15 ms·

A Guide to Twitter

228 points by tasshin 5y ago

throwaway87778 5y ago
TheRealNGenius 5y ago
would love a tl:dr
- twicetwice 5y ago
  don't use twitter to follow Important People and keep up with the daily outrage; use twitter to make friends through meaningful/interesting/fun interactions and good reply game. how to go about doing that is the meat of the article, and is worth reading if that sounds like something you would want to do.
- charlysl 5y ago
  Be my guest
- randomsilence 5y ago
  It's a full introduction to twitter with many aspects. I had to read it all to understand that twitter is more than a timeline of status updates. The idea that stands out to me is that twitter is some form of multi-user kinopio.club [1],[2] when you connect tweets into threads and when you use the search engine properly. [1] https://kinopio.club/ https://kinopio.club/ [2] Show HN: Kinopio.club – visual thinking, brainstorming tool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132631
pjerem 5y ago
I totally failed to use Twitter in any reasonable way. I used it for years, trying to follow interesting people or artists but in the end, it was just an amplified echo chamber of myself. Everyday there was the shitstorm of the day. Absence of nuance was the norm (nuance is not prone to RTs, I believe). Everyone there is trying to push its personal fight, which, while I generally agree with, is never the reason I come to Twitter. Yes I want the world to change about [society topic] but no, Twitter is just not the place for that. In the end, I was mindlessly scrolling through rage and polarized opinions while I was coming to learn / love / occupy myself. Maybe I did something wrong, maybe it was not for me. I closed my account. I don’t miss it but each time I read an article like this I happen to think that maybe I missed something wonderful about Twitter.
- te_chris 5y ago
  I did the same. What really ruined the product for me was the “X who you follow liked this”. If I wanted that shit I’d follow the person.
  - kkcorps 5y ago
    This thing is ruining my experience as well. I don't want any time of suggestions in my feed. I curated it so that there's only people of tech who talk mostly about tech but my feed is pure garbage now filled with political comments, holidays pics etc. of people I don't even follow.
  - oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
    Can you explain further? It sounds like you do follow that person based on the message.
    - matsemann 5y ago
      They follow person X, but not profile Y which had the tweet X liked. Thus they don't want content from Y in their feed.
      - oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
        I see. I consider this a double edged sword, but the positive edge is sharper: the people I follow tend to like things that don't annoy me more often than not. I do agree that it would be useful to be able to configure what appears, though.
  - aniforprez 5y ago
    That's because you're using the "default" view which mixes up the order of your tweets and inserts stuff like this. If you change the view by clicking the sparks icon at the top left and selecting "latest", it simply becomes a reverse chronological order of tweets by people you follow The algorithm of what I want to see is so terrible I never bother with the default view. I've been using latest for years
cobertos 5y ago
I've bounced in and out of Twitter. I still can't get over feeling like my connections with people are mediated by an algorithm. Like, I will be talking to X, Y and Z today because they posted and the timeline thought I'd like it. It felt so one sided too. I would comment and like their stuff much more than they would for mine, and it just felt, wrong... Like I was waaay too focussed on them, but sometimes that's all my timeline would show me. Also there's people I really wish it wouldn't suggest me to IRL that it does frequently. I don't want to block these people, for the implication that has socially. I have for one but it was a Big Deal. I'd rather it not serve us to each other as often.
haunter 5y ago
I started using Twitter very early, in 2006, and was fun for a while. But I don't remember exactly when the timeline and recommendation changes totally ruined it. Apart from the main timeline they used to only show tweets from people you follow liked which was OK, at least acceptable. I still see these time to time but became selective? I see it from some accounts but not all. A person I follow stopped tweeting and I thought something happened but alas they are still active liking tweets but I don't see those anymore on my timeline, yet I see from other accounts... for whatever reason Then they started showing random tweets from people you follow follow. That's when I started to use the site less and less because most of the time my interaction was clicking on "not interested in this Tweet". Totally out of context stuff I don't care about. Final nail in the coffin was the topics. Just randomly filling your timeline with random tweets because I assume some AI thought I might like that but it's worse than the Youtube recommendations. Just because I like ONE Tweet the AI started promoting everything related to that content or the account made it. It's just a mess. Wish we can "reset" our accounts or something to blank state
- pjc50 5y ago
  There is a button in the top right of the timeline to switch to "latest tweets". Everyone I know hates "top tweets" (algo timeline) as well.
asicsp 5y ago
I loved the section about search tips and the vim-like shortcuts for moving up-down. I decided to try building an audience to sell my ebooks better last August, but the connections I made with fellow authors was the better outcome (similar to what's mentioned in this article). It has also helped me to become better at highlighting single concepts instead of users losing focus when faced with a wall of features.
the_gipsy 5y ago
My number one gripe with Twitter is that a link to a tweet is not a simple static HTML page. Instead (guessing here, haven't inspected) you get a page that loads some generic JavaScript, that reads in the URL and extracts that you are, in fact, trying to read a tweet with some ID, and then goes on to load the contents of that tweet by doing an "API request" to fetch its data (probably as JSON), and when the response comes in, finally the tweet's contents are turned into HTML and inserted replacing the dreading spinner gif. My number two is that it's simply frustrating as late-comer, seeing all the established users talking to each others, while you must try to shout witty replies into the void in hopes that some of them are worthy enough for any of the cool kids to engage.
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  “it's simply frustrating as late-comer” - I think this is the major shortcoming of the network and ultimately will be the death of it. I wonder if modern version of twitter could be made, more orientated around an “algorithm” that mixed things up a bit (like tiktok) rather than just a followers / no followers hierarchy of things.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - celeritascelery 5y ago
    Basically the only thing twitter has going for it is that it is NOT algorithmic. Using a third party client I can see exactly what the people I follow tweet and nothing from twitter itself.
  - draw_down 5y ago
- DarylZero 5y ago
  Actually, Twitter only dropped the accessibility via simple HTML in late 2021. Before that you could read twitter links in w3m (and they could be indexed).
Croftengea 5y ago
Great guide, but some suggestions go a bit overboard. I can't imagine to "invite them to do a Zoom call" people I follow in Twitter :)
eitland 5y ago
I try to use Twitter, but I need two accounts, one for Norwegian and one for English. I also cannot tell Twitter that some of my post are probably most interesting for programmers, others for people living close to where I live. etc There was some hype a few years ago about how artificial limitations created "interestingness": Snapchat and Instagram and Twitter were held out as examples, and I guess this was around the time Yo (with the single "Yo" button) was released. But personally, while I saw the benefits of Snap and Instagram I have newer seen any benefit of Twitters model. And yet it stumbles on, driven by network effects years after first WhatsApp, then Telegram and Signal and Matrix have explored and found niches around almost everything Twitter could have been useful for.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  I have only one account, I tweet in English or Dutch depending on the subject, that seems to work quite well.
matsemann 5y ago
When I signed up for twitter many years ago as a student, I used it to follow tech people. It was nice to learn new stuff. But it also felt very limited. Who to follow? What's just noise? How can I follow someone's tech tweets and not personal tweets? How do avoid political rabbit holes? And why should anyone follow me back? Myself retweeted random stuff I cared about, wrote some personal tweets etc. So I ended up abandoning twitter for many years as I kinda didn't find a use case for it. Last year I made a new profile, though. Not a personal one, but dedicated to a single cause. It's much more fun to have this hyper focused profile. People follow me because they know what they get. I interact only with related content etc. But the interface is confusing. Very hard to follow discussions when they branch out. And can't follow new comments on something. The notifications are impossible to make sense of, and I don't even get that many. I had to learn the etiquette on how others in my area uses tweets, retweets, quote tweets etc, and I still don't understand it all.
- matsemann 5y ago
  But a question: how do people make additional accounts now that Twitter requires phone verification? Or is it possible to verify multiple accounts on my same number? Google voice not available here.
