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Quitting Twitter

blog.nindalf.com

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Re: Quitting Twitter

#131

Post by _qulr »

readflaggedcomm wrote: post #84
_qulr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who need to be engaged Who needs to be engaged with? On Twitter, you choose who to follow. Why in the world would you have an obligation to listen to random strangers who want to argue with you? Imagine if you were in a restaurant talking with your friends, some stranger sitting at another table overheard you, and then decided to come over and butt into the conversation? And when the stranger is told to go a…

One man's need is not your obligation, and Twitter is a public place. I don't understand your analogy.

> One man's need is not your obligation

I don't understand your reply.

> Twitter is a public place. I don't understand your analogy.

The point is that in order to meet other people, you have to go out into the public. But that doesn't mean you want to meet with and talk with anyone and everyone out in the public. It's a terrible tradeoff if the only way you can get pleasant social interaction with others is to also suffer unpleasant social interaction with strangers who want to argue with you.

None of us designed Twitter. We have to take it as it is. Twitter is public, yes, but that's not an excuse for you personally to debate with every stranger you happen to disagree with. That's not on Twitter, that's on you.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#132

Post by chrisco255 »

chc wrote: post #40
chrisco255 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just keep a markdown file with links to Twitter profiles from people I care about. Then I visit the links directly despite not having a Twitter profile, I get to read what they have to say. I also added the "Calm Twitter" plugin to my browser that strips out Trending stories, hides like counts, etc. It makes for a better, focused Twitter experience. I don't care about posting, so I get the info I want without needi…

That seems exactly equivalent to following those people and not posting, but more work. How is this better?

It's not. I don't have to rely on Twitter's algo to pump irrelevant crap, replies, etc. I don't have to scroll an infinite feed. I just check the influencers that I care about, to get whatever they posted that day. I don't need to see all the noise. It takes me 15-20 minutes a day to catch up and then I move on.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#133

Post by sneak »

raunometsa wrote: post #88
sneak wrote: post #11

Even if you have followers, if your individual tweets don't engage well, Twitter won't show them to 100% of the people who explicitly follow you, thanks to their algorithms. YouTube is the same way, which is why you see channels telling users to do three clicks to actually follow: subscribe, notifications on, notifications set to "all". They censor you from your own opt-in audience unless your content is clickbaity e…

>> Now I use an email mailing list, and 100% of the people who want to see 100% of the things I send. I totally agree that you should have a direct channel (email) to your internet friends. I think what Twitter can offer is to let new people discover you. Email lists don't grow that way on their own (people won't really forward your email to their friends, but they retweet your tweets and so their friends find you).

The vast majority of my email list is strangers who signed up on my website, after they got linked to something I wrote. That is to say, people don't sign up for my emails because of my emails, they sign up for my emails because of my website. I'm yet to actually send a single email, but I will probably start soon as I have some cool things to announce.

I got to 25% of my Twitter numbers (after 12 years on Twitter) within only a year or two of writing consistently on my own site. By those figures, I am discovered and followed more and faster on my own site than I ever was on Twitter.

YMMV, of course.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#134

Post by HenryBemis »

thereare5lights wrote: post #104
smithmayowa wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul Graham tweets agressively, but I doubt you will block him though, not everyone who tweets agressively is toxic.

I did. I wouldn't unblock. > not everyone who tweets agressively is toxic. This doesn't matter. It's about controlling what kind of energy you let into your life. Negative energy needs to go.

Time and attention. In my mind/book it's where you give your time and attention. I really enjoy a couple of radio shows, where I need to download the mp3 from their websites (they host/share a coupld of hours after their shows), and SecurityNow podcast.

The good thing about it, is that I only listen when I want to listen, and IF I want to listen.

Social media, slow and steady, absorb you into giving, increasingly, more time to them. Either by creating an echo chamber, or creating passions, promoting things you love/hate. Anything to get you hooked more.

Majority of the people do not filter/reduce the alerts on their phones. Good luck working on a project when you get 10 beeps per hour from Twitter, CNN, BBC, FB, IG, YT.

