17 ms·

I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

157 points by affectsk 4y ago

IG999 4y ago
rektide 4y ago
> Finally, I felt irrelevant on Twitter. This is like the first boss of tbe internet. Glad someone can at least confess to this, clarify this point. Understanding & welcoming this is a key pivot. People will slowly trickle in & follow you if you contribute. The reward ks highly chaotic, statistical, makes little clear sense. But just showing up & saying reasonable things is a pretty lock long term win.
- sshlocalhost98 4y ago
  Yes, I agree on this. I am writing machine learning topics on twitters and researchers flock to my blog and comments. Great to see collaboration
  - affectsk 4y ago
    Yep, I've found that if you're really good at what you do and/or have a narrow enough niche you'll have a much easier time getting people to interact with you. If you're just alright and/or don't have a narrow niche, you need to give them more reasons to follow/interact with you. This is my case. I don't consider myself an expert in anything, and being a generalist I'm interested in a lot of stuff. So even if people don't find my tweets or articles unique or extraordinary, many of them tend to stick around because of my personality. At least I got that!
    - sshlocalhost98 4y ago
      Awesome!
- affectsk 4y ago
  Yep, and the cool part is you don't need a lot to start feeling relevant. At least I didn't. A few weeks of consistently showing up and interacting with the same people made them start recognizing me, and that was enough to stop feeling like I'm just tweeting into the void here. Now a few months and a few hundred followers later I'm finally at a point where I can simply ask "my" Twitter for feedback or share a thought and actually get some engagement. That felt like going from 0 to 1, and it was the hardest part. A few hundred followers is still nothing in the grand scheme of Twitter things, but it's enough not to feel irrelevant since they're genuine and actually engage with me.
  - rodgerd 4y ago
    > Yep, and the cool part is you don't need a lot to start feeling relevant. "Being relevant" isn't really my goal on Twitter. Chatting to people is. Sometimes I get to learn stuff. It's supposed to be social.
    - affectsk 4y ago
      That's pretty much what I mean by "being relevant", just my way of putting it. Socializing and learning stuff, but in a way that doesn't feel like I'm shouting into the void.
zaphar 4y ago
I've been using Twitter since it was invite only. I'm not a Twitter personality, I don't have impressive follow counts or viral tweets. I do tweet but mostly only so I can interact with my feed. I've left every other social network. No longer on Facebook. No interest in Instagram or TikTok. But Twitter I've continued to get value from. This is entirely because I'm able to curate my feed. My rules for twitter engagement are: 1. Never look at the algorithmic feed. Switch to most recent or use https://tweetdeck.twitter.com https://tweetdeck.twitter.com for list consumption. 2. Unfollow anyone who consistently pulls you into Twitter cesspools. 3. Follow the people who you find interesting and who doesn't break rule #2 4. Use the mute and block buttons as frequently as you need to. 5. Block retweets which aren't quotes. Everyonce in a while someone will link to a tweet in a different forum and I'll take a look. 90% of the time I'm shocked at what the author of that Tweet's experience of Twitter is like. My experience is 180 degrees different.
- Mandelmus 4y ago
  >Block retweets which aren't quotes. How do you do that? I only know you can disable all retweets from a particular person you follow. I didn't know you could disable non-quote retweets from all accounts you follow.
  - zaphar 4y ago
    Tweetdeck which is basically a fancy interface to Twitters search functionality allows me to do that. I don't use the Twitter app or visit the twitter home page.
- simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  What's your @ ? In my case it's @simon, and one of my problems is that I get a TON of unwanted mentions. No idea how to solve it, after lots of thinking over the years.
  - zaphar 4y ago
    You can see my @ in my HN profile.
gverrilla 4y ago
twitter is like a pyramid scheme of popularity. no thanks
kstenerud 4y ago
I still don't get it. Nothing in this article makes sense to me, either. Not to denigrate the author - I'm sure what he posted makes a ton of sense, just not to me. I made a twitter account shortly after it first started, made a few tweets, and then it languished and I think it's probably long deleted by now. Last year my wife made me another one because "you need it to promote your OSS stuff". Okay so I made a few tweets ... aaaaand it's been sitting dormant for months. I just ... I dunno how to even describe it. Can't see the point, maybe? Can't build any enthusiasm to get involved? Find it about as interesting and engaging as cutting my toenails? But it's been the same with facebook and ... I think it was instagram or one of those newer ones - the one with the icon that looks like a ghost. It's such a hassle to use them! HN is the only place I ever post anything, and even that's a few days of posting stuff and then weeks of nothing. I mean, I do understand how it can be beneficial to work those social networks for your projects and passions and such, but yeeesh what a slog!
- maxsilver 4y ago
  Twitter is the only major social network that I actually 'get'. Instagram is great, but it only works if you take good pictures. You have to be pretty, or a photographer. It's super great for that, but minimum effort needed per post is high, so engagement sort of has to be low. Reddit is great, but it's not really 'social' so much as it's a generic-access to monopolized forums. It feels like a catalog of phpBB forums from the 2000's. It's great for general knowledge stuff (if you are like, 'fan of videogame series' or 'long-time active in trains' or such, Reddit's great). But it doesn't feel social, I don't know anyone from reddit, I've never met a person from Reddit. Facebook is bad, and is also too "real" (pretend real, Zuck's definition of real). If your personal persona, professional persona, immediately-family persona, and extended-family persona are all exactly identical, then Facebook seems great for you. Personally, I hate it, everything I post gets sent to my parents and grandma, and like half of my company org chart, which means I can't write anything real on there, even though ostensibly they are all my "friends". (Am I going to unfriend my work friends or my extended family?). Sure, you can 'scope' your posts, but then people can eventually tell they're scoped poorly and complained. And the people who are on there, are predominantly people full of terrible