271–280 of 292 posts
People might be interested in a project Linus Lee ( https://thesephist.com/ ) started to create a more personal adaption of using Twitter: https://thesephist.com/posts/lucerne/ It seems to tackle the main concerns people have and really focus on the aspect of reaching hard to find niches.
1. Don't engage with or comment on political / social issues.
2. Don't install the app, set a time limit on twitter for all devices.
3. Follow other scientists with few exceptions.
4. Flag posts as irrelevant to me that express anger or controversial political opinions (I especially don't need to know anyones take on the Corona situation).
So far it has worked pretty well, I've got invited to give talks based on initial visibility I generated on Twitter. The open source software project I'm working on came to the attention / got engagement / retweets from relevant people. I reconnected with people that I met a few years ago and it even generated a few leads for job opportunities.
It is also really useful to keep track of scientific progress in a field and seminars / workshops I might want to attend.
The algorithm basically works against you though, even if you follow a few people that post / retweet a lot, they can come to dominate your newsfeed. I also came very close to engage with social / political content, simply because popular content that gets shown to you is often the most controversial. I ended up banning a few mainstream politicians, whose tweets kept getting retweeted by people I wanted to follow and that has solved the problem for the most part.
Overall so far twitter seems to create more opportunities than issues for me, but I notice that I spend way more time there than I initially planned.
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’…
I feel kind of trapped following them :/
I tried using the "this tweet is not relevant" thingie but it doesn't do anything. I mean, this is a thing for which I would gladly have an AI-powered smart filter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Building a better twitter is possible, so build it. It's been done. For example, app.net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net I deleted my Twitter account and joined ADN. But not many followed that example. Most people stuck with Twitter, ADN never reached "critical mass", and it eventually shut down. I don't think this is a technological problem. You could say it's a marketing problem. The critical mass is essen…
> I don't think this is a technological problem. You could say it's a marketing problem. Yes I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. Perhaps App.net really was better, that's great - it means we know how to solve the problems of twitter (given I haven't heard exactly how it was better, that makes me sceptical). But I think what you mean is _replace_ twitter, which is not what I was getting at. That is not just…
ADN was a subscription service. The common expression is always true: if you're not the customer, you're the product.
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’…
I tried this. You end up shedding a ton of follows and mostly end up with people who say nothing. Then a week later you like something that person says and refollow, then they say something again and get unfollowed.
I think fundamentally it's like the article says. twitter is just full of anger and paranoia. I can't say if it's twitter that creates this, but it certainly enhances. Twitter is the problem and quitting is your only option.
On there it was an attack worse than 9/11.
In the real world it was a bunch of memable pictures that no one cares about 2 months later.
I do wonder what happened to podium guy.
I quit about six months ago. The majority of people I followed, I felt obligated to follow, in order to keep ahead of social issues. But the toll of "doom scrolling" constant negative/angry/depressed posts really hammered my own mental health. I also developed a habit of refreshing the feed on my phone every five minutes. I quit, and I found myself lost when I picked up my phone, like a lingering habit (I see someone…
Ironically enough I use uber under my real name and I'm fine, but everyone I know how uses their real name in social media has had problems.
Twitter could've been so much better if people could post into different channels instead of dumping everything into one feed. Humans are multi-faceted beings and their communication is multi-faceted too. Not supporting it in communication software is just poor abstraction. I want to be able to choose which facet of a person I'm interested in, and which not. Instead, Twitter proposes the "all or nothing" approach. Ei…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Removing everyone else doesn’t take as much work as I expected, as long as you’re not hesitant to unfollow (or even block) those who distract from your desired timeline. It's also not even necessarily them . Twitter is enthusiastic in assuming that, because you're engaging with one person, you must also be interested in what they're engaging with. My efforts to have reasoned debate with one person in my life who wa…
Yeah, I think the rise of "follow-of-a-follow" "engagement" content and promoted tweets were where I heavily started to lose any impression at all that I could control/curate my Twitter timeline, and started to lose a lot of interest in Twitter altogether. (Algorithmic reshuffling of the "timeline" into something that wasn't purely time-based didn't help either, but seemed a modest symptom to the other two problems.)
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’…
My approach to Twitter has been to aggressively unfollow anyone posting content that I don’t want to be consuming Doesn't that just leave you in an echo chamber of people who agree with you, and you don't learn anything new? people who simply tweet too many times per day. I'm with you on that one.