  - abhaynayar 5y ago
    Yes, it is possible to verify multiple accounts on the same number.
  - nyuszika7h 5y ago
    Twitter's help page [1] claims you can verify up to 10 accounts with the same phone number, but in reality there's a few weeks cooldown period after 2 accounts where you won't be able to reuse the same number even if you remove it from all accounts. You used to be able to verify 4 at once by removing the number from each account right after verification, but now they're stricter and removing the number right after verification rather than waiting a few weeks is very likely to get your account locked and asking for phone verification again immediately. You can use Google Voice (if you live in the US) or getsmscode.com, though. I've used the latter a lot for multiple sites and it's mostly reliable, better than free alternatives and it only has a very minimal cost ($0.1-$0.5 per verification text). Although it should be noted that sometimes Twitter will randomly force you to re-verify your phone number a while later, and the numbers on this site don't last forever (the US ones generally last for at least a few months, while Chinese ones likely won't work the next day already), so your account may be locked forever unless you manage to successfully appeal to Twitter (which can take anywhere between an hour and 6 months to get a response, whether it is positive or negative). [1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/phone-number-faqs https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/phone-numb...
goblin89 5y ago
> If they mirror your interest, you two can take it up to the next level. If there’s someone you want to become friends with: > 1. follow them > 2. reply to and interact with their tweets …and, based on first-hand experience, get blocked. Presumably, because the other advice given by Twitter users to Twitter users today is “block based on a single tweet”. This makes Twitter excellent if you have a witty personality with a preexisting crowd of followers or friends, but otherwise the time and effort you spend trying to connect goes into the void. That’s why I prefer HN instead. It doesn’t lend itself to profiling others, following and blocking is not the perpetual drama, and contributions to discussion are the focus.
revorad 5y ago
I'm like an alcoholic with Twitter. I can't use it in moderation (trust me, I've tried). Either I'm on it 24/7 or I'm completely out (haven't used it for the last ~6 months). If it weren't for the benefits to my business (it's one of the best marketing channels), I would have deleted my account years ago.
- gnyman 5y ago
  have you tried another client without the endless scroll? Also unfollow or mute everyone who isn't posting things you find real interesting (and also some that post interesting stuff but posts way too much, those I move out to a separate list which I review sometimes) :-) I find having a manageable timeline a super useful tool to catch up on interesting or important news. But every now and then I notice that even with a old-fashioned timeline I spend too much time and I look over who I follow and cull people who post too things I forget the second I've scrolled past and instead keep the people who post well-thought-out things infrequently.
ed 5y ago
> was 15, and I loved reading Metafilter, Digg, TechCrunch, Lifehacker, and 43 Folders I think the author means 42 Things, which was one of the first “Web 2.0” sites (and back then basically meant user generated content and ajax-y features).
- bstpierre 5y ago
  Maybe, but also http://www.43folders.com/ http://www.43folders.com/ would fit the narrative too
- callahad 5y ago
  43 Folders was Merlin Mann's celebration of David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity system. It was very, very popular with the MeFi / Digg / Lifehacker crowd back then.
jacquesm 5y ago
Twitter is fantastic for me. Meet interesting people from all walks of life, interact with them. Just one example: I posted a (very crappy!) rendering of a piece of music yesterday as a New Years wish and got a super nice response from the original artist within a couple of minutes. In real life that would never happen. My tip for using Twitter: just be yourself, and treat your timeline as your livingroom. If people are rude toss them, if they use your livingroom as their platform then toss them too. That way the atmosphere stays nice both for you and others. On that note: Happy New Year hacker news.
- saimiam 5y ago
  Toss out how? Is that the same as blocking them?
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Yes.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  > "just be yourself" I struggle with this. Because there are bits of my character that are popular, and there are bits that aren't. Some things that I say resonate with lots of people and get lots of fake internet points. Other things, not so much. After an incredibly short time "being myself" I find it almost impossible to not think of how what I'm posting will be received, rather than how much I want to say it. If I have an unpopular opinion, I know that posting it will cause a shitfight and I don't want to deal with that. So I don't post it. I end up only posting the things that I think will be received well. That's not "just being myself", that's putting some fake mask over myself in order to be popular, and that shit wrecks my mental health. How do you "just be yourself" on Twitter without dealing with this? Do you not have unpopular opinions? Do you avoid posting opinions that will start a shitfight? If a post you make does cause a lot of negative comments, how do you deal with that?
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    I think the big difference between you and me is I don't actually care about what other people think of me. You can just ignore the responses, there is absolutely no obligation to 'be popular' or to pander to your audience. I have lots of unpopular opinions, on Twitter as well as on HN. I could not care less what others think of my opinions, as long as we can converge on a set of commonly shared facts that's already profit in my book. On HN this typically manifests as downvotes, but just like I am not particularly attached to the upvotes I learned over time to not worry about the downvotes either: they're not necessarily a reflection of whether you are right or not but it's merely a popularity thing and that's not the right yardstick to measure opinions by. Lots of people have toxic or bad opinions that are shared by such a large number of their neighbors that they believe that those are right, regardless of what the state of those opinions is when viewed through a more absolute lens. In the end it's just like your street: leave it a little bit cleaner than you found it and things will over time improve. Litter and degrade and over time you'll come to live in a garbage dump.
tluyben2 5y ago
Been using Twitter lately; so much evangelising web3 there... I did not see that coming.
HlessClaudesman 5y ago
I'm going dark on social media this year, twitter especially. There are some amazing posts on twitter, but how much crap do you have to wade through to get to them? Nuzzel was great at filtering down to the most relevant article, but twitter caught and killed that company, it's acqui-hired CEO promising to move some features into twitter but they never materialised. Twitter wants me to consider the uninformed and the informed alike, just so they can monetise my eyeballs, and in 2022 that's just a waste of our time. I think of my information diet as a classic signal to noise problem. My goal is to unearth thought provoking articles, twitter it might take an hour of slog to get one nugget, whereas hacker news offers about one per minute, and at the other end feral wastelands like the youtunbe comments section you would be lucky to get one gem a month. All of which is my round about way of saying that I love HN! The comments here are often more insightful than the article, and I feel that time spent here is actually time well spent. Happy new years to all the hackers, makers and grinders out there. Don't go changing!
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  I dropped Twitter about 5 years ago, and didn't miss it. I dropped FB over a year ago, and that improved my mental health considerably. I'm finding that I'm part of a growing minority. A large proportion of my friends have also dropped all social media (usually the more interesting friends). I do wonder where this is going.
  - ant6n 5y ago
    hn is social media.
    - Syonyk 5y ago
      It may fit some older definition of "social media," but the definition that it would fit as "social media" is so broad as to cover most of the internet anymore, including blogs with comment sections and forums. The line I draw, personally, to distinguish "harmful social media" from the rest of the web, is per-user algorithmic feeds optimized, by default, for "engagement." That's the mark of a surveillance capitalism extraction beast, and that sort of thing is well demonstrated to be absolute poison to humans. Hacker News (and to an extent reddit, though they're trying to get away from this as far as I can tell, and the algorithmic front page certainly doesn't qualify) have a single consistent "global state." If I'm logged in to HN, I see the same global state as other people do, and as a logged out user sees (subject to a few tweaks like seeing dead/flagged content, which I can't do logged out - but again, I believe everyone with that setting turned on sees the same thing). It's not trying to reorder the front page to engage me - it's simply a global state that can be modified by the bulk aggregate of user interaction, or moderator interaction, and that's reflected to all users. It also lacks the "bottomless bowl" endless scrolling style interface that encourages endless scrolling looking for something interesting. You can see other pages, but the standard view is top 30, and then you have to take a concrete action to see other stuff, not just scroll. It encourages a quick skim of the top stuff to see what's interesting, and then going to do something else because it's not going to change that rapidly. In terms of UI design, that's quite respectful to user attention, and is consistent with "HN tries to be useful, not to extract all the behavioral surplus it possibly can from as many users as possible." It is what it is, take it or leave it. The upvote/downvote system is prone to some harms, but HN tries to avoid most of that by keeping the vote views invisible to everyone else - you have to evaluate the comments by their text, not by what other people think of them (though the more insightful stuff tends to filter to the top, as it should). I would like an option to hide your own responses in the settings (similar to the "I need to work" delay option), but there's a small Chrome extension that does that - Hacker News Demetricifier or something along those lines. So while you can argue that it's "social media" by some definition, it's absolutely nowhere near the same design or motivations as the human-toxic systems we also call "social media." YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter being the worst. I understand TikTok is pretty bad as well, but I'm not in any way familiar with that system.
