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I found this to be true. I was involved in selling a newspaper, and Twitter speculation from the journalists involved was rife and, frankly, full of bullshit.
by marcus_holmes 6y ago
I found this to be true. I was involved in selling a newspaper, and Twitter speculation from the journalists involved was rife and, frankly, full of bullshit.
I decided there was no way to rationally deal with this. So I stopped looking at Twitter. That turned out to be the best thing to do. People still said things, but as I wasn't listening it didn't matter. The gossip and malicious slander reached a crescendo as the sale went though, but ultimately had zero impact on what actually happened.
As far as I can work out, what happens on Twitter stays on Twitter, and if you don't pay it any attention it really doesn't matter.
However, the caveat to that is that journalists are on Twitter, pay a lot of attention to Twitter, and report it as reality. Getting dogpiled on Twitter may not matter, but having it reported in newspapers may make it matter.
- sumtechguy 6y agoI have a few tech people I want to follow as they use it as a blog. But I do not want an account on twitter as it is too easy for me to get dragged into conversations that are unproductive for everyone involved. So I picked a method where I link about 5 people created a folder in firefox and linked to their pages. Then if I am wanting to 'see what is going on'. I open all links in that folder. I do that maybe once a month. Twitter is an attention machine. It feeds on getting your attention. Outrage does that quite nicely so they boderline openly encourage it.
- keiferski 6y agoThis is a good idea. Unfortunately other social media sites have started to force logging in to see content (Instagram, for example) so I worry that Twitter will do something similar soon.
- sumtechguy 6y agoDo they let you log in and 'remember' or is it every time?
- keiferski 6y agoI don't think Instagram lets you view any pages without logging in.
- snowwrestler 6y agoMy solution to this was to set my Twitter account to private and kick out almost all my followers. So if I do get tempted to tweet a reply to something, no one will see it anyway.
- searchableguy 6y agoI unfollowed everything on twitter and few other sites yesterday. I got tired of manufactured content on my timeline. (I found some newsletters and trend sites that happened to be the cause of everyone doing the same things at the same time)
- zachware 6y agoI do this using Feedbin for Twitter follows and (gasp) RSS. I find it useful.
- raybb 6y agoYou may want to try rss-bridge so you can just get tweets from those people into a feed reader
- schemy 6y ago>However, the caveat to that is that journalists are on Twitter, pay a lot of attention to Twitter, and report it as reality. Getting dogpiled on Twitter may not matter, but having it reported in newspapers may make it matter. And how many people read newspapers? The only thing that matters to a business is when people show up with placards in front of the business, or the CEOs house. The cases where that happens are so few and far between that by ignoring everything a newspaper writes you improve your business's performance by the simple fact you're not paying someone to waste time. The rest of it can be summed up as "don't get caught putting babies in blenders".
- marcus_holmes 6y agoWell, investors get jittery if there's a lot of noise. Deals have failed because of controversy started by Twitter dogpiles. And you really don't need to go as far as a baby-blender interaction to generate a Twitter storm. Just hint at anything that might be construed as limiting a journalist's right to publish wtf they feel like publishing ;)