yet want to continue the personal attacks. It's all too easy to open a blocked tweet in Incognito Mode, take a screenshot, add negative comment, and hit post.
> It's all too easy to open a blocked tweet in Incognito Mode, take a screenshot, add negative comment, and hit post.
Which highlights just how confused Twitter is about what they want the "block" feature to be. As I like to say, Twitter is the only website where I get more permissions to view content if I log out.
Imagine if your copy of the daily newspaper came with some stories greyed out because the authors of those stories saw something you said online once and decided they didn't like you, so now your paper comes with their stories hidden. But have no fear! You can just log out and read those stores.
And that's fine. It would still detach that new thread entirely from the old one, so that the target of the ire wouldn't get a million notifications about how they deserve to die or whatever.
No, it was initially made as a micro-blogging service inspired by AIM and LJ, neither of which were primarily made for sharing. The Retweet button and the sharing aspect came later.
If I'm standing in a circle with you and three other people and I start talking about you like you're not there, about how what you just said is really stupid, about how I can't believe you'd ever say something like that -- we all understand why that's rude. But that's exactly how a retweet functions (and it's how a lot of twitter threads function, too (when somebody starts addressing somebody else in the thread about a third person as though they aren't present)). I try very hard not to operate my twitter presence that way and yet I catch myself doing it, too, because it's how twitter is built!
At least when I still used it, you could choose not to receive retweets from accounts you follow. (But it had to be set one followed account at a time.)
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.
I see this exact exchange every thread about twitter.
I’m not convinced “holding it wrong” is a good answer, but it seems to be that I and others are “holding it wrong”.
I have 2 twitter accounts, I follow people who post interesting tech things. Then they retweet some more polarised stuff from others, or even if enough followers like a tweet it ends up in my feed.
I would follow nobody if I unfollowed everyone who does this.
The truth is that humans are varied and while they might have a hobby (tech) they also have opinions about society.
> they retweet some more polarised stuff from others
That's true, but:
a) in my experience, those tweets are the vast minority of what I see, probably less than 1%
b) I just ignore them
This happens in real life too. I have friends with broadly similar outlooks who, from time-to-time, say something I don't agree with. Sometimes I'll choose to engage, and this is always more productive than engaging on Twitter in similar circumstances, I fully accept that. But I'll often just change the subject or otherwise ignore them, and I find that's a perfectly viable tactic on twitter too.
I have my Twitter accounts with 2k follow_ing_(not followers) and there should be literally 200-500 tweets/second that could fill my timeline during daytime. Of those, one or less shows up on Tweetdeck Web, and suspiciously little are relevant to my interest. I even missed a "meta" content of a past season and learned about from someone else very recently. I'm not getting anything.
What I've been thinking about is there needs to be the 2020s great data exfiltration of social media, the second Googlebot Crawler moment.
It has been three years since I've seen a hardcore user cry of "having limbs torn" by Twitter API changes[1] that shut down a free bulk access, and it still reads as vivid as if it was written today to me.
So much of it depends on your professional bubble. I've got some wildly differing bubbles, and my uncurated/unlisted Twitter experience is sheer chaos.
Professionally, tech and math are less filled with rage-bait, but Library Twitter is batshit insane, for example. And don't even get me started on if you write at all; writers on Twitter are a dumpster fire.
My local Twitter (Twitter for my town) is delightful, Seattle Twitter was a shit show.
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.
Have they removed the 200 muted word limit? Or at least implemented word stemming?
This feature, besides being hidden, always felt unreasonably crippled to me. And they banned third party clients that might be able to implement it better.
I gave up on Twitter as a platform because Twitter Inc. refused to give me enough control over my feed. (This applies to banned accounts as well - I would have liked the ability to judge for myself, rather than have an overworked, outsourced, minimum wage moderator decide for me.)
Replying to myself because maybe there's a startup idea in the above comment: convince one or more of the the big social platforms to let users opt out of default moderation, and "subscribe" to thirdy party moderation. (Moderation-as-a-Service?)
This would open up a market similar to how you can use different spam reputation services with email, or different blocklists with ad filters.
It would also take the wind out of the sails of people blasting the social media companies for over- or under-moderation. Don't like what's being censored? Hire a different set of censors.
Go to https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords, you can mute words you don't care about. The feature is a bit hidden in the settings, but the twitter experience is way better once you remove content that makes you angry.
