When I joined twitter a few month ago to promote my scientific publications + open source software projects, I set myself a number of clear rules: 1. Don't eng

When I joined twitter a few month ago to promote my scientific publications + open source software projects, I set myself a number of clear rules: 1. Don't engage with or comment on political / social issues. 2. Don't install the app, set a time limit on twitter for all devices. 3. Follow other scientists with few exceptions. 4. Flag posts as irrelevant to me that express anger or controversial political opinions (I especially don't need to know anyones take on the Corona situation). So far it has worked pretty well, I've got invited to give talks based on initial visibility I generated on Twitter. The open source software project I'm working on came to the attention / got engagement / retweets from relevant people. I reconnected with people that I met a few years ago and it even generated a few leads for job opportunities. It is also really useful to keep track of scientific progress in a field and seminars / workshops I might want to attend. The algorithm basically works against you though, even if you follow a few people that post / retweet a lot, they can come to dominate your newsfeed. I also came very close to engage with social / political content, simply because popular content that gets shown to you is often the most controversial. I ended up banning a few mainstream politicians, whose tweets kept getting retweeted by people I wanted to follow and that has solved the problem for the most part. Overall so far twitter seems to create more opportunities than issues for me, but I notice that I spend way more time there than I initially planned.