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I totally understand your experience on Twitter and a lot of the comments here reflect it. However I do not relate to your experience of it. Over the years I'v

by thdxr 5y ago

I totally understand your experience on Twitter and a lot of the comments here reflect it. However I do not relate to your experience of it. Over the years I've curated a nice set of people to follow and I've had extremely rewarding experiences. I've learned a lot, invested in companies, received investment, all stemming from interactions I've had on Twitter. I definitely occasionally see some of what you're talking about and it creeps into my bubble but I'm diligent about tracking down how it got there and unfollowing whoever pushed it into my field of view. If I can be frank your post here is an example of the kind of stuff I usually push away. Fairly absolute stance with little articulation/empathy of the opposing viewpoint. Taking some of the genuinely negative behavior and implying it must be the entirety of everyone using Twitter. Twitter tends to reflect yourself and if you're honest with yourself you'll often see that you seek out the things that upset you.

rtkwe 5y ago
Yeah I think what a lot of people mess up on Twitter is not curating their list either through people or block words. You can drastically change your experience of twitter by carefully choosing who and what to follow and by judiciously pruning anything that you don't want to see. The one major gap in that is I'd love to be able to follow or add to a list just an accounts tweets but not their retweets, there are some people I follow that I love their work but they retweet to boost a lot of random chaff I don't really want, so I can't follow or add them to a list because they just dominate/pollute the feed. Lists in particular are a good tool because you can quasi-follow someone on a private list where a) it doesn't show up in your follows if they're someone/thing you don't want showing up in your follows and b) you choose when to go see those things so you can self regulate easier if it's not something you can/should see all the time.
mturmon 5y ago
Twitter has a place. There's nothing else that gives deep reach into professional niches. I've learned a lot from epidemiology twitter (no pre-existing knowledge base from me) and from science and applied math twitter that's adjacent to my profession. That knowledge has real value! Like HN, keeping it short has its advantages and I've also learned-by-reading how people say it short and with impact. One has to be super careful about pruning accounts that are predictable, RT too much, or waste time attacking straw men.

by thdxr 5y ago

rtkwe 5y ago

Yeah I think what a lot of people mess up on Twitter is not curating their list either through people or block words. You can drastically change your experience of twitter by carefully choosing who and what to follow and by judiciously pruning anything that you don't want to see. The one major gap in that is I'd love to be able to follow or add to a list just an accounts tweets but not their retweets, there are some people I follow that I love their work but they retweet to boost a lot of random chaff I don't really want, so I can't follow or add them to a list because they just dominate/pollute the feed. Lists in particular are a good tool because you can quasi-follow someone on a private list where a) it doesn't show up in your follows if they're someone/thing you don't want showing up in your follows and b) you choose when to go see those things so you can self regulate easier if it's not something you can/should see all the time.

mturmon 5y ago

Twitter has a place. There's nothing else that gives deep reach into professional niches. I've learned a lot from epidemiology twitter (no pre-existing knowledge base from me) and from science and applied math twitter that's adjacent to my profession. That knowledge has real value! Like HN, keeping it short has its advantages and I've also learned-by-reading how people say it short and with impact. One has to be super careful about pruning accounts that are predictable, RT too much, or waste time attacking straw men.