That's because you're using the "default" view which mixes up the order of your tweets and inserts stuff like this. If you change the view by clicking the sparks icon at the top left and selecting "latest", it simply becomes a reverse chronological order of tweets by people you follow
The algorithm of what I want to see is so terrible I never bother with the default view. I've been using latest for years
You can train it not to do that. When I saw those in my notifications, I kept picking the option that is something like "see less like this" and I haven't seen one in months.
But yes, they are optimizing for things like UAM and engagement, so to them almost anything that draws people back looks like a good product choice.
Isn’t it ridiculous that you have to thoroughly vet people you are to follow for quality tweets, switch out of the default view, and train a machine learning algorithm just to make twitter somewhat useable? Thats not like using a computer tool, thats like trying to ride a stubborn horse.
Yeah, I don't like it. But I recognize that a) my needs are different than most, and b) we are all caught up in a capitalist system where incentives for exploitation abound. So if I can get by with a few tweaks, I'm ok with it.
It took me a long time to figure this tip out... But also noticed it reverts back to default view after a week or so (on mobile app). Like they wanted to force the "X who you follow liked Y".
This thing is ruining my experience as well. I don't want any time of suggestions in my feed. I curated it so that there's only people of tech who talk mostly about tech but my feed is pure garbage now filled with political comments, holidays pics etc. of people I don't even follow.
I see. I consider this a double edged sword, but the positive edge is sharper: the people I follow tend to like things that don't annoy me more often than not. I do agree that it would be useful to be able to configure what appears, though.
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 struggle with this. Because there are bits of my character that are popular, and there are bits that aren't. Some things that I say resonate with lots of people and get lots of fake internet points. Other things, not so much.
After an incredibly short time "being myself" I find it almost impossible to not think of how what I'm posting will be received, rather than how much I want to say it.
If I have an unpopular opinion, I know that posting it will cause a shitfight and I don't want to deal with that. So I don't post it. I end up only posting the things that I think will be received well. That's not "just being myself", that's putting some fake mask over myself in order to be popular, and that shit wrecks my mental health.
How do you "just be yourself" on Twitter without dealing with this? Do you not have unpopular opinions? Do you avoid posting opinions that will start a shitfight? If a post you make does cause a lot of negative comments, how do you deal with that?
"Just be yourself" is a terrible idea if you're a person who is on the edge of a tribe or someone who has bona fides in multiple communities that do NOT like each other.
For example, I'm from a purple area in a purple state and I'm a homosexual who converted TO Christianity as an adult. Twitter considers my existing to be an incitement to a shitfight: Any random innocuous sentence could set SOMEONE off.
This is why the only Tweets I make (as opposed to using it to read other people's Tweets) are shitposts. If it's all going to be a shitfight, it'll be a shitfight on the ground of my choosing.
I think the big difference between you and me is I don't actually care about what other people think of me. You can just ignore the responses, there is absolutely no obligation to 'be popular' or to pander to your audience.
I have lots of unpopular opinions, on Twitter as well as on HN. I could not care less what others think of my opinions, as long as we can converge on a set of commonly shared facts that's already profit in my book. On HN this typically manifests as downvotes, but just like I am not particularly attached to the upvotes I learned over time to not worry about the downvotes either: they're not necessarily a reflection of whether you are right or not but it's merely a popularity thing and that's not the right yardstick to measure opinions by.
Lots of people have toxic or bad opinions that are shared by such a large number of their neighbors that they believe that those are right, regardless of what the state of those opinions is when viewed through a more absolute lens.
In the end it's just like your street: leave it a little bit cleaner than you found it and things will over time improve. Litter and degrade and over time you'll come to live in a garbage dump.
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, I can't seem to disassociate that much. I suspect my childhood bullying trauma is responsible. I guess social media is not for me then.
I wouldn't compare HN with Twitter. On HN barely anyone would give you a nasty response (in my case, I rarely even check the name of the commenter, which is easy due to the lack of avatars and all, so I have even less reasons to take anything personal) while on Twitter people can harass you almost for anything and make a whole stormshit for a single comment.
This. Also the mechanisms work differently. If I post an unpopular opinion on HN, it gets downvoted and disappears. There's no shitfight. If I post a popular opinion it gets upvoted and I get Fake Internet Points. It's asymmetrical and weighted in favour of getting FIP. Much easier to deal with.
