8 ms·

The only people I know with twitter accounts are journalists. One friend in particular has a hard time understanding how you can function without twitter. I tr

The only people I know with twitter accounts are journalists. One friend in particular has a hard time understanding how you can function without twitter. I tried using it, like most people, but when you work a job that doesn’t involve trolling the internet for news, it’s really hard to use twitter in any meaningful manner. You’ll post something and a few days later you’ll have time to post a reply. Or you’ll follow a few interest points and miss everything they post because you don’t visit every hour and it’ll drown in the feed if you don’t. I honestly think all the regular people on twitter are either unemployed or spending so much work time on social media that they ought to be fired. I like social media by the way, but I don’t think it has a lot of value when it’s done primarily with strangers. I mean, my friends use Facebook groups and events to organize stuff and it’s really, really good at that. We use discord/WhatsApp chats to keep in touch on day to day chitchat - which would be better in person but we live in different cities/have children etc. So that sort of social media is great. But talking with strangers? I mean, I’m home in bed with the flu right now, and we’re having this conversation, except I can’t be sure you’ll ever read what I post or if you’ll find it interesting or reply, and even if we do get to have a talk, we’ll likely never have another one. So it doesn’t hold a lot of real value aside from wasting time, and that’s kind of what twitter is all of the time.

1337biz 8y ago
Twitter truly feels like a dangerous mixup of mostly journalist, social activists and social media gurus, who all reaffirm their existance on the platform.
wingerlang 8y ago
Or you’ll follow a few interest points and miss everything they post because you don’t visit every hour and it’ll drown in the feed if you don’t. As long as you don't feel the need to see everything they post you should be fine. I honestly think all the regular people on twitter are either unemployed or spending so much work time on social media that they ought to be fired. I'm a regular that finds some value in Twitter, I follow only a few people and I think Twitter does a fairly good job of surfacing interesting tweets. It also takes me only 2-3 screens to get caught up after a few days. It doesn't have to be an uncontrollable firehose of shit content unless you let it become that way (see: following 1000 active accounts).
- eksemplar 8y ago
  I probably should have said Danes. Americans have taken to twitter in a different way than we have, I still don’t get how you have time for it though, or how you get value from your time there, but that might just be me,
  - wingerlang 8y ago
    I probably spend 10-15 minutes per day (or less) on Twitter. I follow 60 accounts and maybe 10-15 of them are very active. They tend to be either high profile people in my community meaning they comment or share resources quite often. Or they are developers and share progress on their projects. Both types I find value in. For me I think the best thing is to simply unsubscribe to someone whenever you start finding that their tweets bring 25% value rather than 75%. I do the same with Youtube, I give them some leeway but once I find myself not really watching their videos I just unsubscribe.
hiddevb 8y ago
Twitter can be and is used for way more than just spamming bad opinions. There is a lot of subcultures active on twitter because of the vapid manner of content sharing. Small artists, game developers, etc.. posts loads of drawings, artworks, screenshots and gifs to show of their works. It's actually really nice to create a good feed of people who create stuff you like and love. I think this is the superior way to use twitter. Just stay away of all the politics and meme bots.
Angostura 8y ago
There are many ways to use Twitter that aren't social media per se and which are useful. I work with a school and they Tweet out stuff bout what is happening at the school, photos of student activities, etc which parents love. They tweet out thanks to organisations that they are working with or who have come to visit. People working there follow the Twitter accounts of education specialists, regulators, other schools, education department officials etc. All useful stuff.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  I’m European, so using twitter in that way would be really illegal. Having children of my own, I’m really happy they weren’t shared on an American social media-platform for the entire world to see. We do have digital platforms for sharing stuff like that, but they are operated by the schools and the data is encrypted, access locked to the correct parties and the data is t kept forever. That way, you can actually also share meaningful information directly linked to your child.
  - thfuran 8y ago
    It still baffles me that we went from a common wisdom of "don't share personal information on the internet with anyone" to "chronicle your life on the internet publicly" in a few years. I think the first was a bit of an overreaction, but far closer to a sane level of prudence than the current state of affairs.
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      It isn't too surprising - the first popularly wasn't because of sensible "permanent reputation effects" or similar but scare mongering that giving your state and real first name was a sure way to get raped and murdered. Even sensationalist press couldn't find enough to spam even with fabrications like Nintendo DS's pictochat being a pedophile nest and it lost the new and scary factor. So between that crying wolf and the trend following and desire to be famous the shift makes sense.
  - Angostura 8y ago
saiya-jin 8y ago
Same here, never jumped the wagon and for a rather introvert person like me, it seems a bit absurd concept to begin with. Extroverts must be having a blast, but who cares about them. I don't know a single person around me who is active there. As an IT guy. Maybe its more of an US thing? I understand it in context of professionals using it as their free sales/promotion channel (Trump, Cardashians or whoever is in vogue these days). There it makes perfect sense, not that I would like to anyhow participate or care about their opinions. I use BBC Android app to read some news when having few minutes break ie in public transport. Over last years they started to put these tweets of random folks in the articles (so no Trump tweets iframe in the article about his latest tweets, but rather some random folks expressing their opinions about Brexit, olympics or anything else). Those articles really feel much worse because of this - I go to BBC for some serious journalism, not this. It really feels like they try not only persuade me by stating facts in the article, but appeal to my potential 'sheepish' personality trait of accepting popular opinions of others, rather than making opinions from the facts on my own. My main issue - whatever narrative you want to push as a journalist (and they often do), you just look for tweets that you like in the sea of all possible opinions. Just give me the facts, and let me do the thinking and opinion making, please
- eksemplar 8y ago
  I’m an extrovert, I’ll never pick digital communication above face-face. If we’re talking personality types I think it has more to do with people who are motivated by acceptance. I get that part of it, and I understand why the social media gurus and journalists are there, it’s basically their linked-in. (Which is basically management porn). What I don’t get is why regular people join. I mean, I’m a manager, I play the “look-at-me” game on linked-in, in fact it’s part of my damn job to sell our stories to other managers - but I wouldn’t expect my neighbor to want to read about our approach to behavioral design and I’ve frankly never used it in any manner that wasn’t job-related either.
pjc50 8y ago
Don't use twitter for general news. Mute the news sources if you have to. If it's big enough it will bleed over into your feed anyway. Often I can work out what the news is by reverse-engineering the jokes about it. It's much more interesting for highly specific news. I've got some accounts I follow for local news, some for gamedev news, people doing interesting tech, art, jokes, and a few "commentators" who are excellent enough to be worth reading on their own. It can be great for kibitzing on live TV events too. Mind you, these days I post very little original stuff too. The internet is just too much of a live-fire zone.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  HN is my only form of digital news, so I’m a little old school. In fact the only news I read regularly is a national paper that only comes out once a week, that way all the journalists have had time to digest the weeks events and I get a compiled list of what was actually important. I tried following HN styled things on twitter but it just never worked out for me.
  - Sharper 8y ago
    What's the name of that weekly paper, if you don't mind sharing?
maxerickson 8y ago
An awful lot of people on Twitter don't keep up with their feed. They just take a look at what is current.
detaro 8y ago
I think you shouldn't be so fast in judging people for what they use without understanding how they use it. Twitter is completely fine and usable even if you only check it every few days, or only during your morning commute. Some people I know use Twitter maybe one day a month on average. I have no idea why you think you need to see everything on/constantly be on Twitter to use it.