jeffrallen 5y ago
I started using Twitter to follow my new boss and his colleagues in a new to me industry. I stopped several months later because the legitimate "social action" content I was exposed to was overwhelming... I know the world is not perfect, and I try to improve it here and there, but I cannot take the full weight of all that must be fixed on my shoulders at all times.
jsemrau 5y ago
Twitter for me is a news source but not a social network.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
atmosx 5y ago
> You are the one who chooses whether to enter the hellsite or the heavensite. That's naive because pushes the narrative that corporate run social media are just a neutral platforms with no agenda. That's simply not true. The algorithm™ is optimised for retention and the best way to retain is, unfortunately, echo chamber and provocation. > I started using Twitter on a regular basis as an experiment in early 2020. Ah okay! I didn't read after that point, maybe the article should start with this quote.
- mwfogleman 5y ago
  This piece is written by two people, the second sentence was written by my co-author, Brian!
  - atmosx 5y ago
    I know. Re-reading my last comment, I'm afraid Brian paid the piper for many "I did X for 1 week and now I'm an expert" posts that appear on HN. A bit unfair to Brian for sure. I would hate it if Brian stops writing because of my comment. See how messed up the internet is? I'd like to read on the same topic after five years or so.
- freewilly1040 5y ago
  Yeah. I was out on the article after the heaven or hellsite line. To build a reasonable case, defenders of social media must at least acknowledge the toil and difficulty of making your feed anything but a rage inducing time sink, as well as the fact that the sites themselves are not your allies in doing so.
p4bl0 5y ago
My story with Twitter is extremely similar to that of the author. I joined in April 2007 and was seventeen at the time. I think I totally understand the author's position on most subject, but I would be less enthusiastic nonetheless.
jb1991 5y ago
In the last 12 months, I have dropped all social media, in this order: FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit. I almost removed my HN account too but decided it is in a different league (for now). Deleting them has had little effect on my life, to be honest, either positive or negative (except for FB which offered a much stronger ratio of negative/positive than the others and am glad it is totally out of my life).
- duke_core 5y ago
  How did you get out of that reddit scrolling hellhole
  - jb1991 5y ago
    It’s pretty easy! Just takes a couple of clicks in your Reddit settings! And poof!
m-i-l 5y ago
It doesn't talk about what the return on (time) investment is. I've made several concerted efforts over the past 10+ years to use Twitter, with various accounts on various subjects, dutifully regularly posting, following, unfollowing etc. as per recommendations in articles such as this, but all I've ended up with is the sense of having wasted an enormous amount of time and got nothing worthwhile in return. I don't think I've being using it incorrectly, and I'm starting to think that actually might be the attraction for many people. The received wisdom seems to be that people are being manipulated into squandering their time on the social media platforms to view more adverts and increase their profits (with the underlying assumption that the time would have otherwise been spent on more fruitful pursuits), but I'm starting to wonder if many people actually want to waste their time for whatever reason, e.g. to escape the bleak realities of their grim existences.
- schleck8 5y ago
  > I've made several concerted efforts over the past 10+ years to use Twitter, with various accounts on various subjects, dutifully regularly posting, following, unfollowing etc. as per recommendations in articles such as this, but all I've ended up with is the sense of having wasted an enormous amount of time and got nothing worthwhile in return Same for me. I did try to avoid any drama and keyboard wars, but it's simply not possible with how often the algorithm pushes political topics into the trends. I'm thinking about blocking it in my router, i don't think i'll be missing out
- jacquesm 5y ago
  When you approach it from that angle it must be super frustrating, but if you don't look at everything in life from an ROI perspective then it gets a lot easier. I try to be a 'force of good' on whatever platform I join, over the years my focus has shifted considerably and that in turn made me decide to quit certain social media websites (for instance: fieldlines, slashdot), and join others. I'm not the most social person in person (to put it mildly) so this allows me to compensate for that to a certain extent.
- wpietri 5y ago
  The notion that some people want to escape the bleak realities of their grim existences is not particularly new. One just has to look at the history of alcohol consumption; for parts of history, a lot of people were drinking quite a bit. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_alcoholic_drinks#Medieval_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_alcoholic_drinks#Me... Sure, people also use Twitter for that. And almost everything else. As a kid that was surely a big part of why I read huge quantities of SF novels. But that doesn't mean that the only point of having a beer or reading a paperback or using Twitter is time-wasting escapism. I learn a ton from Twitter, getting insights and experiences from people I never would have heard from otherwise. Other people get real community out of it. Still others find it professionally useful: networking with colleagues, finding jobs, keeping up with their fields. So maybe you're using it wrong and maybe it's not for you. But your inability to get something out of it doesn't tell you much about the experience of a lot of people.
andresp 5y ago
It seems like someone made a huge personal investment on twitter and is now trying to convince others to do the same in order to increase the value of whatever they achieved there. Maybe Twitter is amazing for you, that's great. You can keep it.
jollybean 5y ago
This is all fine and good, but apart from very very few people who meet a few colleagues this way, it seems like a giant waste of time. Negative toxicity is obvious, we know that's 'not good'. But I feel even the novel useful bits of Twitter are 'mostly rubbish'. The best Tweets are generally longer statements made by individuals, pointing to research more in the vein of 'microblog'. In fact - what I think would be useful is a non social 'microblog' where people can make posts of highly relevant information of arbitrary length. I don't think anyone other than journalists really benefit from Twitter. I think that we should pretend as if it does not exist, and anything said or done there 'does not count' in terms of anything.
pomber 5y ago
I would make more emphasis on the Muted Words list: https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords That's what makes Twitter bearable for me.
- nvr219 5y ago
  What's on your muted words list? Here's mine: RT @ suggest_pyle_tweet suggest_recycled_tweet_inline suggest_activity_tweet
shruubi 5y ago
I never really got into Twitter. I could never understand the point of posts limited to 140 characters and my severe lack of self esteem means I live my life believing that nothing I say is worth hearing or in any way remotely interesting. In saying that, every time I've tried to "do" Twitter, I just find myself in this space where I feel a mix of sadness, anger, hatred and other negative emotions because 95% of Twitter is either people assuming the worst in everyone, calling other people every horrible name conceivable or just generally being another awful person in a sea of awful people. The fact that I've never quite "got" Twitter has meant that I feel no attachment to it, and don't care if I remove it from my life, so it's not like I'm losing any sleep over it. But, it also helps immensely that removing Twitter from my life is like cutting off a necrotising limb that you never needed to begin with.
- dgellow 5y ago
  You can use it as a write-only log. You have a clever thought or idea, or did something you think is cool? Share it, and you now have a public log for yourself, or for your friends. You don't have to look for interactions, Twitter is a horrible tool for that, but the interface makes it very simple to share a quick thought.
- wpietri 5y ago