political views that no sane person should ever hold -- I do not want to have to spend every waking moment telling folks, "yes, humans should have rights. People are not property." and so on. Twitter is pretty good. It's techie enough that my parents and grandma can't "get it", and aren't tempted to make an account. It's techie enough that most of my professional contacts are on there, but there's a cultural assumption that (as a tiny account with few followers) I can be my authentic self and not get completely in trouble. (I can say something like, "attending a Pride parade" and have that sit next to "released a new version of my cool rubygem" and not get in trouble professionally over it, or have my parents yell at me -- both real things that would 100% happen if I posted that same blurb on Facebook). There's no assumption of Twitter implying friendship (I can follow people I've never met, who I'm not 'friends' with) but close relationships can still grow without having to label it (I can be 'mutuals' with someone, without trying to imply they are my friend). If your net is too wide, you can set up a private "alt" account and lock it, so your closer friends/contacts can see stuff that might otherwise get you in trouble with the broader community -- and since it's a different account, there's no assumption every follower of the one should see all of the other too (it gets around the facebook/scoping problem that way) Twitter gives you a really good pulse about what people want to care about publicly which is useful information (so much as you don't mistake it for what people actually care about, or for the sum total of all they're thinking). Generally speaking, Twitter is the only major Social Network that still feels...well, social.
par 4y ago
If someone has to create such a long justification for why they need to use twitter, i'm still not convinced it has any value. So far in my experience twitter is primarily an echo chamber for VC's to pat each other on the back. I even aggressively try to mute/unfollow them, but engaging with any tech topic just seems to force me into VC twitter. I don't really care for it.
lupire 4y ago
TL;DR: Twitter is useful if you want to read stuff or write stuff (mostly short stuff), without any particular structure. Not sure what the revelation is
wly_cdgr 4y ago
Bro, just do whatever you want, these places are for doing whatever you want. Engagement numbers are irrelevant, we're all just screaming into the void at all times Also, to contradict myself immediately, Facebook is most definitely not for family, Facebook is for making friends with Bulgarian anarchists and for fucking busted e-girls
kosasbest 4y ago
I have a public Twitter account where I barely tweet or browse Twitter. Gained 1000+ followers over the years and many of them are good friends. I grew my following by simply interacting with others and helping out with problems people were having. I try not to tweet something I would regret posting in the future, as this is my public persona and I'm committing to a permanent record so to speak. Even if I delete a tweet, anyone can screenshot it and circulate it online so I'm on my best behavior. I have one other account which is private (where I don't tweet). I don't follow anyone, and if I get follow requests, I decline them. I browse Twitter using their Lists feature, which I've curated heavily over the years. All my lists are private so if I accidentally get a follower, they can't see the lists I've made. All my lists are high signal and I've blocked ~250 accounts that regularly piss me off. I mean, some people just always popup in my feed that are full of rage and bile, so blocking those accounts is great and I enjoy browsing Twitter because of this, since all the bad faith actors have been weeded out.
wcerfgba 4y ago
There are two main things that put me off trying to use Twitter: the character limit, and the closed nature of the platform. The character limit is a completely backwards concept to me. Yes, it encourages people to be succinct, and yes, it creates a space where short-form content feels like a valid contribution. But almost every tweet I get linked (through friends or other websites) that's interesting is either a pointer to another website, or a thread. In order to say anything useful on Twitter and actually have a conversation there, people have to butcher their prose into a thread of sometimes garbled sentences. For me, it's not pleasant to read and it's even less pleasant to write. People work around the limitation by creating images of long-form text (great for accessibility /s) or, like this piece, writing their contribution somewhere else and then just linking it on Twitter. Being a closed platform isn't just a philosophical issue. It means I don't feel like I own my content. It means I am at the whim of the company's dark UX patterns aimed at driving 'engagement', like forcing visitors to log in to view a thread. Why would I want to participate in a platform that is so hostile to allowing me to have meaningful conversations? I have my own website/blog where I have complete control and ownership of what I write. My website is open, mobile friendly, and lightweight, so anyone can go and read it without waiting for a spinner or with a modal getting in the way. I have an email address on there so any visitor can contact me. Occasionally people email me and we have a chat. I network through email. If I discover someone's work and it's interesting, I send them and email with more than 280 characters explaining what I got out of it, sharing my own thoughts, and pointing them at other resources and people they may find valuable. Friends and colleagues reciprocate and send me interesting stuff. Sometimes we have a video call and catch up and discuss opportunities to collaborate. I sign up to people's newsletters, and subscribe to journal alerts and mailing lists. My inbox is a steady stream of interesting conversations and announcements. I skim Hacker News, Tildes, and MetaFilter for new links. I read the comments because usually people are insightful and the interface is clean and lets me focus on the content. I could probably get some use out of Twitter as a way to stay up to date with specific people, if I wasn't so turned off by the UX. A service that allowed me to follow people and then just emailed me a daily or weekly digest of tweets from people I follow (maybe ordered by some metric like retweet, which I also don't grok) could be cool.
mewse-hn 4y ago
I'm 40 and never "got" twitter either. I started to dip my toes in it very casually over the past year or two, but now the Elon Musk acquisition got me to bail. I don't have much regard for people who consider themselves "extremely online" because they spend hours in the vast echo chamber of the twit-sphere - especially journalists. Everyone knows the superior option is posting to weird esoteric message boards with an orange bar at the top