1337biz 8y ago

Twitter truly feels like a dangerous mixup of mostly journalist, social activists and social media gurus, who all reaffirm their existance on the platform.

wingerlang 8y ago

Or you’ll follow a few interest points and miss everything they post because you don’t visit every hour and it’ll drown in the feed if you don’t. As long as you don't feel the need to see everything they post you should be fine. I honestly think all the regular people on twitter are either unemployed or spending so much work time on social media that they ought to be fired. I'm a regular that finds some value in Twitter, I follow only a few people and I think Twitter does a fairly good job of surfacing interesting tweets. It also takes me only 2-3 screens to get caught up after a few days. It doesn't have to be an uncontrollable firehose of shit content unless you let it become that way (see: following 1000 active accounts).

eksemplar 8y ago
I probably should have said Danes. Americans have taken to twitter in a different way than we have, I still don’t get how you have time for it though, or how you get value from your time there, but that might just be me,
- wingerlang 8y ago
  I probably spend 10-15 minutes per day (or less) on Twitter. I follow 60 accounts and maybe 10-15 of them are very active. They tend to be either high profile people in my community meaning they comment or share resources quite often. Or they are developers and share progress on their projects. Both types I find value in. For me I think the best thing is to simply unsubscribe to someone whenever you start finding that their tweets bring 25% value rather than 75%. I do the same with Youtube, I give them some leeway but once I find myself not really watching their videos I just unsubscribe.

hiddevb 8y ago

Twitter can be and is used for way more than just spamming bad opinions. There is a lot of subcultures active on twitter because of the vapid manner of content sharing. Small artists, game developers, etc.. posts loads of drawings, artworks, screenshots and gifs to show of their works. It's actually really nice to create a good feed of people who create stuff you like and love. I think this is the superior way to use twitter. Just stay away of all the politics and meme bots.