  No reason you should use it. But your characterization of the general content is unfair. There are millions of positive, thoughtful people using it for things other than "being awful". I follow a bunch of people in the ADHD and autism communities and get a ton out of hearing what their lives are like and how they're dealing with things. I also follow a bunch of academics so I get to hear a lot about niche topics from people who are world-class experts. Twitter will show you whatever it thinks you want. If you follow a lot of awful people and engage with a lot of awful stuff, it will make sure you get plenty of it. But if you switch to the "latest tweets" view and are careful about who you follow, you can get a lot out of it. Also, as somebody who used to have severe self esteem issues, I really encourage you to find a therapist you like and respect to work on that. They, plus the underlying issues, can make almost anything unenjoyable. As long as we have biases toward seeing ourselves negatively, anything that invites us to be ourselves will feel negative. Edit: Fresh from the top of my timeline, here's an example of the sort of positive niche content from the ADHD/autism communities, a discussion of experiences with medications for ADHD: https://twitter.com/HolSmale/status/1477308561256558595 https://twitter.com/HolSmale/status/1477308561256558595
bstpierre 5y ago
I think a lot of the advice in the article is also relevant to having conversations in other more limited (but still sizable) communities like some topic specific slack or discord servers, or certain forums. Maybe even some rare subreddit but they’re less likely to be structured to support a conversation. Twitter always just seems so vast and complicated that it’s hard to fathom.
- mwfogleman 5y ago
  yes, especially reply game! it's a general skill that's useful everywhere socially, including in person
Nezteb 5y ago
My rules for Twitter: - Mute as many political/controversial words as I can. I currently have 193 muted words/phrases. - Turn off retweets for every single person I follow. I don’t want to see them. - If someone I follow consistently posts things I find uninteresting, I mute them instead of unfollowing so I can still find them easily if I want to. - Never use the explore/trending tabs. To this end I have a local user script that completely hides the trending sidebar. These rules have made Twitter exponentially more enjoyable for me.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  Can you share your world list?
  - Nezteb 5y ago
    It's actually only 141 apparently: https://pastebin.com/Aiu9dQKH https://pastebin.com/Aiu9dQKH
eatonphil 5y ago
I love Twitter, it's helped me reach a lot of people for personal and professional work. Two things that annoy me about twitter. One, it seems to weight tweets by newer follows higher. I keep my follow list to pretty exactly people I want to hear from. But often I see I've missed tweets from people I followed 100 or 200 follows again. I hate this! Two, it doesn't seem to do a good job normalizing tweet frequency across accounts. So I can't follow big tweeters like foone because my time line gets destroyed by their many (but still good) tweets. Anyone have a solution for either?
- wpietri 5y ago
  For the first, consider making "Latest Tweets" your default rather than "Home". For the latter, consider putting those big tweeters on lists instead of following. You can check in on them occasionally via the list.
  - eatonphil 5y ago
    I have tried latest tweets too but then I just miss the people who don't post at the same time I'm around. I have also tried lists but Twitter's lists are a truly second class entity compared to accounts. You can only have 4 show up on your time line and they show up quite infrequently. Lists not in my time line I never remember to check.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      Yeah, ultimately we're drinking from a firehose here; Twitter provides more good content than I can ever consume. So for me these choices are about regret minimization. Personally, I just stick with the latest tweets view and occasionally pop into the ranked timeline to get a different slice on things. But if you want more control, you might also consider a different client, like tweetdeck. Or having different accounts for different purposes.
ejb999 5y ago
I gave up twitter, facebook and most all other social media about a 18 +/- months ago (though was never a big user to begin with) - it is truly a cesspool (and yes, I realize that HN is a minor version of social media). I even went so far as to modify my hosts file so that I can't even get to twitter, facebook, instagram or LinkedIn (and several other places), just to resist the urge to follow a link that would bring me down the rabbit-hole. Once you realize the entire business model of these social media giants is pretty much like a boxing match promoter - i.e. get the two sides to hate each other, and watch the groups fight it out online (and sell ads to make a profit). It is not a coincidence that Americans are now strictly divided about just about every topic - and it has become pretty acceptable to wish death on anyone that disagrees with you on anything - that was not a mistake by Zuckerberg/Dorsey et al - that was by design. The more people hate each other, the more willing they are to get into the mosh-pit of social media and fight it out - while FB/Twitter sells advertising to the event. Never forget: Zuckerberg/Dorsey and many others got rich by dividing Americans and amplifying the hate on both sides to be able to sell even more ads while they fight it out online.
2-718-281-828 5y ago
Exploring trends on twitter doesn't work. I'm in Germany. There is a list of terms currently trending. I click on one. And if it is even remotely not superspecific in general or to German language then I will get shown tweets from whatever part of the world and that mainly. My trick is to add "lang:de" to the search but that is annoying and doesn't work reliably. They should have a way to actually explore a trend - if "Covid" is trending in Germany all of a sudden then this is likely not directly related to some tweet from India about "Covid". So annoying. I mostly go on twitter to get perspectives from my professor of choice on Corona stuff: https://twitter.com/stohr_klaus https://twitter.com/stohr_klaus
tomcam 5y ago
Incredibly helpful guide. Had no idea about most of this.
yob89 5y ago
leephillips 5y ago
You can use Twitter as a useful source of information and news while avoiding the time-wasting and toxic aspects, and sidestepping Twitter’s manipulative algorithms. The key is to make strategic use of lists and never look at your timeline: https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/ https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/
aantix 5y ago
When I see someone that gained 35K followers in a year, I feel skeptical. How? I’ve seen numbers even on viral tweets, and the number of followers gained is really low. So there has to be more to to getting followers than just writing good content.
ArtDev 5y ago
I went dark on social media about nine months ago. It's been great for my mental health. Ironically, it was Reddit that brought me back. The reason is there is freedom to being anonymous while having all your posts public. Like HN. I have new accounts and I only follow and post around a single interest of mine. Even my Facebook account is anonymous. My system works well. I plan to keep using it across 2022. HN and Reddit have shown me that single-subject media is typically positive and fun. I have no idea what my real friends are up to unless I see them or text them. I like my life this way. It feels like my world is smaller but it also wonderfully quieter.. in a good way.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
My guide to Twitter: don’t use it. Your mental health will thank you.
aleksandrh 5y ago
Good read, but I don't believe it's possible to make friends online in the true sense of that term. I've been doing things online for a majority of my life. Forums, gaming, chatting with strangers. I've made many "friends" this way, but they're not people I know. We've lost touch over the years, and I wouldn't ever turn to them for help because we don't know each other that well anyway. Twitter is the same. The best you can have is acquaintances, peers/colleagues, or followers.
karaterobot 5y ago
This is a thoughtful guide, and I enjoyed reading it. Ironically, you could never publish something like this on Twitter itself, which is why I'll continue to stay away.
AlexCoventry 5y ago
Seems likely that this is the 2022 version of the Submarine. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html Kudos to the new executive team at twitter.
arctica123 5y ago
Twitter can be really useful for academia where the character limit forces you to condense the main points of your research into one or a couple of short bullet points. Together with a small gif and links to project page and arxiv, this makes it really easy to get attention for your work and follow that of others. Sometimes it is even possible yo start some meaningful discussions there. You have to carefully curate who to follow though.
keerthiko 5y ago
Obligatory, if you find your twitter experience garbage mostly because of algorithms that keep suggesting things to you that you explicitly did not follow/sign up for in your feed (random ppl's tweets liked by someone you follow, entirely viral retweets, replies from strangers to ppl you follow, "suggested people/tweets", etc) then save yourself the trouble and simply bookmark realtwitter.com[0] It's a very simple search filter redirect that removes most of the garbage[1] Throw in uBlock or some ad blocker in your desktop browser and you're good to go. Never use twitter's mobile app except to tweet or view notifications. [0](realtwitter.com) - not clickable in HN but you can type that into your browser bar [1](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3Areplies https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=filter%3Afollows%20-fi...).