- criddell 4y ago
  Musk has said he wants to make Twitter a free speech hub once again. On Twitter, people are asking him if he would take down the video of the Buffalo supermarket gunman killing shoppers or leave it up and so far I don't think he's answered. Musk wants to make changes, but it isn't clear exactly what changes he would make.
WalterBright 4y ago
I discovered that Twitter replaces having an email list for business. You aren't spamming people, they sign up to follow you. The idea is to keep your tweets interesting to people who are using your products and services. A corollary is to not use it to post personal stuff or politics. I wish the technical people I follow on Twitter would leave the politics out, I follow them for their technical insights.
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  Seconded. I've tried to follow technical / subject folks, but the politics is constantly there. Maybe next try I'll block the folks who crap out the politics so I don't follow them again, which I've done multiple times.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    It's not that I mind them tweeting their politics that much, it's that I don't want them annoying my followers.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > I wish the technical people I follow on Twitter would leave the politics out, I follow them for their technical insights. You need a very large muted keywords list.
- bachmeier 4y ago
  > I wish the technical people I follow on Twitter would leave the politics out, I follow them for their technical insights. I think this is a significant flaw in the design of Twitter. You should be able to follow a subset of someone else's tweets rather than the binary all/nothing we have now.
  - munificent 4y ago
    Honestly, it's a significant flaw in the design of humans. When interacting with a human, I did not sign up for them being a complete holistic personality with hopes, dreams, beliefs, history, etc. I just want direct access to some personally chosen subset of their brain. Why do I have to deal with their messy... ugh... peopleness?
matsemann 4y ago
I've recently done the same. Had a dormant firstname+lastname twitter profile for years. But made a new one for a niche a few months ago. Only follow and interact related to that niche, and I get lots of engagement on the stuff I post. 900+ followers already. What I think makes a difference is that the name of my account tells what you can expect. So if someone sees a comment from me, the chance of them following me is higher as they know I will only post related stuff, compared to following some random person making a single great comment, and then getting all their other stuff in your feed. I now also chat regularly on DMs with other people in the niche, get recognized sometimes IRL and end up in conversations based on it etc. So actually been some interesting months. Edit: I guess this also depends on the niche. For me that niche is just a hobby, which means that most of my interactions are pleasant. So pretty different experience compared to if one's following controversial topics/figures.
joshu 4y ago
twitter is a game. the main move is saying things that get a reaction. your score is the number of likes/responses/follows. getting follows let you get a bigger reaction.
- pohl 4y ago
  I bet that, for most people, it's just a feed. Most Twitter users probably just follow what's interesting and doom-scroll without tweeting. It's only really a game for the minority that wants to call attention to themselves.
conductr 4y ago
I've tried it and I just have no desire to scroll, or contribute to, another endless feed. My inbox is bad enough. I'm ok missing out on it. I never once said, "dang, if only I was a daily twitter user I would have [insert any type of benefit to my life]".
wrs 4y ago
I still don’t get it. Why would I want to talk to my friends in public? In a medium specifically designed to propagate out-of-context sound bites? Surrounded by trolls of all ideologies? I stopped posting anything on Twitter because there was nothing to say that’s worth the risk.
- criddell 4y ago
  Twitter is sometimes the best way to reach customer service people who can actually help you with your problem. For me, that's my number one use case.
- lupire 4y ago
  Because public is easy. You don't have to make coordinate plans of who to include where and when. Twitter is like a pub that people are always at.
- Underphil 4y ago
  Yeah, I hear you. I do get Twitter but am still not interested in what it offers. To each their own, I say.
- incomingpain 4y ago
  My first account was infosec twitter, I mostly would comment with positivity and was utterly ignored. So I let that account go away. After Elon made the offer to buy twitter because of censorship I created a new account to test to see if I get censored. I never said anything at all. I was busy liking or following people at first but I connected to my country's politicians and that was enough for me to be shadowbanned. >I stopped posting anything on Twitter because there was nothing to say that’s worth the risk. To me it's not so much risk. If you're a platform who ideally wants to maximize activity on the platform. Censoring me because of world-view is really bad. Why would I waste my time commenting while shadowbanned? I just uninstall and stop.
  - smw 4y ago
    Doesn't the term 'shadowbanned' mean that your posts are just invisible to other users, without them telling you that? How would you know if you never posted anything?
thebradbain 4y ago
I _love_ Twitter. I think it's the only social media website that rewards "power users" (to a fault). It has a horrific onboarding experience that I imagine leaves many would-be regular users stuck in a "now what?" rut. Its moderation is too lax (no, really, it is. Try posting some of the things * waves hands * "both sides" complain about on any other mainstream social media network – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok – and they'll be near-instantly removed there yet likely allowed to remain on Twitter. This goes for pornography, bots, extremist tweets, targeted harassment, slurs -- even with good account-following hygiene, you'll see these things at the top of tweet replies, possibly promoted into your feed as a "viral tweet", etc. This discussion about "censorship" wouldn't even be a discussion if Twitter just more strongly enforced its guidelines it already has established. As it is, my opinion is that every decision to remove something seems personal only because you'll see so many other tweets obviously breaking the rules, leading one to wonder "why me") Yet still, despite it all, it's the only mainstream social media network where it actively feels like, to me, being part of the conversation. In the same people say reddit is about the communities you curate, so is Twitter -- but in my experience, even moreso, because the majority of people on it (or at least those in my circle) are real people, not hiding behind avatars or usernames.