Time and Attention.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#135

Post by bandwitch »

I personally do not care about Problem 1. I mostly use Twitter in a passive way -- following people that are experts on the topics that I'm interested in. I assume if you want to get a reasonable following you need to put quite the effort in it.

Problem 2 appears but I've noticed that muting works well enough to avoid it.

Problem 3 does not seem to be Twitter-specific but again blocking and muting seems to work for me as well.

My personal take is that something brings value to you or not depending on how you use it. Here is a quote from (https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/) that resonates with me: "The Explore Tab on Twitter is the most important newspaper in the world. It’s littered with celebrity gossip and exaggerated political drama — both of which yield a wide reach but incentivize empty content. And yet, as the Paradox of Abundance predicts, Twitter is also one of the world’s top intellectual communities. It’s the bedrock of my social and intellectual life. It’s a place to make friends, raise your ambitions, and connect directly with people at the top of their fields. And yet, most people use Twitter to consume information with no nutritional value."

Re: Quitting Twitter

#136

Post by ubermonkey »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #71

My approach to Twitter has been to aggressively unfollow anyone posting content that I don’t want to be consuming. That ranges from constantly dunking on every opportunity to people who simply tweet too many times per day. The best content and discussion comes from small groups of people with similar interests who aren’t using Twitter simply to fill time or to build their personal brand. Removing everyone else doesn’…

yeah, me too. I follow a lot of authors or musicians I enjoy, plus a cadre of local and far-flung friends. I am pretty politically engaged but political twitter is just gamesmanship, so I have no time for it AT ALL.

I also use a 3rd party client, so I'm not subjected to algorithmic chicanery in my feed. I mute widely. And I read it at most 2 or 3 times a day.

In general, I find it WAY more pleasant than FB. (I'd love to ditch FB, but for a number of logistical/community reasons that's just not feasible for me, so I try to minimize my interaction with it.)

(What I REALLY want is the old GEnie SFRT back.)

Re: Quitting Twitter

#137

Post by kyle-rb »

tradesmanhelix wrote: post #48

I recently "quit" Twitter myself. I say "quit" because if you actually delete/remove/whatever your account, your handle may then become available for others to use. To avoid that, I used a combo of scripts/services to remove all of my Twitter data (tweets, likes, follows, etc.) and scrubbed my bio, profile pics, etc. I also set a reminder to log in every 6 months to avoid being purged and have my handle become availa…

fyi they never actually implemented that "purge inactive accounts" thing. I remember people bringing up the issue of dead people's accounts being deleted/taken over, but idk if that was why they shelved it.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#138

Post by nonameiguess »

ketzo wrote: post #8

For a post called "Quitting Twitter", I think this piece actually does a great job summarizing the really cool things about Twitter. I think there's something a little magical about finding someone you really respect in your field, responding to one of their tweets, and getting a thoughtful response six minutes later! The toxicity is rough, though. It exhausts me on big subreddits, too -- it's impossible to have conv…

This was possible before Twitter. I remember back in the phpBB days, I was in a group where people were discussing the work of the philosopher Daniel Dennett and I had just read his book and didn't think people were reading him correctly. Instead of immediately taking to the "submit" button to tell them what I thought, I just emailed Daniel Dennett and asked him. He was head of the Tufts University Cognitive Science center and his email was publicly listed. He answered pretty quickly.

I wonder if he still would or if the amount of spam hitting public figures from every direction is so overwhelming that they can't possibly respond to it all. And I wonder how much of the "responses" you get from blue checks on Twitter is really them and how much is a hired social media manager running their account.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#140

Post by andrew_ »

90% of Twitter:

"Someone I don't like did something I don't like and I'm so angry and you need to know about my anger because that will make a big difference to absolutely no one."

I've kept my profile/account up, but I've stopped participating and nuked all but a handful of tweets that I thought may be a reference for folks, and didn't want to turn them into dead ends. It's too hard (or requires too much effort) to avoid the toxic stuff that makes Twitter a hellscape. I'd like to go back to the days when people didn't think everyone else was interested in them airing their bullshit to the world.

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