On Using Twitter

Same thing here. Was following smart programmers and engineers on programming related matters. Fast forward a few years and most of them were spending their time talking about completely unrelated US political matters and petty drama 99% of the time and very little actual programming stuff. I just removed Twitter from my phone.

I'm not sure how Twitter works now, but I imagine that a system of bot generated topics rather than direct following would be better suited for people like me.

Hashtags don't work, anybody can put any hashtag they want, even when the tweet is completely unrelated to the hashtag.

X tweeting about Y without naming them is doing so because they wish to avoid a fight. Doubly so when Y has a known angry set of followers. One may even have the other blocked. By snitch tagging you're trying to start a fight between X and Y and potentially Y's followers. Snitch-tagging is for people who want X to be sent death threats but aren't willing to put their own name on them.

Subtweeting is usually just venting about someone or something. And by its nature it's ambiguous.

> The takeaway for me is to stay away from threads like this.

Correct. There's enough fighting on twitter already.

Interesting the author didn't mention lists which are my favorite way to escape the firehose of Twitter. The trick is to add just /one/ account to a list, and then you can visit that 'list' when you want, rather than that account being forced upon you randomly when you fire up the app.

It's also a quick way to access an account without having to search for the account each time. You're probably thinking that defeats the purpose of a 'list' if there's just one account in it, but it's been my go-to method for a long time now, and I have bookmarked so many useful tweets, and I sometimes even reference these gems in blogposts, or share the tweet with friends on other social media channels.

It's all about having the time to /mull/ and assimilate knowledge rather than drinking from a firehose.

Historians are taught to be aware of their own biases and attributing value in their research / observations of the past.

Having said that, I think it's far more interesting to look at the medium itself. Marshall McLuhan, after all, did say "the medium is the message" or "the medium is the massage".

Twitter was first conceived as a micro-blogging service. You simply gave status updates about what was going on in your life, or a part of your life, or whatever. Then @ replies, # tags and re-tweets were introduced. Re-tweets weren't even invented by Twitter, it was something users started to do, and then Twitter implemented it as a button:

https://www.annehelmond.nl/2013/01/19/on-retweet-analysis-an...

The same is true for the # tag which was introduced by early user @chrismessina.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Messina_(open-source_adv...

Then there's the history of Twitter itself which is mired in strife between the original founders, and changing different strategic visions as things suddenly - and rather unexpectedly - took off, thanks to the mobile revolution. Twitter is, after all a business, and not a very successful one at at that: it only turned it first annual profit in... 2018.

Why this backdrop? Because if you use Twitter, the feed of tweets you see is inherently distorted by this historic context. Twitter is used as channel for direct conversation between individuals... but it was originally never intended to become that. Twitter is used for marketing purposes to wide audiences... but it was never originally intended to be that.

The same is true with most social media. They were conceived by a few founders on a very limited premise - which was indeed rooted in their own personal context of affluence - and everything else became improvisation along the way as users took the concept and then started using those tools in novel, unexpected ways.

None that implies that these platforms don't carry value, are unusable or a lost cause. And neither does it excuse how the strategies and the visions of the past 15 years didn't result in affordances that curb discrimination, polarization and intolerance, but sometimes even reinforced them.

What this means to your average user, then, is that social media present a particular biased representation of reality; just as much as you would find in mainstream media. It's up to the user/reader then to be critical and understand that these continuous feeds of disparate thoughts are only presenting you with so much truth about the world.

Historians are taught that true objective historiography doesn't really exist and a pure fact based overview of history isn't informative. The interpretative nature of historiography doesn't make history any less valuable. As the famous French historian Marc Bloch wrote:

"The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings."

Marc Bloch was the founder of the Annales School together with other famous historians: their work informed contemporary historiography up until this day. Beyond academics, Bloch saw active combat in World War I, joined the resistance in World War II and was arrested and executed 3 weeks after D-Day. He was also Jewish. Context matters, and Bloch was acutely aware that he wasn't just writing history, he was also very much being part of it's making.

In the same vain, in actively using Twitter, users are shaping it and forming it's history.