On Twitter other people can retweet my unpopular opinion and comment on it, tagging me on their reply. My feed fills up with people being nasty to me. I can't deal with that in a mature, adult fashion, as it immediately triggers old trauma. I curl in a ball and retreat. I had to leave Twitter.
Wait, what? I've been using both platforms for something like 15 years. In both places I get lots of good, thoughtful engagement. But I'd say dickish replies for me are more common here than on Twitter. And I'll note that the term "flame war" long predates the existence of Twitter, and originates in exactly the sort of tech-heavy, nerd-favoring online context that HN is.
HN is 'about' tech. When people have strong opinions, there's at least a consensus that we can discuss them in a reasonable matter. But it's not immune from the problem - I've observed, and been on the receiving end of, small pile-ons when introducing emotion into a HN topic.
Twitter is, ostensibly, about everything. I've found it easy to filter out all the stuff I'm not interested in, but observed as a whole, without any filtering, an awful lot of discussion is about politics or social issues, and they are naturally divisive and cause conflict.
I've never really got into Twitter but to me your comment makes me ask, would you rather learn to be yourself and ignore the shitstorm, or do you want to force yourself to be quiet just because a couple of strangers on the internet didn't like what you had to say. Likely they won't even remember you in a few minutes anyway.
I'm sure there'll always be people who disagree with something you have to say, and Twitter seems to give people an easy way to do so through retweets, but it's better than constantly muting parts of yourself.
Also, I'd probably just block and move on I suppose, I really don't have any frame of reference since I rarely interact with people I don't know online.
> Do you avoid posting opinions that will start a shitfight?
This. I don't find it difficult - in the same way that I wouldn't walk into an office or a bar and shout something divisive, I just avoid talking about those kinds of things. I just steer clear of politics, really.
I think what I'm saying is future proof to a degree that I do not think I will need that, though, if my country swings further right than it already has I'm sure I'll be up against a wall somewhere. But that's a general risk for sticking your name to stuff you say and write.
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!
I dropped Twitter about 5 years ago, and didn't miss it. I dropped FB over a year ago, and that improved my mental health considerably.
I'm finding that I'm part of a growing minority. A large proportion of my friends have also dropped all social media (usually the more interesting friends). I do wonder where this is going.
> It's a game for people with time, which is quite different.
I think you're locked into a certain worldview that does not necessarily line up with reality. I see people on social media that definitely do not fit your picture, and that's the vast majority of them. 'Young' people, lets say under 25 are a small fraction of what I come across on Twitter, and old people and retirees are an even smaller fraction.
As for FB, I couldn't tell you, I have been there twice and decided that it wasn't for me. But Twitter is chock full of working professionals.
Oh, Twitter definitely fits. There's a reason Twitter is dominated by professions like academics, journalists, and writers: They have a lot of time during their work day/ work time to spend on Twitter. They're allowed hours of access to computers + their work performance is judged on social metrics in addition to quantitative ones.
Each social media's most active class is a group of people that has more free time than the average person (for whatever reason). Twitter's is just 'highly educated people with the free time and autonomy in their (likely WFH or unsupervised) jobs to fuck around online.'
My friends who work at academic institutions and who do creative work for a living have way more free time than your average office, retail, or service worker. That's why Twitter is such a cesspit when it comes to anything around social class.
It may fit some older definition of "social media," but the definition that it would fit as "social media" is so broad as to cover most of the internet anymore, including blogs with comment sections and forums.
The line I draw, personally, to distinguish "harmful social media" from the rest of the web, is per-user algorithmic feeds optimized, by default, for "engagement." That's the mark of a surveillance capitalism extraction beast, and that sort of thing is well demonstrated to be absolute poison to humans.
Hacker News (and to an extent reddit, though they're trying to get away from this as far as I can tell, and the algorithmic front page certainly doesn't qualify) have a single consistent "global state." If I'm logged in to HN, I see the same global state as other people do, and as a logged out user sees (subject to a few tweaks like seeing dead/flagged content, which I can't do logged out - but again, I believe everyone with that setting turned on sees the same thing).
It's not trying to reorder the front page to engage me - it's simply a global state that can be modified by the bulk aggregate of user interaction, or moderator interaction, and that's reflected to all users.
