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I’m a total Twitter n00b. But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? I was treating retweets as a stronger version of ‘like’, in a sense. Assumin

I’m a total Twitter n00b. But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? I was treating retweets as a stronger version of ‘like’, in a sense. Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds, and make them more likely to mute or unfollow me. So yeah, I like far more than I retweet. I also have well less than 1000 followers, being a n00b. I DO have a link in my profile, but don’t actively request people visit. But figure they eventually might (I do much tweeting within the aspiring author community, mentioning my WIP, or Work In Progress, so figure potentially-interested parties could click. But no, not actively marketing, yet...)

stordoff 9y ago
> But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? I was treating retweets as a stronger version of ‘like’ I'm in the same boat, but I'm not sure you could take it any other way. At least in my usage, 'like' is a signal to the poster that I liked their comment/it was a beneficial contribution, whereas 'retweet' is that AND I think it would be useful/interesting to a weirder audience. Retweeting more than likely seems backwards, and more like spam.
Nition 9y ago
> Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds. You can choose to mute retweets from an account without muting the whole account, so that's not too much of a problem. If you retweet too much they can mute your retweets. Recently something changed though, and now things you Like can also show up in your friend's feeds, and I haven't found any way on the default twitter site to mute those. So Likes can actually be more spammy than retweets now!
thaumasiotes 9y ago
> But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? HN itself suffers from this problem. There is apparently a heavy "controversial" penalty applied to articles that get too many comments relative to their upvotes. But, commenting is most of HN's functionality. I comment fairly frequently; I certainly don't upvote articles anywhere near as often.
cookiecaper 9y ago
> Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds, and make them more likely to mute or unfollow me. If there's one thing I've learned about social media, it's that this totally considerate, natural thought pattern is anathema to the platform vendors. In the real world, you expect a high Signal-to-Noise ratio, and want to reward people who speak less often because their words become more weighty/significant. Social platforms work on the exact inverse of this principle! They reward high Noise-to-Signal accounts because that keeps the psychological engagement hooks going. The platforms actively punish accounts that aren't continuously, repetitively pushing those buttons. If you ever wonder why the spammiest crap floats to the top, this is why. We're all just flashing bulbs in the social media slot machine. If we're not frantically flashing, blinking, or otherwise making it difficult for the consumer-gambler to look away, we're not serving the platform's purpose, and we'll be replaced with a bulb that does.
- deleted 9y ago
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zaarn 9y ago
On mastodon I use boosts (similar to retweet) when I want everyone who follows me to see a specific post. Like is when I find the specific toot interesting but not something I want to bother other people with.

stordoff 9y ago

> But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? I was treating retweets as a stronger version of ‘like’ I'm in the same boat, but I'm not sure you could take it any other way. At least in my usage, 'like' is a signal to the poster that I liked their comment/it was a beneficial contribution, whereas 'retweet' is that AND I think it would be useful/interesting to a weirder audience. Retweeting more than likely seems backwards, and more like spam.

Nition 9y ago

> Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds. You can choose to mute retweets from an account without muting the whole account, so that's not too much of a problem. If you retweet too much they can mute your retweets. Recently something changed though, and now things you Like can also show up in your friend's feeds, and I haven't found any way on the default twitter site to mute those. So Likes can actually be more spammy than retweets now!

thaumasiotes 9y ago

> But are we really supposed to retweet more than we like? HN itself suffers from this problem. There is apparently a heavy "controversial" penalty applied to articles that get too many comments relative to their upvotes. But, commenting is most of HN's functionality. I comment fairly frequently; I certainly don't upvote articles anywhere near as often.

cookiecaper 9y ago

> Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds, and make them more likely to mute or unfollow me. If there's one thing I've learned about social media, it's that this totally considerate, natural thought pattern is anathema to the platform vendors. In the real world, you expect a high Signal-to-Noise ratio, and want to reward people who speak less often because their words become more weighty/significant. Social platforms work on the exact inverse of this principle! They reward high Noise-to-Signal accounts because that keeps the psychological engagement hooks going. The platforms actively punish accounts that aren't continuously, repetitively pushing those buttons. If you ever wonder why the spammiest crap floats to the top, this is why. We're all just flashing bulbs in the social media slot machine. If we're not frantically flashing, blinking, or otherwise making it difficult for the consumer-gambler to look away, we're not serving the platform's purpose, and we'll be replaced with a bulb that does.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

zaarn 9y ago

On mastodon I use boosts (similar to retweet) when I want everyone who follows me to see a specific post. Like is when I find the specific toot interesting but not something I want to bother other people with.