A Guide to Twitter

228 points by tasshin 5y ago

throwaway87778 5y ago

TheRealNGenius 5y ago

would love a tl:dr

twicetwice 5y ago
don't use twitter to follow Important People and keep up with the daily outrage; use twitter to make friends through meaningful/interesting/fun interactions and good reply game. how to go about doing that is the meat of the article, and is worth reading if that sounds like something you would want to do.
charlysl 5y ago
Be my guest
randomsilence 5y ago
It's a full introduction to twitter with many aspects. I had to read it all to understand that twitter is more than a timeline of status updates. The idea that stands out to me is that twitter is some form of multi-user kinopio.club [1],[2] when you connect tweets into threads and when you use the search engine properly. [1] https://kinopio.club/ https://kinopio.club/ [2] Show HN: Kinopio.club – visual thinking, brainstorming tool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132631

pjerem 5y ago

I totally failed to use Twitter in any reasonable way. I used it for years, trying to follow interesting people or artists but in the end, it was just an amplified echo chamber of myself. Everyday there was the shitstorm of the day. Absence of nuance was the norm (nuance is not prone to RTs, I believe). Everyone there is trying to push its personal fight, which, while I generally agree with, is never the reason I come to Twitter. Yes I want the world to change about [society topic] but no, Twitter is just not the place for that. In the end, I was mindlessly scrolling through rage and polarized opinions while I was coming to learn / love / occupy myself. Maybe I did something wrong, maybe it was not for me. I closed my account. I don’t miss it but each time I read an article like this I happen to think that maybe I missed something wonderful about Twitter.

te_chris 5y ago
I did the same. What really ruined the product for me was the “X who you follow liked this”. If I wanted that shit I’d follow the person.
- kkcorps 5y ago
  This thing is ruining my experience as well. I don't want any time of suggestions in my feed. I curated it so that there's only people of tech who talk mostly about tech but my feed is pure garbage now filled with political comments, holidays pics etc. of people I don't even follow.
- oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
  Can you explain further? It sounds like you do follow that person based on the message.
  - matsemann 5y ago
    They follow person X, but not profile Y which had the tweet X liked. Thus they don't want content from Y in their feed.
    - oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
      I see. I consider this a double edged sword, but the positive edge is sharper: the people I follow tend to like things that don't annoy me more often than not. I do agree that it would be useful to be able to configure what appears, though.
- aniforprez 5y ago
  That's because you're using the "default" view which mixes up the order of your tweets and inserts stuff like this. If you change the view by clicking the sparks icon at the top left and selecting "latest", it simply becomes a reverse chronological order of tweets by people you follow The algorithm of what I want to see is so terrible I never bother with the default view. I've been using latest for years

cobertos 5y ago

I've bounced in and out of Twitter. I still can't get over feeling like my connections with people are mediated by an algorithm. Like, I will be talking to X, Y and Z today because they posted and the timeline thought I'd like it. It felt so one sided too. I would comment and like their stuff much more than they would for mine, and it just felt, wrong... Like I was waaay too focussed on them, but sometimes that's all my timeline would show me. Also there's people I really wish it wouldn't suggest me to IRL that it does frequently. I don't want to block these people, for the implication that has socially. I have for one but it was a Big Deal. I'd rather it not serve us to each other as often.

haunter 5y ago

I started using Twitter very early, in 2006, and was fun for a while. But I don't remember exactly when the timeline and recommendation changes totally ruined it. Apart from the main timeline they used to only show tweets from people you follow liked which was OK, at least acceptable. I still see these time to time but became selective? I see it from some accounts but not all. A person I follow stopped tweeting and I thought something happened but alas they are still active liking tweets but I don't see those anymore on my timeline, yet I see from other accounts... for whatever reason Then they started showing random tweets from people you follow follow. That's when I started to use the site less and less because most of the time my interaction was clicking on "not interested in this Tweet". Totally out of context stuff I don't care about. Final nail in the coffin was the topics. Just randomly filling your timeline with random tweets because I assume some AI thought I might like that but it's worse than the Youtube recommendations. Just because I like ONE Tweet the AI started promoting everything related to that content or the account made it. It's just a mess. Wish we can "reset" our accounts or something to blank state

pjc50 5y ago
There is a button in the top right of the timeline to switch to "latest tweets". Everyone I know hates "top tweets" (algo timeline) as well.

asicsp 5y ago

I loved the section about search tips and the vim-like shortcuts for moving up-down. I decided to try building an audience to sell my ebooks better last August, but the connections I made with fellow authors was the better outcome (similar to what's mentioned in this article). It has also helped me to become better at highlighting single concepts instead of users losing focus when faced with a wall of features.

the_gipsy 5y ago

My number one gripe with Twitter is that a link to a tweet is not a simple static HTML page. Instead (guessing here, haven't inspected) you get a page that loads some generic JavaScript, that reads in the URL and extracts that you are, in fact, trying to read a tweet with some ID, and then goes on to load the contents of that tweet by doing an "API request" to fetch its data (probably as JSON), and when the response comes in, finally the tweet's contents are turned into HTML and inserted replacing the dreading spinner gif. My number two is that it's simply frustrating as late-comer, seeing all the established users talking to each others, while you must try to shout witty replies into the void in hopes that some of them are worthy enough for any of the cool kids to engage.

throwaway4good 5y ago
“it's simply frustrating as late-comer” - I think this is the major shortcoming of the network and ultimately will be the death of it. I wonder if modern version of twitter could be made, more orientated around an “algorithm” that mixed things up a bit (like tiktok) rather than just a followers / no followers hierarchy of things.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- celeritascelery 5y ago
  Basically the only thing twitter has going for it is that it is NOT algorithmic. Using a third party client I can see exactly what the people I follow tweet and nothing from twitter itself.
- draw_down 5y ago
DarylZero 5y ago
Actually, Twitter only dropped the accessibility via simple HTML in late 2021. Before that you could read twitter links in w3m (and they could be indexed).

Croftengea 5y ago

Great guide, but some suggestions go a bit overboard. I can't imagine to "invite them to do a Zoom call" people I follow in Twitter :)

eitland 5y ago

I try to use Twitter, but I need two accounts, one for Norwegian and one for English. I also cannot tell Twitter that some of my post are probably most interesting for programmers, others for people living close to where I live. etc There was some hype a few years ago about how artificial limitations created "interestingness": Snapchat and Instagram and Twitter were held out as examples, and I guess this was around the time Yo (with the single "Yo" button) was released. But personally, while I saw the benefits of Snap and Instagram I have newer seen any benefit of Twitters model. And yet it stumbles on, driven by network effects years after first WhatsApp, then Telegram and Signal and Matrix have explored and found niches around almost everything Twitter could have been useful for.

jacquesm 5y ago
I have only one account, I tweet in English or Dutch depending on the subject, that seems to work quite well.

matsemann 5y ago

When I signed up for twitter many years ago as a student, I used it to follow tech people. It was nice to learn new stuff. But it also felt very limited. Who to follow? What's just noise? How can I follow someone's tech tweets and not personal tweets? How do avoid political rabbit holes? And why should anyone follow me back? Myself retweeted random stuff I cared about, wrote some personal tweets etc. So I ended up abandoning twitter for many years as I kinda didn't find a use case for it. Last year I made a new profile, though. Not a personal one, but dedicated to a single cause. It's much more fun to have this hyper focused profile. People follow me because they know what they get. I interact only with related content etc. But the interface is confusing. Very hard to follow discussions when they branch out. And can't follow new comments on something. The notifications are impossible to make sense of, and I don't even get that many. I had to learn the etiquette on how others in my area uses tweets, retweets, quote tweets etc, and I still don't understand it all.

