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I feel like most people must use Twitter wrong. Despite how common a criticism it is, your description is not even remotely my experience. I don’t know why. Ma
by barnabee 5y ago
I feel like most people must use Twitter wrong. Despite how common a criticism it is, your description is not even remotely my experience.
I don’t know why. Maybe most users follow people who they like or respect or think are good people not people who share content they care about or write interesting original tweets? Maybe they think the only recourse to not liking what they see on their timeline is to complain and wish people were better rather than unfollow? Or maybe some whole major topics/spheres of interest are just entirely toxic to the core.
Twitter is incredibly valuable to me as a source of news, insight, and discussion on a wide range of topics (from programming to space to politics to skiing and more). It’s been nothing short of revolutionary for my consumption of news and information.
Twitter is actually better than RSS (though I do miss RSS being a thing) at what RSS was designed for, because curating your follows can give a better signal to noise ratio than taking everything from a given site, AND gives you a wider range of sources because you don't personally need to discover a source to see articles from it.
It also provides for some excellent debates, discussion, and interactions between really smart people.
I do agree with Elon though. The direction of the product is poor and there are many baffling decisions. It sometimes seems like Twitter themselves don’t even know why their product is valuable or what it’s potential really is.
I’d love to see some really radical changes. The kind that might not work and could be the end of Twitter if they fail. I’d love to see Twitter become really open, even open source, become a federated network, integrate privacy and anonymity tech, etc.
We don’t know his plans and I doubt it’ll happen, but Elon is one of the few people who has demonstrated willing to risk everything on an outcome he thinks is important. I hope this is one of this cases, and his instincts are at least reasonable.
- lupire 5y agoTwitter (and Reddit, and Facebook) is like beans. Beans are a great nutritious tasty food of you know how to prepare them. But if you eat raw beans directly out of the package from the producer, you will get sick or die.
- bombcar 5y agoAnd even if you DO eat them correctly, you're likely to subject everyone around you to random chemical attacks. The analogy works!
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y agoI'm always baffled about this as well. I keep the people I follow heavily curated, and I don't follow more than 90 - 120 people at a time. Unfollowing and Refollowing is easy, why should I amass a list of thousands of follows like some people do? If I notice a negative pattern or drop in quality I simply unfollow, that's it. It's the big advantage over Facebook, the relationships are not bi-directional for me as an average user. In short: I get a quality experience and lots of useful information from Twitter because I only follow people that tweet quality content and useful tweets. However I do have to mention that the algorithmic timeline IS really bad, so I do feel like Twitter is constantly fighting me and trying to turn my feed into polarizing crap.
- barnabee 5y agoAgreed, if you can’t read enough of the temporally sorted timeline the answer right now is unfollows not the algo timeline. I would totally use something to sort and filter my feed so I could proceed it quicker and follow more insightful people. It just needs to be external to Twitter, transparent, and under my control, and have financial incentives aligned with my goals. I actually like the idea of a marketplace for both human curated and algorithmic “edit streams” (h/t Neal Stephenson) as views over Twitter and other social/internet data that are transparent about what they filtered out or boosted and why, and could be provided by FOSS and collaborative communities as well as companies with a variety of business models.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago> use something to sort and filter my feed It wasn't even that long ago when we had at least some of those options via external clients. That was until Twitter started to dismantle that possibility and limited external clients much more heavily.
- noir_lord 5y agoI'm similar but I keep a hard cap of 80 accounts I follow, if I'm at that it's one in and one out. That way every new follow comes with a cost because I have to a) drop something I thought was following b) weigh up which is least valuable. As a result all I follow on twitter is open source projects, companies I use products from (i.e. JetBrains) and people I actually like/have something interesting to say. It makes twitter very useful to corral all that stuff into one place.
- the_gipsy 5y agoTwitter is completely unusable if you hadn't joined years ago, or are a famous person.
- Jcowell 5y agoWhat ? Why? What is the use case your seeking that is undoable if you joined now compared to years ago?
- the_gipsy 5y agoYou can't read anything relevant until you have curated who you follow, which takes a long time. Whatever you write goes into the void, until you have gained followers, for which you must keep posting into the void for hopes of getting followers... In short, it only works for accounts from way back with enough circlejerk, or famous people.
- tootie 5y agoI joined Twitter fairly recently and am mostly following journalists and thought leaders for subjects I'm interested in, and a few high quality creators. There's an odd gem but there's still a ton of noise per signal. I don't think Dorsey has any idea what he's doing and I think even less of Musk. The value to society that can be derived from a platform like Twitter is completely separate from the value it can bring to investors.