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Once I got to the point that I had my follow list well tuned for my tastes, Twitter became a very valuable source of information for me. The trick has been to b

by icey 17y ago

Once I got to the point that I had my follow list well tuned for my tastes, Twitter became a very valuable source of information for me. The trick has been to be ruthless with unfollowing people if they dirty my Twitter stream with stuff that distracts me or irritates me. (It's also helpful to be on the lookout for anyone to add who might add value to the stream.)

thesethings 17y ago
This is a great point that I hope people listen to. You REALLY have to tune your follow list. There's no one size fits all. Put time into thinking about what's useful to you. News? Commercial announcements? Personal friend updates? And here's something it took me a long time to learn and adapt to: Just because somebody is really cool/smart/one of your favorite thinkers, doesn't mean you should follow them. When I first got to Twitter, I followed a lot of the writers/programmers/thinkers I admired. And while I still admire their work and think they're inspirational people, I had to unfollow many of them for the following reasons: * They never tweeted about the things that otherwise made them interesting to me (they have every right to do this, just not a good fit for me on Twitter.) * They used Twitter as their venting medium. (Well-known people tend to fly a lot, go to hotels a lot, and have many opportunities to be let down by "incompetence." Twitter has been their preferred medium to talk about such.) Again, I think this is fine. It's actually really healthy to vent. But it's not so great to hear it all the time. * They were stressed a LOT. And it made me stressed. It makes sense. Productive smart people that are interesting to me are probably busy and have meetings and deadlines etc. But I felt their pain too acutely. Anyway... I think Twitter is great. And everything I mentioned above is fine in moderation. (And it's even fine in abundance, just not for me.) Really put some time curating your Twitter follower list, and it can be great.

by icey 17y ago

thesethings 17y ago

This is a great point that I hope people listen to. You REALLY have to tune your follow list. There's no one size fits all. Put time into thinking about what's useful to you. News? Commercial announcements? Personal friend updates? And here's something it took me a long time to learn and adapt to: Just because somebody is really cool/smart/one of your favorite thinkers, doesn't mean you should follow them. When I first got to Twitter, I followed a lot of the writers/programmers/thinkers I admired. And while I still admire their work and think they're inspirational people, I had to unfollow many of them for the following reasons: * They never tweeted about the things that otherwise made them interesting to me (they have every right to do this, just not a good fit for me on Twitter.) * They used Twitter as their venting medium. (Well-known people tend to fly a lot, go to hotels a lot, and have many opportunities to be let down by "incompetence." Twitter has been their preferred medium to talk about such.) Again, I think this is fine. It's actually really healthy to vent. But it's not so great to hear it all the time. * They were stressed a LOT. And it made me stressed. It makes sense. Productive smart people that are interesting to me are probably busy and have meetings and deadlines etc. But I felt their pain too acutely. Anyway... I think Twitter is great. And everything I mentioned above is fine in moderation. (And it's even fine in abundance, just not for me.) Really put some time curating your Twitter follower list, and it can be great.