It also lacks the "bottomless bowl" endless scrolling style interface that encourages endless scrolling looking for something interesting. You can see other pages, but the standard view is top 30, and then you have to take a concrete action to see other stuff, not just scroll. It encourages a quick skim of the top stuff to see what's interesting, and then going to do something else because it's not going to change that rapidly. In terms of UI design, that's quite respectful to user attention, and is consistent with "HN tries to be useful, not to extract all the behavioral surplus it possibly can from as many users as possible." It is what it is, take it or leave it.
The upvote/downvote system is prone to some harms, but HN tries to avoid most of that by keeping the vote views invisible to everyone else - you have to evaluate the comments by their text, not by what other people think of them (though the more insightful stuff tends to filter to the top, as it should). I would like an option to hide your own responses in the settings (similar to the "I need to work" delay option), but there's a small Chrome extension that does that - Hacker News Demetricifier or something along those lines.
So while you can argue that it's "social media" by some definition, it's absolutely nowhere near the same design or motivations as the human-toxic systems we also call "social media." YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter being the worst. I understand TikTok is pretty bad as well, but I'm not in any way familiar with that system.
That's interesting. I've not really thought a lot about how Hacker News is social media platform. But it does fit the bill in terms of a virtual community for me.
I think of traditional social media as focusing on individuals rather than topics (like Hacker News or Reddit). Once you start giving power to individuals rather than ideas or topics, the community becomes toxic and unpleasant for me. Individual focused communities, where likes and followers determine value create deep centralization and power for those that wield it and frequently devolve into paid advertisements and/or product placement schemes. Topic based communities are of course not immune to toxicity and paid advertisement (as seen on Reddit). Despite that vulnerability, I've found the best social communities to be based on ideas and topics rather than those celebrating individual ideas/content.
I find the discourse and topics on this site to be excellent. It's absolutely my favorite site on the web. If Hacker News ever follows in the footsteps of Reddit by optimizing dark patterns for monetization, such as paid ads, I'll be deeply disappointed. For now, though -- thanks to all that contribute to making this site great!
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.
And what’s worse, half the time you get an error loading the tweet! I assume it’s partially an issue of not being logged in but it boggles my mind that it happens so often.
“it's simply frustrating as late-comer” - I think this is the major shortcoming of the network and ultimately will be the death of it.
I wonder if modern version of twitter could be made, more orientated around an “algorithm” that mixed things up a bit (like tiktok) rather than just a followers / no followers hierarchy of things.
Basically the only thing twitter has going for it is that it is NOT algorithmic. Using a third party client I can see exactly what the people I follow tweet and nothing from twitter itself.
Actually, Twitter only dropped the accessibility via simple HTML in late 2021. Before that you could read twitter links in w3m (and they could be indexed).
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.
But a question: how do people make additional accounts now that Twitter requires phone verification? Or is it possible to verify multiple accounts on my same number? Google voice not available here.
Twitter's help page [1] claims you can verify up to 10 accounts with the same phone number, but in reality there's a few weeks cooldown period after 2 accounts where you won't be able to reuse the same number even if you remove it from all accounts. You used to be able to verify 4 at once by removing the number from each account right after verification, but now they're stricter and removing the number right after verification rather than waiting a few weeks is very likely to get your account locked and asking for phone verification again immediately.
You can use Google Voice (if you live in the US) or getsmscode.com, though. I've used the latter a lot for multiple sites and it's mostly reliable, better than free alternatives and it only has a very minimal cost ($0.1-$0.5 per verification text). Although it should be noted that sometimes Twitter will randomly force you to re-verify your phone number a while later, and the numbers on this site don't last forever (the US ones generally last for at least a few months, while Chinese ones likely won't work the next day already), so your account may be locked forever unless you manage to successfully appeal to Twitter (which can take anywhere between an hour and 6 months to get a response, whether it is positive or negative).
Thanks. Yeah, had lots of problems when making my new account recently. It got constantly locked. Then support unlocked it but it got locked automatically a few hours later each time. I'm not exactly running a troll farm here, I get why they do it, but very annoying. Half the fun of twitter for me is the niche accounts. Like World Bollard Association for instance (not mine). But making these gets harder every day.
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 know. Re-reading my last comment, I'm afraid Brian paid the piper for many "I did X for 1 week and now I'm an expert" posts that appear on HN. A bit unfair to Brian for sure. I would hate it if Brian stops writing because of my comment.
See how messed up the internet is? I'd like to read on the same topic after five years or 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 have tried latest tweets too but then I just miss the people who don't post at the same time I'm around.
