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I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

martinboss.com

41–50 of 228 posts

Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

#41
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.

Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

#42

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.

> 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.

Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

#44
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.

Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

#45
post #7

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 engageme…

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.

People like to trash on algorithmic feeds, but they secretly love them. YouTube for instance compared to Odysee.

Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

#46

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 t…

> "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 becau…

> 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?

Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

#47
post #7

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 engageme…

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.

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.

Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

#48
post #33

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.

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.

Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

#50
post #7

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 engageme…

> 5. Block retweets which aren't quotes. What's the reason for this? I didn't even realize you could do that.

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.

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