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Twitter is also excellent for following journalists, but i keep them sectioned off into their own list and try my best to limit the attention i pay to that. I

Twitter is also excellent for following journalists, but i keep them sectioned off into their own list and try my best to limit the attention i pay to that. I can see why people say twitter sucks, but really it only sucks if you're following a whole bunch of different "genres" in the same feed. the prolific tweeters like to talk about twitter in sections - "politics twitter", "black twitter", "meme twitter" etc and if that's how you use it, it's pretty good.

derefr 7y ago
It's too bad that Twitter itself doesn't make this into a real abstraction. I'd love to treat my feed as mixed activity from a set of isolated communities, where one community can retweet something from another community into their own community, but where this retweet acts as its own object that doesn't inform anyone from the origin community about the activity on it in the destination community. Sort of like Slack, if there were teams but no channels, only threads, and your view was a unified all-threads-in-all-teams activity stream.
basscomm 7y ago
> I can see why people say twitter sucks, but really it only sucks if you're following a whole bunch of different "genres" in the same feed. the prolific tweeters like to talk about twitter in sections - "politics twitter", "black twitter", "meme twitter" etc and if that's how you use it, it's pretty good. Twitter sucks for lots of reasons, but a big one for me is that it's really tough to follow a 'genre' or topic because so few people stick to tweeting about one genre or related genres. I only really ever used twitter to follow small(ish) tweeters and a few corporate brand accounts that weren't interactive anyway. The brand accounts never responded to anything anyone wrote to them, so twitter is, in effect, just a newsletter delivery service for them so they got filtered off into their own list. I tried following a few prolific tweeters, but I got tired of checking my feed and the prolific tweeters completely drowning out everyone else I followed. The small tweeters were more interactive (they would actually respond to things I would @ them once in a while) but they usually posted in topics all over the place. I might have followed them because someone else I follow retweeted something that I was interested in on a particular topic, video games, say, but after following them for a while, it turned out that they veer off into politics or the economy or mental health issues or racism or some other realm. Not to say that those aren't important things, but they're not the thing I was following them for, and it cluttered up the feed with things that I wasn't interested in looking at that day. Twitter would have been a lot more useful to me if I could somehow follow topics instead of people. Yes, I know about Tweetdeck and lists and hashtags, but that presumes that I want to bother continually setting up those things as the conversations flow and evolve, or that I'm following the correct hashtag or term (e.g. I was following #widget3a and most of the interesting conversations happen with #3awidget so I missed the whole thing), or that people manage to tag their tweets appropriately, et cetera.

derefr 7y ago

It's too bad that Twitter itself doesn't make this into a real abstraction. I'd love to treat my feed as mixed activity from a set of isolated communities, where one community can retweet something from another community into their own community, but where this retweet acts as its own object that doesn't inform anyone from the origin community about the activity on it in the destination community. Sort of like Slack, if there were teams but no channels, only threads, and your view was a unified all-threads-in-all-teams activity stream.

basscomm 7y ago

> I can see why people say twitter sucks, but really it only sucks if you're following a whole bunch of different "genres" in the same feed. the prolific tweeters like to talk about twitter in sections - "politics twitter", "black twitter", "meme twitter" etc and if that's how you use it, it's pretty good. Twitter sucks for lots of reasons, but a big one for me is that it's really tough to follow a 'genre' or topic because so few people stick to tweeting about one genre or related genres. I only really ever used twitter to follow small(ish) tweeters and a few corporate brand accounts that weren't interactive anyway. The brand accounts never responded to anything anyone wrote to them, so twitter is, in effect, just a newsletter delivery service for them so they got filtered off into their own list. I tried following a few prolific tweeters, but I got tired of checking my feed and the prolific tweeters completely drowning out everyone else I followed. The small tweeters were more interactive (they would actually respond to things I would @ them once in a while) but they usually posted in topics all over the place. I might have followed them because someone else I follow retweeted something that I was interested in on a particular topic, video games, say, but after following them for a while, it turned out that they veer off into politics or the economy or mental health issues or racism or some other realm. Not to say that those aren't important things, but they're not the thing I was following them for, and it cluttered up the feed with things that I wasn't interested in looking at that day. Twitter would have been a lot more useful to me if I could somehow follow topics instead of people. Yes, I know about Tweetdeck and lists and hashtags, but that presumes that I want to bother continually setting up those things as the conversations flow and evolve, or that I'm following the correct hashtag or term (e.g. I was following #widget3a and most of the interesting conversations happen with #3awidget so I missed the whole thing), or that people manage to tag their tweets appropriately, et cetera.