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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

#61

Post by anyfoo »

SL61 wrote: post #31
kstenerud wrote: post #10

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…

The thing with Twitter is you need a decent number of mutuals (i.e. they follow you and you follow them) to get a decent amount of high-quality interaction. On a new account with 0 followers, most people won't see you. Even if you reply to a popular tweet, most people will ignore your reply because of your low follower count. I have two Twitter accounts: a pseudonymous one with a few hundred followers where I talk ab…

> The thing with Twitter is you need a decent number of mutuals (i.e. they follow you and you follow them) to get a decent amount of high-quality interaction.

I did that for an eletronics-related hobby of mine. Took a while, finally got it off the ground with some mutuals.

And then it felt... weird. Like I was compressing down my thoughts, for mostly performative purposes no less. I didn't like communicating with my peers that way instead of, say, per email or even chat (IRC, Discord, whatever). I felt I had to say "what was on my mind right now" instead of processing anything beforehand, but without the more direct conversational back and forth of chat.

Another problem I noticed: Almost every technical account with a minimum number of followers has this barrage of people that are doing quips, making dubious statements, or just asking simple or also dubious questions to almost every tweet, where even the questions seemed performative. Even the most kind and engaged originators seem to ignore them the overwhelming majority of the time, probably because it's too much to handle.

It was not for me. Unlike blogs, it did not add anything to my hobby.

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

#62

Post by VectorLock »

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.

I've been a long-time Twitter user and I recently switched to "See latest Tweets instead" and I had the same conclusion, the "algorithm" was actually doing a decent job of surfacing new stuff for me that I liked. I missed it pretty quick and switched back. I think doing the manual curation to tell the algo what you _don't_ want to see helps immensely.

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

#63

Post by recursive »

notacoward wrote: post #53
emkemp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree, and I'm surprised more people aren't using Tweetdeck.

I feel like a lot of people complaining about Twitter only experience it through the twitter.com web interface. I'd hate it too if that was my only experience of it. Using Tweetdeck and/or just about any mobile client is worlds better. You don't get so much random dreck, which makes it much easier to see and engage with people you actually know or like. As far as I can tell, using any social-media site other than wit…

If that's really the only way to make twitter good, then it seems like a reasonable complaint that twitter is not that way. If twitter can't be bothered to make their own product tolerable, I don't feel any compulsion to do it for them.

I say this as someone who briefly attempted to dabble in twitter on a few occasions. I have an account. I've tweeted a few times. I now check it probably a few times a year.

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

#64

Post by huhtenberg »

WalterBright wrote: post #28

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.

That's the way to use it for disseminating the information, 100%.

Been doing it for a while for several projects and it's a fantastic broadcast tool to keep interested people updated on news they want to hear. The main trick is to never waver off topic.

This doesn't replace a mailing list though. Not even close. There are simply parts of the target audience that aren't on Twitter. So Twitter needs to be combined with the newsletter, the RSS feed, a dedicated sub on Reddit and what have you. Together these result in a lot of reach. They also cross-pollinate well.

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

#65

Post by munificent »

bachmeier wrote: post #56
WalterBright wrote: post #28

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. I think this is a significant flaw in the design of Twitter. You should be able to follow a subset of someone else's tweets rather than the binary all/nothing we have now.

Honestly, it's a significant flaw in the design of humans.

When interacting with a human, I did not sign up for them being a complete holistic personality with hopes, dreams, beliefs, history, etc. I just want direct access to some personally chosen subset of their brain. Why do I have to deal with their messy... ugh... peopleness?

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

#66

Post by Nav_Panel »

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…

Re (2), I always soft-block (block and then unblock) rather than unfollow, mainly because I view my twitter feed as a collection of friends, and I'd rather "terminate the relationship" than make it one-sided. If I want to preserve the relationship but find them annoying, I'll mute them.

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

#67

Post by WalterBright »

xen2xen1 wrote: post #30
WalterBright wrote: post #28

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.

Seconded. I've tried to follow technical / subject folks, but the politics is constantly there. Maybe next try I'll block the folks who crap out the politics so I don't follow them again, which I've done multiple times.

It's not that I mind them tweeting their politics that much, it's that I don't want them annoying my followers.

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

#68

Post by bombcar »

the_gipsy wrote: post #23
kstenerud wrote: post #10

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…

Ok, I'll let you in: you're either already famous, or you have a huge curated network of bidirectional followers from the early days. Then it works.

Which distills down to: either you’re famous or you’re famous.

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

#69

Post by munificent »

I find it strange when people make broad declarative statements about a social media platform. There is no singular Twitter experience any more than there is a singular "America" experience or "web" experience. Twitter is a vast heterogeneous sea of semi-overlapping distinct communities. My Twitter is not your Twitter. I'm happy the author "got" their Twitter but they way they got it isn't how mine works.

My mental model for Twitter is basically like a giant cocktail party. Imagine you're hanging out and you want to find a couple of cool people to talk with. You've maybe got one or two people you know around but you want to meet some new ones. So you throw out a joke or tell a story to them, but maybe just a little bit louder in case it perks someone else's ear up because you have something in common.

Over time, you find yourself in a corner of the room surrounded by your tribe, having fun, telling anecdotes and connecting. Throughout the night, people come and go in the group, but it has a vaguely stable vibe of certain common interests. Every now and then someone totally random wanders by, joins the conversation, gets a little confused when they don't get the weird in-jokes, and wanders off.

It becomes a great evening because you discovered some new people you have a lot in common with.

That's Twitter for me.

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