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I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

martinboss.com

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

#181

Post by matthewdgreen »

berberous wrote: post #14
zaphar wrote: 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.

Twitter has a function for identifying content you'd like others to see in your own timeline: it's called retweet. It also has a function for identifying content that is noteworthy but failed to meet the higher bar, and that's called "favorite" (I still prefer "like", but whatever.) At some point Twitter's algorithm began using favorites to serve the purpose previously served by retweets, and the quality of the timeline has been in free-fall since then.

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

#182

Post by lapcat »

celdon25 wrote: post #175
lapcat wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are web browser extensions that are pretty good at improving the web site.

Such as?

I wrote one for iOS and macOS: https://underpassapp.com/tweaks/

There are some in the Chrome Web Store too, though I don't have links.

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

#183

Post by capybara_2020 »

zaphar wrote: 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…

One rule I have found really useful.

Unfollow/nute any account that has more than 10k followers. Especially if they are social media famous.

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

#184

Post by projektfu »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #178
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm a little confused about the blocking of RTs. Finding interesting technical content in my timeline and retweeting it to my followers is the activity I feel best about on Twitter. The algorithmic timeline (which I don't use, but others do) has made this less useful, but I think this retweet capability is a huge part of the value of the platform. I certainly don't have time to quote-tweet all of those interesting tw…

I don't block all retweets but there are too many abusive retweeters who retweet every retweet of their own post. If you don't block their retweets the whole timeline is nothing but the same post retweeted 100 times.

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

#185

Post by projektfu »

berberous wrote: post #14
zaphar wrote: 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.

The algorithmic feed would keep showing things I had already seen and bury interesting tweets from people I actually follow in favor of outrage-of-the-day type stuff.

There was a period of time when Twitter was testing an interface that had the two feeds on tabs and it kept reverting back to the algorithmic tab. I almost quit.

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

#186

Post by dayvid »

zaphar wrote: 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…

That's what I love about Twitter. It's designed for power users by giving you a lot of controls up front on how you want to interact with the platform. It's not that rewarding if you're not actively curating your feed. You can do it on a user level and even not show posts with specific words. Imagine if you could do that on other social platforms? You could follow your family and/or friends and only see family or trip updates and no political nonsense posts.

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

#187

Post by dynamite-ready »

zaphar wrote: 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…

Many people say bad things about the algorithmic feed, but for me, the 'most recent' feed meant that often I missed tweets from people I'm actually interested in.

So I switched back.

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

#188

Post by amatecha »

AstralStorm wrote: post #149
dragonwriter wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only talk of "public forum" comes from people who are desperate to force others to listen to them. Occasionally, it's used by other people properly to refer to a space used by government for official purposes; I suspect much of the other use is dual purpose, that is, it intends to discredit the proper use as much as to advance a more overt purpose.

Twitter is of course completely unsuitable as means of official communication - just the word limit makes it terrible for the purpose. What it is good for is sending sound bites at each other. (For emergency communications SMS is better and sufficient.)

Not to mention that you can no longer view more than a couple tweets of a given user without having the experience blocked with a "sign in!" modal covering the screen, preventing further use of the platform. This change alone has made the platform less accessible than ever.

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

#190

Post by tmalsburg2 »

PKop wrote: post #116
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand the anonymous accounts rule. Some of the most interesting and insightful people on Twitter are anonymous. And we could say the same about Hacker News. Do you think this website would be better if we all had to use our real names?

It’s true that some of best accounts are anonymous (that’s why I have rule 7), but also 90%+ of the most toxic accounts are anonymous. Hacker news is a different population, and heavily moderated. Can’t usefully compare IMO.
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