jsemrau 4y ago
I never liked Twitter as a platform. We use it as a free instant news datasource for out investment platform (finclout). For that it works well. IMO the benefits are : 1. Relevant traders are posting interesting insights. 2. Community engagement. 3. Up-to-date information. Besides that I try to stay away.
soneca 4y ago
A more informative title could be ”I finally got how to win on Twitter”, because that’s what this person wanted. They wanted to “win”. That’s not what I want. I “got” Twitter from my first time using it. I wanted to follow a mix of diverse people around topics that interested me and be informed on new and old things about these topics. And I never minded reading personal stuff from those people. I actually enjoyed to learn about their other interests or funny remarks.
- affectsk 4y ago
  Low-key yeah, I do want to figure out how to win, but I haven't gotten there yet. Your way of "getting" it is perfectly fine, too - if that's what you want out of it. Right now I do enjoy reading people's personal stuff, but they have to be the people I care about at least to some extent. So what I wanted out of Twitter was the ability to be heard, not just to listen. That's the part that I kinda figured out. Winning is a different story.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- EricE 4y ago
  No kidding - I wonder how many of those accounts he interacts with are just bots :p
oneoff786 4y ago
I’ve enjoyed Twitter as a way to find experts on Ukraine. But it seems pretty niche. It only seems useful to me for extremely recent events on unfamiliar topics.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pessimizer 4y ago
What is twitter? 1) Major-, mini-, and micro-celebrities making declarations in a quotable form, and 2) their fans and anti-fans either trying to figure out a witty way to compliment them, ridicule them, or become them by adding to or topping their declarations. How to do twitter well? Specialize in a subject or two. Join defacto voting rings through popular hashtags within your subject's community and subtle hot-keyword-of-the-day stuffing. Steal jokes from nobodies. Reply to every tweet from a popular account. Bait popular accounts into fights.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tootie 4y ago
  This is accurate. Casual users will not ever acquire a following and may never tweet. It was advertised back in the day as "public text messaging" to send small updates to your circle. That died a long time ago and they never really updated the branding. Now, it is for celebrities big and small. Lady Gaga can reach a few million people, a charismatic geologist can reach a few thousand with earthquake facts. It's good for industry people discussing niche topics with an open audience. It's good for some businesses to reach customers. There's a modicum of interactivity. I setup a pretty solid feed of high-quality commenters and publications. I still quit in under a year.
jpswade 4y ago
Twitter is simple, its purpose is to broadcast in short form. Like newspapers, magazines and radio and TV before it. Twitter's power is its reach.
munificent 4y ago
I find it strange when people make broad declarative statements about a social media platform. There is no singular Twitter experience any more than there is a singular "America" experience or "web" experience. Twitter is a vast heterogeneous sea of semi-overlapping distinct communities. My Twitter is not your Twitter. I'm happy the author "got" their Twitter but they way they got it isn't how mine works. My mental model for Twitter is basically like a giant cocktail party. Imagine you're hanging out and you want to find a couple of cool people to talk with. You've maybe got one or two people you know around but you want to meet some new ones. So you throw out a joke or tell a story to them, but maybe just a little bit louder in case it perks someone else's ear up because you have something in common. Over time, you find yourself in a corner of the room surrounded by your tribe, having fun, telling anecdotes and connecting. Throughout the night, people come and go in the group, but it has a vaguely stable vibe of certain common interests. Every now and then someone totally random wanders by, joins the conversation, gets a little confused when they don't get the weird in-jokes, and wanders off. It becomes a great evening because you discovered some new people you have a lot in common with. That's Twitter for me.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dynamic_sausage 4y ago
Twitter is great for threads posting science-related curiosities, you just need to follow the right people. Here are two awesome accounts of general interest https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973 https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973 https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3 https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3 It also makes sense to follow experts in one's field. Gabriel Peyré regularly posts computational math stuff of superb quality: https://twitter.com/gabrielpeyre https://twitter.com/gabrielpeyre
russellbeattie 4y ago
Twitter is about writing a quick thought to get it out of your system and hoping some of your followers actually sees it, which statistically, they won't. I wrote an analysis 12 years ago about it (below). With the passage of time it's clear that without AI algorithms, Twitter (and other social networks) would be totally useless, instead of mostly useless, as it is today. I didn't get how good AI was going to get back then so I assumed Twitter (which was only 4 years old at that point) was a fad that would eventually fade. Missed that call. Instead it became the greatest tool for spreading misinformation that humankind has ever created. Woops. I stopped using Twitter on January 20th, 2016 and deleted all my previous tweets, likes and followers. I only have an account now as a placeholder. I encourage you to do the same. https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-firehose https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-fireho...
- affectsk 4y ago
  Enjoyed the article! Phased attention and transient information is exactly how I see Twitter myself. Trying to stay on top of everything is out of question. I think of Twitter as an ongoing party that I can drop by, see what's up, chat with a few friends, make a few new friends, have a little fun, move on until next time. This approach only makes sense when you have a "community" of people on Twitter that you "belong" to. That's the part I was missing back when I tried it originally.
