I rejoined Twitter earlier this year after a bit over a year off. This time around I focused on the stuff that I liked: interacting with other writers, so my college friend who teaches at the Naval War College and tweets a mix of politics and cats, I don’t follow this time around. And a lot of prominent Catholic figures that I used to follow, I don’t because a lot of Catholic Twitter is arguing about stuff that I don’t want to deal with in what is ostensibly my relaxation and socialization space. There are only a handful of people in my feed who I’ve met, but it is much better the way it is. I’m also liberal with my use of the mute and block buttons (I keep blocking ads for clickbait sites but the Twitter algorithm hasn't caught on to that yet).
I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it
121–130 of 228 posts
Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me the absolute worst of the worst is the "More Tweets" list under certain tweets. It's basically designed to be the most sensationalist, polarizing, "hot take"ist bullshit imaginable. I'm not sure I've ever read a single thing worth reading in that section. A rather meta example: scroll down to the "More Tweets" section under this recent Elon Musk tweet - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525738556102164480 I…
These are tweets Twitter wants to hide because they are deemed toxic.
Sorry, to be clear I'm talking about the "More Tweets" list at the bottom. What you're referring to is the "Show more replies" link which requires a click to unroll.
Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it
#123Yeah, it's a newsfeed timesink. It's just gotten better as the feed has improved.
Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it
#124Ah yes, figured out Twitter...
...although to express this, you need more than 140 characters...
Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it
#125This is... an almost obsessive level of thinking about Twitter. I don't know why you would force yourself to use something you clearly didn't need. I do find it funny that he found a community of people focused on getting followers on twitter to tweet to about twitter. This has reinforced my decision to avoid this website at all costs.
Gotta learn from the experts!
Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it
#126I still don’t get it. Why would I want to talk to my friends in public ? In a medium specifically designed to propagate out-of-context sound bites? Surrounded by trolls of all ideologies? I stopped posting anything on Twitter because there was nothing to say that’s worth the risk.
Yeah, I hear you. I do get Twitter but am still not interested in what it offers. To each their own, I say.
Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it
#127This is... an almost obsessive level of thinking about Twitter. I don't know why you would force yourself to use something you clearly didn't need. I do find it funny that he found a community of people focused on getting followers on twitter to tweet to about twitter. This has reinforced my decision to avoid this website at all costs.
Some people really struggle with FOMO.
Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it
#128I don't know if you really "get" twitter until you've had a throw-away tweet from 7 years ago dredged up and used to try and destroy you.
The best I've had is being suspended for a 7 year old "kill all boomers" tweet :(
Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it
#129Damn this sure is a lot of thinking about how to Twitter. I just started following my friends after their Livejournal posts turned into incoherent auto posted collections of the day’s Twitter replies and that was basically it.
Well until the past few years when it suddenly became POLITICAL RAGE MATCH and I started running a Mastodon server for myself and some of my friends…
Re: I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it
#130I'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…
I settled on a similar approach. I used to liberally follow all sorts of accounts that seemed even remotely relevant, but signal to noise was abysmal and there was way too much drama. Several times I was on the verge of quitting, even though Twitter was quite useful for promoting my own work and that of my students. But recently I decided to try a new approach and systematically unfollowed a lot of accounts. Now I st…
This begs the question to me, is there a way to "fix" Twitter, without greatly reducing its impact? It seems to me some people talk about making Twitter "the" public forum, but most of the fixes to Twitter seem to be about how to make it work for your niche. Which is great! Things shouldn't have to be big or making billions of dollars to be good. But "No politicians, no journalists, no institutions" doesn't sound like a public forum to me, and I can't imagine some people would buy Twitter in order to dramatically shrink it.