Angostura 8y ago

There are many ways to use Twitter that aren't social media per se and which are useful. I work with a school and they Tweet out stuff bout what is happening at the school, photos of student activities, etc which parents love. They tweet out thanks to organisations that they are working with or who have come to visit. People working there follow the Twitter accounts of education specialists, regulators, other schools, education department officials etc. All useful stuff.

eksemplar 8y ago
I’m European, so using twitter in that way would be really illegal. Having children of my own, I’m really happy they weren’t shared on an American social media-platform for the entire world to see. We do have digital platforms for sharing stuff like that, but they are operated by the schools and the data is encrypted, access locked to the correct parties and the data is t kept forever. That way, you can actually also share meaningful information directly linked to your child.
- thfuran 8y ago
  It still baffles me that we went from a common wisdom of "don't share personal information on the internet with anyone" to "chronicle your life on the internet publicly" in a few years. I think the first was a bit of an overreaction, but far closer to a sane level of prudence than the current state of affairs.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    It isn't too surprising - the first popularly wasn't because of sensible "permanent reputation effects" or similar but scare mongering that giving your state and real first name was a sure way to get raped and murdered. Even sensationalist press couldn't find enough to spam even with fabrications like Nintendo DS's pictochat being a pedophile nest and it lost the new and scary factor. So between that crying wolf and the trend following and desire to be famous the shift makes sense.
- Angostura 8y ago

saiya-jin 8y ago

Same here, never jumped the wagon and for a rather introvert person like me, it seems a bit absurd concept to begin with. Extroverts must be having a blast, but who cares about them. I don't know a single person around me who is active there. As an IT guy. Maybe its more of an US thing? I understand it in context of professionals using it as their free sales/promotion channel (Trump, Cardashians or whoever is in vogue these days). There it makes perfect sense, not that I would like to anyhow participate or care about their opinions. I use BBC Android app to read some news when having few minutes break ie in public transport. Over last years they started to put these tweets of random folks in the articles (so no Trump tweets iframe in the article about his latest tweets, but rather some random folks expressing their opinions about Brexit, olympics or anything else). Those articles really feel much worse because of this - I go to BBC for some serious journalism, not this. It really feels like they try not only persuade me by stating facts in the article, but appeal to my potential 'sheepish' personality trait of accepting popular opinions of others, rather than making opinions from the facts on my own. My main issue - whatever narrative you want to push as a journalist (and they often do), you just look for tweets that you like in the sea of all possible opinions. Just give me the facts, and let me do the thinking and opinion making, please

eksemplar 8y ago
I’m an extrovert, I’ll never pick digital communication above face-face. If we’re talking personality types I think it has more to do with people who are motivated by acceptance. I get that part of it, and I understand why the social media gurus and journalists are there, it’s basically their linked-in. (Which is basically management porn). What I don’t get is why regular people join. I mean, I’m a manager, I play the “look-at-me” game on linked-in, in fact it’s part of my damn job to sell our stories to other managers - but I wouldn’t expect my neighbor to want to read about our approach to behavioral design and I’ve frankly never used it in any manner that wasn’t job-related either.

pjc50 8y ago

Don't use twitter for general news. Mute the news sources if you have to. If it's big enough it will bleed over into your feed anyway. Often I can work out what the news is by reverse-engineering the jokes about it. It's much more interesting for highly specific news. I've got some accounts I follow for local news, some for gamedev news, people doing interesting tech, art, jokes, and a few "commentators" who are excellent enough to be worth reading on their own. It can be great for kibitzing on live TV events too. Mind you, these days I post very little original stuff too. The internet is just too much of a live-fire zone.

eksemplar 8y ago
HN is my only form of digital news, so I’m a little old school. In fact the only news I read regularly is a national paper that only comes out once a week, that way all the journalists have had time to digest the weeks events and I get a compiled list of what was actually important. I tried following HN styled things on twitter but it just never worked out for me.
- Sharper 8y ago
  What's the name of that weekly paper, if you don't mind sharing?

maxerickson 8y ago

An awful lot of people on Twitter don't keep up with their feed. They just take a look at what is current.

detaro 8y ago

I think you shouldn't be so fast in judging people for what they use without understanding how they use it. Twitter is completely fine and usable even if you only check it every few days, or only during your morning commute. Some people I know use Twitter maybe one day a month on average. I have no idea why you think you need to see everything on/constantly be on Twitter to use it.