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Twitter gives you the ability to curate yourself a feed from comments of people you deem interesting enough to follow and keep up-to-date with, as far as I know
by SolaceQuantum 10y ago
Twitter gives you the ability to curate yourself a feed from comments of people you deem interesting enough to follow and keep up-to-date with, as far as I know. I mostly use it for my literary pursuits, and being able to follow editors, agents, and authors at the same time with minimal hassle has made twitter very useful to the fiction scene.
Alternatively, in the tech world, it gives you live updates on various developers that people look up to. technologies you want to keep up with, and updates on exciting open source software.
- sverige 10y agoThank you and the others who replied. I may have to revisit Twitter.
- inopinatus 10y agoA word of warning. You think you're curating it yourself, but the discovery mechanisms are algorithmically biased towards finding you an opinion you already agree with. This is why a) social media is often characterised as a narcissistic echo chamber, and b) why it becomes so rapidly toxic when two naturally opposed communities coincide on a topic. A wonderful petri dish for anthropologists, but not a medium we'll be proud of fifty years from now.
- Godel_unicode 10y ago> ...the discovery mechanisms are algorithmically biased... That depends entirely on how you use Twitter. Find people you know or have heard of other places and think are smart/interesting/important/etc. Follow people they retweet. Repeat. Meet Kevin Bacon.
- dredmorbius 10y agoFighting human psycology, sociology, and site design through individual conscious will scales poorly. Your friends and FOAFs are not likely to exercise the same level of control as you're expressing. I've consistently observed this even among a carefully curated set of sources on several SocMed sites.
- Merad 10y agoThe problem with Twitter, IMO, is that it's a fire hose. Let's say that I decide to follow John Carmack. I'm interested in his thoughts on technical topics and especially articles or posts that he may have written. Instead, I get all of that plus* the inspirational quotes he posts every morning, his political opinions, his thoughts on current events, etc. None of which I care about, and none of which (AFAIK) Twitter gives me the ability to filter. *I don't know if John Carmack actually posts anything of the sort, just a hypothetical.
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoIs there a comparable service that has a public/private feed? I guess Facebook wall posts would be the closest, but you can't publicly follow people there.
- kalleboo 10y agoMeanwhile Facebook does filter out things it thinks you're not interested in, and it outrages people that they're missing out on something.