matsemann 5y ago
But a question: how do people make additional accounts now that Twitter requires phone verification? Or is it possible to verify multiple accounts on my same number? Google voice not available here.
- abhaynayar 5y ago
  Yes, it is possible to verify multiple accounts on the same number.
- nyuszika7h 5y ago
  Twitter's help page [1] claims you can verify up to 10 accounts with the same phone number, but in reality there's a few weeks cooldown period after 2 accounts where you won't be able to reuse the same number even if you remove it from all accounts. You used to be able to verify 4 at once by removing the number from each account right after verification, but now they're stricter and removing the number right after verification rather than waiting a few weeks is very likely to get your account locked and asking for phone verification again immediately. You can use Google Voice (if you live in the US) or getsmscode.com, though. I've used the latter a lot for multiple sites and it's mostly reliable, better than free alternatives and it only has a very minimal cost ($0.1-$0.5 per verification text). Although it should be noted that sometimes Twitter will randomly force you to re-verify your phone number a while later, and the numbers on this site don't last forever (the US ones generally last for at least a few months, while Chinese ones likely won't work the next day already), so your account may be locked forever unless you manage to successfully appeal to Twitter (which can take anywhere between an hour and 6 months to get a response, whether it is positive or negative). [1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/phone-number-faqs https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/phone-numb...

goblin89 5y ago

> If they mirror your interest, you two can take it up to the next level. If there’s someone you want to become friends with: > 1. follow them > 2. reply to and interact with their tweets …and, based on first-hand experience, get blocked. Presumably, because the other advice given by Twitter users to Twitter users today is “block based on a single tweet”. This makes Twitter excellent if you have a witty personality with a preexisting crowd of followers or friends, but otherwise the time and effort you spend trying to connect goes into the void. That’s why I prefer HN instead. It doesn’t lend itself to profiling others, following and blocking is not the perpetual drama, and contributions to discussion are the focus.

revorad 5y ago

I'm like an alcoholic with Twitter. I can't use it in moderation (trust me, I've tried). Either I'm on it 24/7 or I'm completely out (haven't used it for the last ~6 months). If it weren't for the benefits to my business (it's one of the best marketing channels), I would have deleted my account years ago.

gnyman 5y ago
have you tried another client without the endless scroll? Also unfollow or mute everyone who isn't posting things you find real interesting (and also some that post interesting stuff but posts way too much, those I move out to a separate list which I review sometimes) :-) I find having a manageable timeline a super useful tool to catch up on interesting or important news. But every now and then I notice that even with a old-fashioned timeline I spend too much time and I look over who I follow and cull people who post too things I forget the second I've scrolled past and instead keep the people who post well-thought-out things infrequently.

ed 5y ago

> was 15, and I loved reading Metafilter, Digg, TechCrunch, Lifehacker, and 43 Folders I think the author means 42 Things, which was one of the first “Web 2.0” sites (and back then basically meant user generated content and ajax-y features).

bstpierre 5y ago
Maybe, but also http://www.43folders.com/ http://www.43folders.com/ would fit the narrative too
callahad 5y ago
43 Folders was Merlin Mann's celebration of David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity system. It was very, very popular with the MeFi / Digg / Lifehacker crowd back then.

jacquesm 5y ago

Twitter is fantastic for me. Meet interesting people from all walks of life, interact with them. Just one example: I posted a (very crappy!) rendering of a piece of music yesterday as a New Years wish and got a super nice response from the original artist within a couple of minutes. In real life that would never happen. My tip for using Twitter: just be yourself, and treat your timeline as your livingroom. If people are rude toss them, if they use your livingroom as their platform then toss them too. That way the atmosphere stays nice both for you and others. On that note: Happy New Year hacker news.

saimiam 5y ago
Toss out how? Is that the same as blocking them?
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Yes.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
> "just be yourself" I struggle with this. Because there are bits of my character that are popular, and there are bits that aren't. Some things that I say resonate with lots of people and get lots of fake internet points. Other things, not so much. After an incredibly short time "being myself" I find it almost impossible to not think of how what I'm posting will be received, rather than how much I want to say it. If I have an unpopular opinion, I know that posting it will cause a shitfight and I don't want to deal with that. So I don't post it. I end up only posting the things that I think will be received well. That's not "just being myself", that's putting some fake mask over myself in order to be popular, and that shit wrecks my mental health. How do you "just be yourself" on Twitter without dealing with this? Do you not have unpopular opinions? Do you avoid posting opinions that will start a shitfight? If a post you make does cause a lot of negative comments, how do you deal with that?
- jacquesm 5y ago
  I think the big difference between you and me is I don't actually care about what other people think of me. You can just ignore the responses, there is absolutely no obligation to 'be popular' or to pander to your audience. I have lots of unpopular opinions, on Twitter as well as on HN. I could not care less what others think of my opinions, as long as we can converge on a set of commonly shared facts that's already profit in my book. On HN this typically manifests as downvotes, but just like I am not particularly attached to the upvotes I learned over time to not worry about the downvotes either: they're not necessarily a reflection of whether you are right or not but it's merely a popularity thing and that's not the right yardstick to measure opinions by. Lots of people have toxic or bad opinions that are shared by such a large number of their neighbors that they believe that those are right, regardless of what the state of those opinions is when viewed through a more absolute lens. In the end it's just like your street: leave it a little bit cleaner than you found it and things will over time improve. Litter and degrade and over time you'll come to live in a garbage dump.

tluyben2 5y ago

Been using Twitter lately; so much evangelising web3 there... I did not see that coming.

HlessClaudesman 5y ago

I'm going dark on social media this year, twitter especially. There are some amazing posts on twitter, but how much crap do you have to wade through to get to them? Nuzzel was great at filtering down to the most relevant article, but twitter caught and killed that company, it's acqui-hired CEO promising to move some features into twitter but they never materialised. Twitter wants me to consider the uninformed and the informed alike, just so they can monetise my eyeballs, and in 2022 that's just a waste of our time. I think of my information diet as a classic signal to noise problem. My goal is to unearth thought provoking articles, twitter it might take an hour of slog to get one nugget, whereas hacker news offers about one per minute, and at the other end feral wastelands like the youtunbe comments section you would be lucky to get one gem a month. All of which is my round about way of saying that I love HN! The comments here are often more insightful than the article, and I feel that time spent here is actually time well spent. Happy new years to all the hackers, makers and grinders out there. Don't go changing!

marcus_holmes 5y ago
I dropped Twitter about 5 years ago, and didn't miss it. I dropped FB over a year ago, and that improved my mental health considerably. I'm finding that I'm part of a growing minority. A large proportion of my friends have also dropped all social media (usually the more interesting friends). I do wonder where this is going.
- ant6n 5y ago
  hn is social media.
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    It may fit some older definition of "social media," but the definition that it would fit as "social media" is so broad as to cover most of the internet anymore, including blogs with comment sections and forums. The line I draw, personally, to distinguish "harmful social media" from the rest of the web, is per-user algorithmic feeds optimized, by default, for "engagement." That's the mark of a surveillance capitalism extraction beast, and that sort of thing is well demonstrated to be absolute poison to humans. Hacker News (and to an extent reddit, though they're trying to get away from this as far as I can tell, and the algorithmic front page certainly doesn't qualify) have a single consistent "global state." If I'm logged in to HN, I see the same global state as other people do, and as a logged out user sees (subject to a few tweaks like seeing dead/flagged content, which I can't do logged out - but again, I believe everyone with that setting turned on sees the same thing). It's not trying to reorder the front page to engage me - it's simply a global state that can be modified by the bulk aggregate of user interaction, or moderator interaction, and that's reflected to all users. It also lacks the "bottomless bowl" endless scrolling style interface that encourages endless scrolling looking for something interesting. You can see other pages, but the standard view is top 30, and then you have to take a concrete action to see other stuff, not just scroll. It encourages a quick skim of the top stuff to see what's interesting, and then going to do something else because it's not going to change that rapidly. In terms of UI design, that's quite respectful to user attention, and is consistent with "HN tries to be useful, not to extract all the behavioral surplus it possibly can from as many users as possible." It is what it is, take it or leave it. The upvote/downvote system is prone to some harms, but HN tries to avoid most of that by keeping the vote views invisible to everyone else - you have to evaluate the comments by their text, not by what other people think of them (though the more insightful stuff tends to filter to the top, as it should). I would like an option to hide your own responses in the settings (similar to the "I need to work" delay option), but there's a small Chrome extension that does that - Hacker News Demetricifier or something along those lines. So while you can argue that it's "social media" by some definition, it's absolutely nowhere near the same design or motivations as the human-toxic systems we also call "social media." YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter being the worst. I understand TikTok is pretty bad as well, but I'm not in any way familiar with that system.