handsaway 4y ago
This is... an almost obsessive level of thinking about Twitter. I don't know why you would force yourself to use something you clearly didn't need. I do find it funny that he found a community of people focused on getting followers on twitter to tweet to about twitter. This has reinforced my decision to avoid this website at all costs.
- affectsk 4y ago
  Gotta learn from the experts!
- Underphil 4y ago
  Some people really struggle with FOMO.
bekantan 4y ago
I picked up Twitter in 2021 after a longer break. Today I prefer lists over following and have several prioritized lists per interest, e.g. P0, P1, ..., Pn for programmers. When I want to see what's going on, I start with level zero. Very few people on my lists tweet every day. I enjoy reading people who tweet about new insights within their current area of interest - this rarely happens more than once per week. I aspire to have such account myself. I don't mind staying silent if I don't have something interesting to share.
RajT88 4y ago
I don't know if you really "get" twitter until you've had a throw-away tweet from 7 years ago dredged up and used to try and destroy you.
- affectsk 4y ago
  I guess that's one benefit of not having started earlier!
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  The best I've had is being suspended for a 7 year old "kill all boomers" tweet :(
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    How old were you when you posted it?
  - remram 4y ago
    Ha! I got that too! I tweeted the classic joke "old people should be killed at birth", which made sense in context. Got a few likes in the moment. 4 months later, account suspended, had to delete the tweet to get it back. I'm still puzzled by what happened.
  - xigoi 4y ago
    Would you mind if someone was suspended for tweeting “kill all black people”?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - EricE 4y ago
      Humourless people like you are why we can't have nice things :( Talk about taking things out of context to the extreme!
      - 4y ago
m1117 4y ago
Twitter is crazy and amazing. I stopped using it and a year ago I came back, its getting better!
lizardactivist 4y ago
I'm sorry to hear that.
dhosek 4y ago
I rejoined Twitter earlier this year after a bit over a year off. This time around I focused on the stuff that I liked: interacting with other writers, so my college friend who teaches at the Naval War College and tweets a mix of politics and cats, I don’t follow this time around. And a lot of prominent Catholic figures that I used to follow, I don’t because a lot of Catholic Twitter is arguing about stuff that I don’t want to deal with in what is ostensibly my relaxation and socialization space. There are only a handful of people in my feed who I’ve met, but it is much better the way it is. I’m also liberal with my use of the mute and block buttons (I keep blocking ads for clickbait sites but the Twitter algorithm hasn't caught on to that yet).
isthmus 4y ago
Yeah, it's a newsfeed timesink. It's just gotten better as the feed has improved.
TheRealNGenius 4y ago
Ah yes, figured out Twitter... ...although to express this, you need more than 140 characters...
egypturnash 4y ago
Damn this sure is a lot of thinking about how to Twitter. I just started following my friends after their Livejournal posts turned into incoherent auto posted collections of the day’s Twitter replies and that was basically it. Well until the past few years when it suddenly became POLITICAL RAGE MATCH and I started running a Mastodon server for myself and some of my friends…
fortuna86 4y ago
It's an RSS feed for people.
- aendruk 4y ago
  It used to be literally this. > If you'd like to keep up with Twitter updates without logging in, try subscribing to Twitter via rss feed. […] Find an rss feed for a Twitter page in the sidebar of any public profile page https://web.archive.org/web/20110228080118/http://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/107-my-profile-account-settings/articles/15361-how-to-find-your-rss-feed https://web.archive.org/web/20110228080118/http://support.tw...
  - lapcat 4y ago
    I deleted my Twitter account in 2012 because they removed RSS support. (I returned 4 years later, because unfortunately my leaving did not kill Twitter.)
fleddr 4y ago
A lot of people are familiar with the 90-9-1 rule regarding social networks. 90% is just lurking and never tweets, 9% might occasionally tweet, and 1% writes most tweets, or more accurately...writes the tweets that generate the most engagement. What not everybody understands is that this rule pretty much also applies to every individual. If you have a 1000 followers, you should very much assume that 90% never even sees your tweets. 10% might see it, of which possibly 1% bothers to lift their finger and like it. An even smaller percentage might make the gigantic effort of typing a comment. These numbers roughly play out on the author's twitter profile where the typical post has 0-1 likes with the occasional outlier of 3-5 likes, and in general...almost no comments at all. So the roughly 500 followers add up to this tiny amount of actual engagement that you can substantiate to about 5 people. It's a very rough guidance, but dividing followers by a 100 can't be far off in trying to come to a meaningful following. If you think that's pessimistic, consider this extreme example: https://twitter.com/nytimes https://twitter.com/nytimes The NYTimes has a stunning 53M followers. When you scroll through their feed, notice how the typical tweet struggles to even get 100 likes or comments. There's the occasional outlier regarding politically impactful tweets, but even those fail to impress. If we are to take their "typical" tweet and round that up to 100 likes / comments, which is already optimistic, we're talking about an engagement percentage of 0.0002%, or 1 in 5,000 followers engaging. When you do this same exercise for somebody that truly gets Twitter, Elon Musk (for better or worse), we're talking about roughly 1 in 1,000 followers engaging. This doesn't even account for bots. And it also doesn't go into the issue of actual engagement typically being of a very low quality, hardly enriching. In my view, both Instagram and Twitter are not great for community building or rich conversations. Good old forums, reddit, HN, Discord and even Facebook groups are vastly superior at it.
- lapcat 4y ago
  I wonder if Twitter wasn't better in the early days when there were no stats, and a "retweet" was just someone typing "RT" followed by copy and pasting the tweet.
lewisl9029 4y ago
