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Ask HN: How do you manage your Twitter timeline?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your Twitter timeline?

#11

Post by bromagosa »

I started using twitter as it comes, then when it became unmanageable I started using TweetDeck, but notifications were annoying and the client was way too heavy for my machine. The tab kept freezing all the time. That was a long time ago, I haven't checked it out for a while.

After all this, I switched back to plain Twitter and built my interest lists (smalltalk, music, friends, etc), but having to visit all these lists all the time became tedious too.

It's been around half a year I haven't read my Twitter timeline at all.

I know it sounds stupid for the way Twitter is meant to be, but until there is a functionality allowing you to silence people you follow, I just can't use it.

I know, why would you follow people if you were not interested in what they tweet? I guess I'm stupid.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your Twitter timeline?

#12

Post by petercooper »

I've been using it since 2006 and I now follow 1500ish people. I dip in and out. It's like a river.

I don't visit Hacker News or Reddit every 2 hours to ensure I don't miss a single story. Similarly, I don't want to read every tweet, RSS item, or whatever. E-mail is the only thing I do that for and even then half of it is filtered.

I'm considering creating a Twitter list for people for who I wish to see every tweet (e.g. my dad who just joined) but it hasn't been important enough to do yet.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your Twitter timeline?

#13

Post by thibaultCha »

Tweetbot for Mac is for me the best client by far. I follow 200 people but I have a list called "Light Timeline" that I first created to catch up my Twitter feed when I was off from it for too long. But now I only use this list, since Tweetbot deals with your lists as if it was your Timeline, you see absolutely no difference, except I now only follow 20~30 people, and I am much less distracted. (idem on my iPhone) Why not forget about Twitter web and give desktop apps a try ?

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your Twitter timeline?

#14

Post by nekgrim »

1. I use Hootsuite website (and Falcon Pro on my phone). Hootsuite allows you to have 6 lists (and more, with horizontal scrolling) in the same page. Falcon brings me to the beginning of my timeline's unread part, so it's easier to know what I have to read.

2. All that I want is provided by others apps (Pocket for "read later", Hootsuite & Falcon for conversation history)

Twitter website is really useless for power users, it's a shame they try to kill every others clients with their API restrictions.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your Twitter timeline?

#15

Post by voyou »

"Skimming 200 tweets" in one go might be a bit of a pain, but all 200 tweets don't arrive at once. If you briefly check Twitter during short pauses of work throughout the day, your 200 tweets would probably come in blocks of 10 or 20, and that number of tweets is easy to skim. And if you find there are more tweets than that, just don't read them all - anything really important will surely be tweeted again, or (more likely) arrive via other channels.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your Twitter timeline?

#16

Post by voyou »

bromagosa wrote: post #11

I started using twitter as it comes, then when it became unmanageable I started using TweetDeck, but notifications were annoying and the client was way too heavy for my machine. The tab kept freezing all the time. That was a long time ago, I haven't checked it out for a while. After all this, I switched back to plain Twitter and built my interest lists (smalltalk, music, friends, etc), but having to visit all these l…

"why would you follow people if you were not interested in what they tweet?"

Well, yeah. Who are these people that you want to silence but don't want to unfollow? What would unfollowing do, which you don't want, which silencing would not do?

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your Twitter timeline?

#17

Post by anuragramdasan »

I follow just a little under 100 people. A lot of those tweets are just some comments about current affairs, tech or random funny tweets. While I use no particular client to filter my tweets, but when I skim through my timeline I usually look for links.

If the tweet doesn't have a link, it is basically 140 characters of someone commenting on something and can be ignored. If it has a link, maybe it could be a tweet pointing to something interesting.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your Twitter timeline?

#18

Post by dudeofjude »

voyou wrote: post #16
bromagosa wrote: post #11

I started using twitter as it comes, then when it became unmanageable I started using TweetDeck, but notifications were annoying and the client was way too heavy for my machine. The tab kept freezing all the time. That was a long time ago, I haven't checked it out for a while. After all this, I switched back to plain Twitter and built my interest lists (smalltalk, music, friends, etc), but having to visit all these l…

"why would you follow people if you were not interested in what they tweet?" Well, yeah. Who are these people that you want to silence but don't want to unfollow? What would unfollowing do, which you don't want, which silencing would not do?

IMO people get slightly offended/feel bad if you unfollow them.

But as a gesture of politeness, you might want to follow someone who has followed you and is close to you, but at the same time you would not want to listen to all his tweets, in that case, silence might work, and not unfollowing.

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