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I found twitter incredibly useless and had many fits and starts. Now I'm at the point where I use the mobile app everyday multiple times per day. I gave up twe

I found twitter incredibly useless and had many fits and starts. Now I'm at the point where I use the mobile app everyday multiple times per day. I gave up tweeting entirely. I have 6 followers and only 3 of them are people I know in real life, however none of them tweet. So twitter isn't a text messaging replacement for me. I just accepted that Facebook is a much better place for me to put a thought and get feedback from people I know. I follow ~150 people. The main blobs are pros in a video game I play seriously, and politics professionals, and science/tech professionals, and media outlets. I don't follow any celebrities or people who I think are just brand pushers. Now every time I go to twitter I know that I will have a new set of interesting content to pursue. New conversations about strategies or video archives from the game universe. Breaking news with commentary by politics minds I care about (no hacks or rank partisans). Interesting science and tech links from other like minded people who are keeping up. The real problem with twitter is that it is completely nonobvious how I eventually came to like it. I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a set of follows which will engage them. Seems like twitter can't either.

Mithaldu 10y ago
> I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a set of follows which will engage them. Seems like twitter can't either. The problem is that many people think of twitter as a tool to talk to someone. In reality it is a tool to subscribe to people. Micro-blogging is a stupid word, but it is true. You get use out of twitter by treating it like an RSS client: Find feeds with content that interests you (personal things of friends, musicians, artists, game devs, people talking about political issues that interest you, activist groups, etc.) and subscribe to them. That covers the use case of the average person. If you feel ambitious you can also become a content producer, but that is of course a real investment.

Mithaldu 10y ago

> I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a set of follows which will engage them. Seems like twitter can't either. The problem is that many people think of twitter as a tool to talk to someone. In reality it is a tool to subscribe to people. Micro-blogging is a stupid word, but it is true. You get use out of twitter by treating it like an RSS client: Find feeds with content that interests you (personal things of friends, musicians, artists, game devs, people talking about political issues that interest you, activist groups, etc.) and subscribe to them. That covers the use case of the average person. If you feel ambitious you can also become a content producer, but that is of course a real investment.