So I had a Twitter account since 2009 but never really used it till a few months ago. I have some mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I really love the consumption side (following people and reading their tweets): being able to follow interesting people and populate my feed with all kinds of great posts about topics I'm interested in. I've honestly been learning a lot and getting exposed to a lot more perspectives I'd never have been exposed to from just passively scrolling over the past few months. This alone makes it more than worthwhile in my books, and makes me wish I started using it sooner. On the other hand, the production side (actually posting my own tweets) almost always feels like shouting into a void given my rather tiny follower count. I've done it enough times with the same outcome to the point that I've mostly given up on actually posting my own tweets, and have toned down my engagement on the platform to just replying to other people's tweets and retweeting things I find worth sharing. I'm not saying this needs to change, it's the system working as intended. I imagine people with high follower counts probably get enough engagement on their tweets to make it a completely different experience, and it's totally fair. They've spent years building up an audience, I haven't, and the difference in reach/engagement is a natural consequence of that. Though this is why HN still feels so special. Everything I write here stands on its own merits. Good comments rise to the top and bad ones get ignored/downvoted into oblivion. The algorithm doesn't care about who's writing it. Sure, it's not a perfect meritocracy. There's a ton of luck involved, famous people in the community will still get their usernames recognized and noticed/upvoted more often as a result, and the downvote-for-disagreement culture breeds a lot of groupthink. But I still love this place despite all of its warts.
bitwize 4y ago
Twitter is the Great Banality Laser. Every evil genius needs a death ray. Elon just bought himself an informational one.
inopinatus 4y ago
My rules for Twitter: * Maintain exactly one public tweet and one like * Delete all other tweets within 24..168 hours * Ensure that your # of followed == # of followers (this is for comedy, not metrics) * Never quote or re-tweet * Never reveal any personal or professional information * Have an entirely cryptic bio * Don't take it in the slightest bit seriously * Don't invest any mental energy whatsoever in ephemeral trash like social media The only winning move is not to play.
sydthrowaway 4y ago
This is basically blogspam.
wallacoloo 4y ago
i'd be really curious how the author approaches DMs. microblogging didn't make sense to me until i realized that the timeline can just be used as an approach to easily create surface-level connections, with the more fulfilling interactions happening in DMs (or more often, Matrix chatrooms, since i use ActivityPub instead of Twitter and in my corner Matrix is ubiquitous).
karaterobot 4y ago
I "got" Twitter in 2007, which is why I stopped using it in 2007. Whenever I click a link to something someone has posted in Twitter, and I see what I view as a useful or insightful tweet, I momentarily think "maybe Twitter isn't so bad after all," then I scroll down to the replies, and see the other 99.9% of what Twitter is, and close the tab.
alliao 4y ago
i think the varied way of how people using it speak volumes of the strength and weakness of the platform, it's not the same tool to all people and that's fine. It's still got a little bit of that internet magic which is direct access to unfiltered opinion from domain experts from the early 90s. I remember being able to email authors of books I'd read instead of snail mail that got me very excited.
Kim_Bruning 4y ago
Not sure he gets it now either. It's fairly easy to get on the order 1K followers just talking with people and having real conversations. I actually got into some interesting discussions relatively early on, even with people of radically opposed opinions. But ... twitter is not (or no longer) great for conversations, as it is very hard to track down conversation threads or suss out context. It took a lot of effort to stay on the ball and keep track of all the variables in a multi-way conversation between very different kinds of people. In the end I felt I was getting less out of twitter than I was putting in, so I no longer have a twitter account.
steve76 4y ago
bradfitz 4y ago
rendall 4y ago
If anyone's interested, I wrote a Chrome extension that hides Tweets that say "so-and-so liked" and other such tweets, imaginatively called Twitter 'likes' hider. Open source. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-likes-hider/dkcgnebncpfljfaaplmedjnfjifffagj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-likes-hide...
sylware 4y ago
? twitter is still hostile to noscript/basic (x)html browsers. nitter for all?
ryzvonusef 4y ago
>Here are a few good reasons to be on Twitter: >>To stay informed about what's going on (in the world, in your country, in your industry, in your community, in the niche you're in). >>To meet and connect with like-minded people, find new Twitter friends with common interests, and expand your social circle. >>To promote your business or sell your products and services. Twitter is a great way to do it without being pushy. >>To share your thoughts, feelings, and experiences with the world. Create serendipity around yourself! >>To help people who are currently at the stages of their lives that you've already gone through. Share your lessons! >See? This instantly makes Twitter more purposeful. ----- compare and contrast with another outlook on twitter i found recently: https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/16/23075683/jeff-bezos-twitter-elon-musk-posting-troll https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/16/23075683/jeff-bezos-twitt... >I cannot believe I am about to explain Twitter, but for those of you who are not on the social media platform fondly referred to as “the hellsite” by its most committed users: the dumbest users and the smartest users post the exact same way. Sentence fragments, inconsistent punctuation, half-baked ideas, and a strong propensity for trolling are all among the power users’ most consistent traits. >Trolling is crucial, actually. See, one of Twitter’s major engagement mechanisms is the quote-tweet dunk, where you post someone else’s tweet to make fun of it. This means that Twitter heavily incentivizes bad behavior. Sure, a good own will drive engagement, but so will an obviously stupid take that provides other users with an opening to dunk, thus spreading your original tweet further. There is no incentive to be reasonable. I’m going to say it again, because this is a fundamental law of Twitter: there is no incentive to be reasonable.

