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I've only recently started casually using Twitter. I have no idea how anything works. Threads make no sense to me. Am I supposed to respond to myself? How do @-

I've only recently started casually using Twitter. I have no idea how anything works. Threads make no sense to me. Am I supposed to respond to myself? How do @-mentions work? There seem to be a few different rules, but I have no idea what they are or when they apply. What counts against the character limit? It seems like links don't, but I'm not sure exactly how that works, either. As far as I can tell, Twitter is a site with nondeterministic UX where the same folks who insist on civility on HN get to call other people monsters for their politics. I sure don't get it.

visarga 10y ago
I, too, started using Twitter semi-seriously as of late. I'd like to see Twitter conversations in a tree interface, like Hacker News and reddit. It's too much scrolling around to see such small nuggets of text.
exclusiv 10y ago
It's a terrible service for almost every user who thinks their microblog messages are even being seen and the UI is cluttered with noise. The design of the platform itself prevents any sort of meaningful conversation; so it's not good for that. It's really good to follow celebrities, experts or other personalities as a news digest though. And a good place to find a pulse on social topics. I killed my account I had for many years and just use it to search news and follow certain people or tech topics. It's not worth the time investment for me to publish. It might be for those trying to build an audience to sell stuff to or get speaking engagements or prep their profile for optics to get a new job. But even then, most people would be better off focusing on building an email list instead of a follower list for those things.
- vt240 10y ago
  I agree. I just recently signed up for the very first time, simply because news stories seem to break on twitter first. I can't see why I would bother with personal followers. Seems to work great, like you said, as a central place to receive updates for You Tube channels, journalists and industry experts.

visarga 10y ago

I, too, started using Twitter semi-seriously as of late. I'd like to see Twitter conversations in a tree interface, like Hacker News and reddit. It's too much scrolling around to see such small nuggets of text.

exclusiv 10y ago

It's a terrible service for almost every user who thinks their microblog messages are even being seen and the UI is cluttered with noise. The design of the platform itself prevents any sort of meaningful conversation; so it's not good for that. It's really good to follow celebrities, experts or other personalities as a news digest though. And a good place to find a pulse on social topics. I killed my account I had for many years and just use it to search news and follow certain people or tech topics. It's not worth the time investment for me to publish. It might be for those trying to build an audience to sell stuff to or get speaking engagements or prep their profile for optics to get a new job. But even then, most people would be better off focusing on building an email list instead of a follower list for those things.

vt240 10y ago
I agree. I just recently signed up for the very first time, simply because news stories seem to break on twitter first. I can't see why I would bother with personal followers. Seems to work great, like you said, as a central place to receive updates for You Tube channels, journalists and industry experts.