3 ms·

Twitter is exactly as good or as awful as the set of people you follow. If you carefully limit the set of people you follow, avoiding folks who retweet random c

Twitter is exactly as good or as awful as the set of people you follow. If you carefully limit the set of people you follow, avoiding folks who retweet random clickbait and focusing on people who post interesting things, your Twitter feed can work quite well. Likewise, don't try to deliberately gain followers; if you're doing interesting things and posting about them, you'll gain followers anyway. But also, if you don't enjoy Twitter, you don't have to use it; you don't have to have a "presence" there if you don't find it useful and productive. Also: > Tech twitter thinks just because they are good at programming, they have a valid view on topic Y. Those users exist everywhere. Many people would say the same about many HN users.

delecti 5y ago
> avoiding folks who retweet random clickbait I'd slightly alter this advice to: don't hesitate to use the "turn off retweets" feature. On a per-follow basis, you can individually decide whether you want to see retweets from each individual account you follow, and it's a great feature. Some accounts are good to follow on their own, but unbearable if your feed is full of everything they retweet.
- JoshTriplett 5y ago
  Absolutely true. But also, don't hesitate to not follow someone, even if you know them, if they're too high-volume or low signal-to-noise ratio. There are people I know, who I consider friends, but don't follow on Twitter because they're too high-volume and would drown out the rest of my feed. (I use reverse-chronological and do actually read everything.)
tootie 5y ago
I have been using Twitter for a year or so and mostly follow journalists, publications and some industry leading people relevant to my career. I see an interesting tweet maybe once or twice a week. Even recognized experts in digital domains with thousands of followers seem to post/share an enormous amount of useless fluff.

delecti 5y ago

> avoiding folks who retweet random clickbait I'd slightly alter this advice to: don't hesitate to use the "turn off retweets" feature. On a per-follow basis, you can individually decide whether you want to see retweets from each individual account you follow, and it's a great feature. Some accounts are good to follow on their own, but unbearable if your feed is full of everything they retweet.

JoshTriplett 5y ago
Absolutely true. But also, don't hesitate to not follow someone, even if you know them, if they're too high-volume or low signal-to-noise ratio. There are people I know, who I consider friends, but don't follow on Twitter because they're too high-volume and would drown out the rest of my feed. (I use reverse-chronological and do actually read everything.)

tootie 5y ago

I have been using Twitter for a year or so and mostly follow journalists, publications and some industry leading people relevant to my career. I see an interesting tweet maybe once or twice a week. Even recognized experts in digital domains with thousands of followers seem to post/share an enormous amount of useless fluff.