jeffrallen 5y ago

I started using Twitter to follow my new boss and his colleagues in a new to me industry. I stopped several months later because the legitimate "social action" content I was exposed to was overwhelming... I know the world is not perfect, and I try to improve it here and there, but I cannot take the full weight of all that must be fixed on my shoulders at all times.

jsemrau 5y ago

Twitter for me is a news source but not a social network.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

atmosx 5y ago

> You are the one who chooses whether to enter the hellsite or the heavensite. That's naive because pushes the narrative that corporate run social media are just a neutral platforms with no agenda. That's simply not true. The algorithm™ is optimised for retention and the best way to retain is, unfortunately, echo chamber and provocation. > I started using Twitter on a regular basis as an experiment in early 2020. Ah okay! I didn't read after that point, maybe the article should start with this quote.

mwfogleman 5y ago
This piece is written by two people, the second sentence was written by my co-author, Brian!
- atmosx 5y ago
  I know. Re-reading my last comment, I'm afraid Brian paid the piper for many "I did X for 1 week and now I'm an expert" posts that appear on HN. A bit unfair to Brian for sure. I would hate it if Brian stops writing because of my comment. See how messed up the internet is? I'd like to read on the same topic after five years or so.
freewilly1040 5y ago
Yeah. I was out on the article after the heaven or hellsite line. To build a reasonable case, defenders of social media must at least acknowledge the toil and difficulty of making your feed anything but a rage inducing time sink, as well as the fact that the sites themselves are not your allies in doing so.

p4bl0 5y ago

My story with Twitter is extremely similar to that of the author. I joined in April 2007 and was seventeen at the time. I think I totally understand the author's position on most subject, but I would be less enthusiastic nonetheless.

jb1991 5y ago

In the last 12 months, I have dropped all social media, in this order: FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit. I almost removed my HN account too but decided it is in a different league (for now). Deleting them has had little effect on my life, to be honest, either positive or negative (except for FB which offered a much stronger ratio of negative/positive than the others and am glad it is totally out of my life).

duke_core 5y ago
How did you get out of that reddit scrolling hellhole
- jb1991 5y ago
  It’s pretty easy! Just takes a couple of clicks in your Reddit settings! And poof!

m-i-l 5y ago

It doesn't talk about what the return on (time) investment is. I've made several concerted efforts over the past 10+ years to use Twitter, with various accounts on various subjects, dutifully regularly posting, following, unfollowing etc. as per recommendations in articles such as this, but all I've ended up with is the sense of having wasted an enormous amount of time and got nothing worthwhile in return. I don't think I've being using it incorrectly, and I'm starting to think that actually might be the attraction for many people. The received wisdom seems to be that people are being manipulated into squandering their time on the social media platforms to view more adverts and increase their profits (with the underlying assumption that the time would have otherwise been spent on more fruitful pursuits), but I'm starting to wonder if many people actually want to waste their time for whatever reason, e.g. to escape the bleak realities of their grim existences.

schleck8 5y ago
> I've made several concerted efforts over the past 10+ years to use Twitter, with various accounts on various subjects, dutifully regularly posting, following, unfollowing etc. as per recommendations in articles such as this, but all I've ended up with is the sense of having wasted an enormous amount of time and got nothing worthwhile in return Same for me. I did try to avoid any drama and keyboard wars, but it's simply not possible with how often the algorithm pushes political topics into the trends. I'm thinking about blocking it in my router, i don't think i'll be missing out
jacquesm 5y ago
When you approach it from that angle it must be super frustrating, but if you don't look at everything in life from an ROI perspective then it gets a lot easier. I try to be a 'force of good' on whatever platform I join, over the years my focus has shifted considerably and that in turn made me decide to quit certain social media websites (for instance: fieldlines, slashdot), and join others. I'm not the most social person in person (to put it mildly) so this allows me to compensate for that to a certain extent.
wpietri 5y ago
The notion that some people want to escape the bleak realities of their grim existences is not particularly new. One just has to look at the history of alcohol consumption; for parts of history, a lot of people were drinking quite a bit. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_alcoholic_drinks#Medieval_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_alcoholic_drinks#Me... Sure, people also use Twitter for that. And almost everything else. As a kid that was surely a big part of why I read huge quantities of SF novels. But that doesn't mean that the only point of having a beer or reading a paperback or using Twitter is time-wasting escapism. I learn a ton from Twitter, getting insights and experiences from people I never would have heard from otherwise. Other people get real community out of it. Still others find it professionally useful: networking with colleagues, finding jobs, keeping up with their fields. So maybe you're using it wrong and maybe it's not for you. But your inability to get something out of it doesn't tell you much about the experience of a lot of people.

andresp 5y ago

It seems like someone made a huge personal investment on twitter and is now trying to convince others to do the same in order to increase the value of whatever they achieved there. Maybe Twitter is amazing for you, that's great. You can keep it.

jollybean 5y ago

This is all fine and good, but apart from very very few people who meet a few colleagues this way, it seems like a giant waste of time. Negative toxicity is obvious, we know that's 'not good'. But I feel even the novel useful bits of Twitter are 'mostly rubbish'. The best Tweets are generally longer statements made by individuals, pointing to research more in the vein of 'microblog'. In fact - what I think would be useful is a non social 'microblog' where people can make posts of highly relevant information of arbitrary length. I don't think anyone other than journalists really benefit from Twitter. I think that we should pretend as if it does not exist, and anything said or done there 'does not count' in terms of anything.

pomber 5y ago

I would make more emphasis on the Muted Words list: https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords That's what makes Twitter bearable for me.

nvr219 5y ago
What's on your muted words list? Here's mine: RT @ suggest_pyle_tweet suggest_recycled_tweet_inline suggest_activity_tweet

shruubi 5y ago

I never really got into Twitter. I could never understand the point of posts limited to 140 characters and my severe lack of self esteem means I live my life believing that nothing I say is worth hearing or in any way remotely interesting. In saying that, every time I've tried to "do" Twitter, I just find myself in this space where I feel a mix of sadness, anger, hatred and other negative emotions because 95% of Twitter is either people assuming the worst in everyone, calling other people every horrible name conceivable or just generally being another awful person in a sea of awful people. The fact that I've never quite "got" Twitter has meant that I feel no attachment to it, and don't care if I remove it from my life, so it's not like I'm losing any sleep over it. But, it also helps immensely that removing Twitter from my life is like cutting off a necrotising limb that you never needed to begin with.

