5 ms·
The difference for me has always beem that Twitter is organized by person rather than by topic. In some ways that's good if I'm following someone because I care
by 63 5y ago
The difference for me has always beem that Twitter is organized by person rather than by topic. In some ways that's good if I'm following someone because I care about them personally, but usually I follow people because I'm interested in a particular aspect of their work like art or announcements. In those cases, I don't want to hear about their political opinions or what their child did that week. I know you can follow topics as well, but that often seems overwhelming and imprecise. Social media as a platform is just incredibly confusing in the way it blurs the line between performer and audience.
- Talanes 5y agoLikes and Retweets are the big annoyances, IMO. If I'm following someone, it's because I want to see the content that they are consciously putting out, not just whatever they impulsively click a heart on. And unless you're a personal friend or a particularly interesting content aggregator, I probably don't care about your RTs either.
- baud147258 5y agoI've been mostly successful in removing likes from people I'm following by using (on the desktop) the ... > I'm not interested in this tweet > show fewer likes from X. Though sometime likes reappear and I have to reload the page once or twice to get a chronological timeline. Though that doesn't do anything about retweets.
- cpeterso 5y agoMuting words or hashtags helps a lot for focusing your timeline, though Twitter's mute list has a max of 200 words.
- nfrankel 5y agoI've found the solution a while ago: unfollow. I only follow people who tweet about themes that interest me. If somebody wants to tell the world their private life, good for them, but without me.
- ryantgtg 5y agoMy solution was to mute words. It was way too tedious to say “show fewer of Bob’s RTs”. So like, I muted the word “Trump”. But I use twitter in a really specific way, and I acknowledge this isn’t a great solution.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ragebol 5y agoI mostly ignore the stuff not about the topic I followed a person for, but it does help me to keep my world view wider.
- rconti 5y agoThis has been my fundamental problem with Twitter; I use Facebook to follow actual friends and their goings-on, and Twitter to follow Important People with Important Things To Say. Turns out, I care a lot more about the former than the latter. You could relatively easily flip the script and use the platforms in the opposite way. (although Twitter's narrow reach makes it harder to follow IRL "friends" because they're not so likely to be on the platform or use it regularly).
- jasonladuke0311 5y agoYup. There was this "follow the whole person!" bullshit on infosec Twitter a while back, and it was just such nonsense. I follow them because I'm interested in their thoughts on computer security, no other reason. I couldn't care less about a security nerd's political opinions; it's just as irrelevant to me as a politician's thoughts on computer security.
- soundnote 5y agoThe politician could be trying to legislate standardizing on Windows XP, banning firewalls and connecting said computers to the Internet.
- jasonladuke0311 5y agoAnd the security nerd could be running for local office. Typical HN navel-gazing that is orthogonal to the point.