I have also tried lists but Twitter's lists are a truly second class entity compared to accounts. You can only have 4 show up on your time line and they show up quite infrequently.
Lists not in my time line I never remember to check.
Yeah, ultimately we're drinking from a firehose here; Twitter provides more good content than I can ever consume. So for me these choices are about regret minimization.
Personally, I just stick with the latest tweets view and occasionally pop into the ranked timeline to get a different slice on things. But if you want more control, you might also consider a different client, like tweetdeck. Or having different accounts for different purposes.
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.
Exploring trends on twitter doesn't work. I'm in Germany. There is a list of terms currently trending. I click on one. And if it is even remotely not superspecific in general or to German language then I will get shown tweets from whatever part of the world and that mainly. My trick is to add "lang:de" to the search but that is annoying and doesn't work reliably. They should have a way to actually explore a trend - if "Covid" is trending in Germany all of a sudden then this is likely not directly related to some tweet from India about "Covid". So annoying.
I mostly go on twitter to get perspectives from my professor of choice on Corona stuff:
Good read, but I don't believe it's possible to make friends online in the true sense of that term. I've been doing things online for a majority of my life. Forums, gaming, chatting with strangers. I've made many "friends" this way, but they're not people I know. We've lost touch over the years, and I wouldn't ever turn to them for help because we don't know each other that well anyway.
Twitter is the same. The best you can have is acquaintances, peers/colleagues, or followers.
Twitter can be really useful for academia where the character limit forces you to condense the main points of your research into one or a couple of short bullet points. Together with a small gif and links to project page and arxiv, this makes it really easy to get attention for your work and follow that of others. Sometimes it is even possible yo start some meaningful discussions there.
You have to carefully curate who to follow though.
In the last 12 months, I have dropped all social media, in this order: FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit. I almost removed my HN account too but decided it is in a different league (for now). Deleting them has had little effect on my life, to be honest, either positive or negative (except for FB which offered a much stronger ratio of negative/positive than the others and am glad it is totally out of my life).
I think a lot of the advice in the article is also relevant to having conversations in other more limited (but still sizable) communities like some topic specific slack or discord servers, or certain forums. Maybe even some rare subreddit but they’re less likely to be structured to support a conversation. Twitter always just seems so vast and complicated that it’s hard to fathom.
I started using Twitter to follow my new boss and his colleagues in a new to me industry. I stopped several months later because the legitimate "social action" content I was exposed to was overwhelming... I know the world is not perfect, and I try to improve it here and there, but I cannot take the full weight of all that must be fixed on my shoulders at all times.
My story with Twitter is extremely similar to that of the author. I joined in April 2007 and was seventeen at the time. I think I totally understand the author's position on most subject, but I would be less enthusiastic nonetheless.
This is a thoughtful guide, and I enjoyed reading it. Ironically, you could never publish something like this on Twitter itself, which is why I'll continue to stay away.
Obligatory, if you find your twitter experience garbage mostly because of algorithms that keep suggesting things to you that you explicitly did not follow/sign up for in your feed (random ppl's tweets liked by someone you follow, entirely viral retweets, replies from strangers to ppl you follow, "suggested people/tweets", etc) then save yourself the trouble and simply bookmark realtwitter.com[0]
It's a very simple search filter redirect that removes most of the garbage[1]
Throw in uBlock or some ad blocker in your desktop browser and you're good to go.
Never use twitter's mobile app except to tweet or view notifications.
[0](realtwitter.com) - not clickable in HN but you can type that into your browser bar
> was 15, and I loved reading Metafilter, Digg, TechCrunch, Lifehacker, and 43 Folders
I think the author means 42 Things, which was one of the first “Web 2.0” sites (and back then basically meant user generated content and ajax-y features).
43 Folders was Merlin Mann's celebration of David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity system. It was very, very popular with the MeFi / Digg / Lifehacker crowd back then.
don't use twitter to follow Important People and keep up with the daily outrage; use twitter to make friends through meaningful/interesting/fun interactions and good reply game.
how to go about doing that is the meat of the article, and is worth reading if that sounds like something you would want to do.
It's a full introduction to twitter with many aspects. I had to read it all to understand that twitter is more than a timeline of status updates.
The idea that stands out to me is that twitter is some form of multi-user kinopio.club [1],[2] when you connect tweets into threads and when you use the search engine properly.
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.