[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
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