dgellow 5y ago
You can use it as a write-only log. You have a clever thought or idea, or did something you think is cool? Share it, and you now have a public log for yourself, or for your friends. You don't have to look for interactions, Twitter is a horrible tool for that, but the interface makes it very simple to share a quick thought.
wpietri 5y ago
No reason you should use it. But your characterization of the general content is unfair. There are millions of positive, thoughtful people using it for things other than "being awful". I follow a bunch of people in the ADHD and autism communities and get a ton out of hearing what their lives are like and how they're dealing with things. I also follow a bunch of academics so I get to hear a lot about niche topics from people who are world-class experts. Twitter will show you whatever it thinks you want. If you follow a lot of awful people and engage with a lot of awful stuff, it will make sure you get plenty of it. But if you switch to the "latest tweets" view and are careful about who you follow, you can get a lot out of it. Also, as somebody who used to have severe self esteem issues, I really encourage you to find a therapist you like and respect to work on that. They, plus the underlying issues, can make almost anything unenjoyable. As long as we have biases toward seeing ourselves negatively, anything that invites us to be ourselves will feel negative. Edit: Fresh from the top of my timeline, here's an example of the sort of positive niche content from the ADHD/autism communities, a discussion of experiences with medications for ADHD: https://twitter.com/HolSmale/status/1477308561256558595 https://twitter.com/HolSmale/status/1477308561256558595

bstpierre 5y ago

I think a lot of the advice in the article is also relevant to having conversations in other more limited (but still sizable) communities like some topic specific slack or discord servers, or certain forums. Maybe even some rare subreddit but they’re less likely to be structured to support a conversation. Twitter always just seems so vast and complicated that it’s hard to fathom.

mwfogleman 5y ago
yes, especially reply game! it's a general skill that's useful everywhere socially, including in person

Nezteb 5y ago

My rules for Twitter: - Mute as many political/controversial words as I can. I currently have 193 muted words/phrases. - Turn off retweets for every single person I follow. I don’t want to see them. - If someone I follow consistently posts things I find uninteresting, I mute them instead of unfollowing so I can still find them easily if I want to. - Never use the explore/trending tabs. To this end I have a local user script that completely hides the trending sidebar. These rules have made Twitter exponentially more enjoyable for me.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Can you share your world list?
- Nezteb 5y ago
  It's actually only 141 apparently: https://pastebin.com/Aiu9dQKH https://pastebin.com/Aiu9dQKH

eatonphil 5y ago

I love Twitter, it's helped me reach a lot of people for personal and professional work. Two things that annoy me about twitter. One, it seems to weight tweets by newer follows higher. I keep my follow list to pretty exactly people I want to hear from. But often I see I've missed tweets from people I followed 100 or 200 follows again. I hate this! Two, it doesn't seem to do a good job normalizing tweet frequency across accounts. So I can't follow big tweeters like foone because my time line gets destroyed by their many (but still good) tweets. Anyone have a solution for either?

wpietri 5y ago
For the first, consider making "Latest Tweets" your default rather than "Home". For the latter, consider putting those big tweeters on lists instead of following. You can check in on them occasionally via the list.
- eatonphil 5y ago
  I have tried latest tweets too but then I just miss the people who don't post at the same time I'm around. I have also tried lists but Twitter's lists are a truly second class entity compared to accounts. You can only have 4 show up on your time line and they show up quite infrequently. Lists not in my time line I never remember to check.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Yeah, ultimately we're drinking from a firehose here; Twitter provides more good content than I can ever consume. So for me these choices are about regret minimization. Personally, I just stick with the latest tweets view and occasionally pop into the ranked timeline to get a different slice on things. But if you want more control, you might also consider a different client, like tweetdeck. Or having different accounts for different purposes.

ejb999 5y ago

I gave up twitter, facebook and most all other social media about a 18 +/- months ago (though was never a big user to begin with) - it is truly a cesspool (and yes, I realize that HN is a minor version of social media). I even went so far as to modify my hosts file so that I can't even get to twitter, facebook, instagram or LinkedIn (and several other places), just to resist the urge to follow a link that would bring me down the rabbit-hole. Once you realize the entire business model of these social media giants is pretty much like a boxing match promoter - i.e. get the two sides to hate each other, and watch the groups fight it out online (and sell ads to make a profit). It is not a coincidence that Americans are now strictly divided about just about every topic - and it has become pretty acceptable to wish death on anyone that disagrees with you on anything - that was not a mistake by Zuckerberg/Dorsey et al - that was by design. The more people hate each other, the more willing they are to get into the mosh-pit of social media and fight it out - while FB/Twitter sells advertising to the event. Never forget: Zuckerberg/Dorsey and many others got rich by dividing Americans and amplifying the hate on both sides to be able to sell even more ads while they fight it out online.

2-718-281-828 5y ago

Exploring trends on twitter doesn't work. I'm in Germany. There is a list of terms currently trending. I click on one. And if it is even remotely not superspecific in general or to German language then I will get shown tweets from whatever part of the world and that mainly. My trick is to add "lang:de" to the search but that is annoying and doesn't work reliably. They should have a way to actually explore a trend - if "Covid" is trending in Germany all of a sudden then this is likely not directly related to some tweet from India about "Covid". So annoying. I mostly go on twitter to get perspectives from my professor of choice on Corona stuff: https://twitter.com/stohr_klaus https://twitter.com/stohr_klaus

tomcam 5y ago

Incredibly helpful guide. Had no idea about most of this.

yob89 5y ago

leephillips 5y ago

You can use Twitter as a useful source of information and news while avoiding the time-wasting and toxic aspects, and sidestepping Twitter’s manipulative algorithms. The key is to make strategic use of lists and never look at your timeline: https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/ https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/

aantix 5y ago

When I see someone that gained 35K followers in a year, I feel skeptical. How? I’ve seen numbers even on viral tweets, and the number of followers gained is really low. So there has to be more to to getting followers than just writing good content.

ArtDev 5y ago

I went dark on social media about nine months ago. It's been great for my mental health. Ironically, it was Reddit that brought me back. The reason is there is freedom to being anonymous while having all your posts public. Like HN. I have new accounts and I only follow and post around a single interest of mine. Even my Facebook account is anonymous. My system works well. I plan to keep using it across 2022. HN and Reddit have shown me that single-subject media is typically positive and fun. I have no idea what my real friends are up to unless I see them or text them. I like my life this way. It feels like my world is smaller but it also wonderfully quieter.. in a good way.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

My guide to Twitter: don’t use it. Your mental health will thank you.

aleksandrh 5y ago

Good read, but I don't believe it's possible to make friends online in the true sense of that term. I've been doing things online for a majority of my life. Forums, gaming, chatting with strangers. I've made many "friends" this way, but they're not people I know. We've lost touch over the years, and I wouldn't ever turn to them for help because we don't know each other that well anyway. Twitter is the same. The best you can have is acquaintances, peers/colleagues, or followers.

karaterobot 5y ago

This is a thoughtful guide, and I enjoyed reading it. Ironically, you could never publish something like this on Twitter itself, which is why I'll continue to stay away.

AlexCoventry 5y ago

Seems likely that this is the 2022 version of the Submarine. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html Kudos to the new executive team at twitter.

arctica123 5y ago

Twitter can be really useful for academia where the character limit forces you to condense the main points of your research into one or a couple of short bullet points. Together with a small gif and links to project page and arxiv, this makes it really easy to get attention for your work and follow that of others. Sometimes it is even possible yo start some meaningful discussions there. You have to carefully curate who to follow though.

keerthiko 5y ago

Obligatory, if you find your twitter experience garbage mostly because of algorithms that keep suggesting things to you that you explicitly did not follow/sign up for in your feed (random ppl's tweets liked by someone you follow, entirely viral retweets, replies from strangers to ppl you follow, "suggested people/tweets", etc) then save yourself the trouble and simply bookmark realtwitter.com[0] It's a very simple search filter redirect that removes most of the garbage[1] Throw in uBlock or some ad blocker in your desktop browser and you're good to go. Never use twitter's mobile app except to tweet or view notifications. [0](realtwitter.com) - not clickable in HN but you can type that into your browser bar [1](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3Areplies https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=filter%3Afollows%20-fi...).