157 points by affectsk 4y ago

> Finally, I felt irrelevant on Twitter. This is like the first boss of tbe internet. Glad someone can at least confess to this, clarify this point. Understanding & welcoming this is a key pivot. People will slowly trickle in & follow you if you contribute. The reward ks highly chaotic, statistical, makes little clear sense. But just showing up & saying reasonable things is a pretty lock long term win.

sshlocalhost98 4y ago
Yes, I agree on this. I am writing machine learning topics on twitters and researchers flock to my blog and comments. Great to see collaboration
- affectsk 4y ago
  Yep, I've found that if you're really good at what you do and/or have a narrow enough niche you'll have a much easier time getting people to interact with you. If you're just alright and/or don't have a narrow niche, you need to give them more reasons to follow/interact with you. This is my case. I don't consider myself an expert in anything, and being a generalist I'm interested in a lot of stuff. So even if people don't find my tweets or articles unique or extraordinary, many of them tend to stick around because of my personality. At least I got that!
  - sshlocalhost98 4y ago
    Awesome!
affectsk 4y ago
Yep, and the cool part is you don't need a lot to start feeling relevant. At least I didn't. A few weeks of consistently showing up and interacting with the same people made them start recognizing me, and that was enough to stop feeling like I'm just tweeting into the void here. Now a few months and a few hundred followers later I'm finally at a point where I can simply ask "my" Twitter for feedback or share a thought and actually get some engagement. That felt like going from 0 to 1, and it was the hardest part. A few hundred followers is still nothing in the grand scheme of Twitter things, but it's enough not to feel irrelevant since they're genuine and actually engage with me.
- rodgerd 4y ago
  > Yep, and the cool part is you don't need a lot to start feeling relevant. "Being relevant" isn't really my goal on Twitter. Chatting to people is. Sometimes I get to learn stuff. It's supposed to be social.
  - affectsk 4y ago
    That's pretty much what I mean by "being relevant", just my way of putting it. Socializing and learning stuff, but in a way that doesn't feel like I'm shouting into the void.

zaphar 4y ago

I've been using Twitter since it was invite only. I'm not a Twitter personality, I don't have impressive follow counts or viral tweets. I do tweet but mostly only so I can interact with my feed. I've left every other social network. No longer on Facebook. No interest in Instagram or TikTok. But Twitter I've continued to get value from. This is entirely because I'm able to curate my feed. My rules for twitter engagement are: 1. Never look at the algorithmic feed. Switch to most recent or use https://tweetdeck.twitter.com https://tweetdeck.twitter.com for list consumption. 2. Unfollow anyone who consistently pulls you into Twitter cesspools. 3. Follow the people who you find interesting and who doesn't break rule #2 4. Use the mute and block buttons as frequently as you need to. 5. Block retweets which aren't quotes. Everyonce in a while someone will link to a tweet in a different forum and I'll take a look. 90% of the time I'm shocked at what the author of that Tweet's experience of Twitter is like. My experience is 180 degrees different.

Mandelmus 4y ago
>Block retweets which aren't quotes. How do you do that? I only know you can disable all retweets from a particular person you follow. I didn't know you could disable non-quote retweets from all accounts you follow.
- zaphar 4y ago
  Tweetdeck which is basically a fancy interface to Twitters search functionality allows me to do that. I don't use the Twitter app or visit the twitter home page.
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
What's your @ ? In my case it's @simon, and one of my problems is that I get a TON of unwanted mentions. No idea how to solve it, after lots of thinking over the years.
- zaphar 4y ago
  You can see my @ in my HN profile.

gverrilla 4y ago

twitter is like a pyramid scheme of popularity. no thanks

kstenerud 4y ago

I still don't get it. Nothing in this article makes sense to me, either. Not to denigrate the author - I'm sure what he posted makes a ton of sense, just not to me. I made a twitter account shortly after it first started, made a few tweets, and then it languished and I think it's probably long deleted by now. Last year my wife made me another one because "you need it to promote your OSS stuff". Okay so I made a few tweets ... aaaaand it's been sitting dormant for months. I just ... I dunno how to even describe it. Can't see the point, maybe? Can't build any enthusiasm to get involved? Find it about as interesting and engaging as cutting my toenails? But it's been the same with facebook and ... I think it was instagram or one of those newer ones - the one with the icon that looks like a ghost. It's such a hassle to use them! HN is the only place I ever post anything, and even that's a few days of posting stuff and then weeks of nothing. I mean, I do understand how it can be beneficial to work those social networks for your projects and passions and such, but yeeesh what a slog!

maxsilver 4y ago
Twitter is the only major social network that I actually 'get'. Instagram is great, but it only works if you take good pictures. You have to be pretty, or a photographer. It's super great for that, but minimum effort needed per post is high, so engagement sort of has to be low. Reddit is great, but it's not really 'social' so much as it's a generic-access to monopolized forums. It feels like a catalog of phpBB forums from the 2000's. It's great for general knowledge stuff (if you are like, 'fan of videogame series' or 'long-time active in trains' or such, Reddit's great). But it doesn't feel social, I don't know anyone from reddit, I've never met a person from Reddit. Facebook is bad, and is also too "real" (pretend real, Zuck's definition of real). If your personal persona, professional persona, immediately-family persona, and extended-family persona are all exactly identical, then Facebook seems great for you. Personally, I hate it, everything I post gets sent to my parents and grandma, and like half of my company org chart, which means I can't write anything real on there, even though ostensibly they are all my "friends". (Am I going to unfriend my work friends or my extended family?). Sure, you can 'scope' your posts, but then people can eventually tell they're scoped poorly and complained. And the people who are on there, are predominantly people full of terrible political views that no sane person should ever hold -- I do not want to have to spend every waking moment telling folks, "yes, humans should have rights. People are not property." and so on. Twitter is pretty good. It's techie enough that my parents and grandma can't "get it", and aren't tempted to make an account. It's techie enough that most of my professional contacts are on there, but there's a cultural assumption that (as a tiny account with few followers) I can be my authentic self and not get completely in trouble. (I can say something like, "attending a Pride parade" and have that sit next to "released a new version of my cool rubygem" and not get in trouble professionally over it, or have my parents yell at me -- both real things that would 100% happen if I posted that same blurb on Facebook). There's no assumption of Twitter implying friendship (I can follow people I've never met, who I'm not 'friends' with) but close relationships can still grow without having to label it (I can be 'mutuals' with someone, without trying to imply they are my friend). If your net is too wide, you can set up a private "alt" account and lock it, so your closer friends/contacts can see stuff that might otherwise get you in trouble with the broader community -- and since it's a different account, there's no assumption every follower of the one should see all of the other too (it gets around the facebook/scoping problem that way) Twitter gives you a really good pulse about what people want to care about publicly which is useful information (so much as you don't mistake it for what people actually care about, or for the sum total of all they're thinking). Generally speaking, Twitter is the only major Social Network that still feels...well, social.

par 4y ago

If someone has to create such a long justification for why they need to use twitter, i'm still not convinced it has any value. So far in my experience twitter is primarily an echo chamber for VC's to pat each other on the back. I even aggressively try to mute/unfollow them, but engaging with any tech topic just seems to force me into VC twitter. I don't really care for it.

lupire 4y ago

TL;DR: Twitter is useful if you want to read stuff or write stuff (mostly short stuff), without any particular structure. Not sure what the revelation is

wly_cdgr 4y ago

Bro, just do whatever you want, these places are for doing whatever you want. Engagement numbers are irrelevant, we're all just screaming into the void at all times Also, to contradict myself immediately, Facebook is most definitely not for family, Facebook is for making friends with Bulgarian anarchists and for fucking busted e-girls

kosasbest 4y ago

I have a public Twitter account where I barely tweet or browse Twitter. Gained 1000+ followers over the years and many of them are good friends. I grew my following by simply interacting with others and helping out with problems people were having. I try not to tweet something I would regret posting in the future, as this is my public persona and I'm committing to a permanent record so to speak. Even if I delete a tweet, anyone can screenshot it and circulate it online so I'm on my best behavior. I have one other account which is private (where I don't tweet). I don't follow anyone, and if I get follow requests, I decline them. I browse Twitter using their Lists feature, which I've curated heavily over the years. All my lists are private so if I accidentally get a follower, they can't see the lists I've made. All my lists are high signal and I've blocked ~250 accounts that regularly piss me off. I mean, some people just always popup in my feed that are full of rage and bile, so blocking those accounts is great and I enjoy browsing Twitter because of this, since all the bad faith actors have been weeded out.

wcerfgba 4y ago

There are two main things that put me off trying to use Twitter: the character limit, and the closed nature of the platform. The character limit is a completely backwards concept to me. Yes, it encourages people to be succinct, and yes, it creates a space where short-form content feels like a valid contribution. But almost every tweet I get linked (through friends or other websites) that's interesting is either a pointer to another website, or a thread. In order to say anything useful on Twitter and actually have a conversation there, people have to butcher their prose into a thread of sometimes garbled sentences. For me, it's not pleasant to read and it's even less pleasant to write. People work around the limitation by creating images of long-form text (great for accessibility /s) or, like this piece, writing their contribution somewhere else and then just linking it on Twitter. Being a closed platform isn't just a philosophical issue. It means I don't feel like I own my content. It means I am at the whim of the company's dark UX patterns aimed at driving 'engagement', like forcing visitors to log in to view a thread. Why would I want to participate in a platform that is so hostile to allowing me to have meaningful conversations? I have my own website/blog where I have complete control and ownership of what I write. My website is open, mobile friendly, and lightweight, so anyone can go and read it without waiting for a spinner or with a modal getting in the way. I have an email address on there so any visitor can contact me. Occasionally people email me and we have a chat. I network through email. If I discover someone's work and it's interesting, I send them and email with more than 280 characters explaining what I got out of it, sharing my own thoughts, and pointing them at other resources and people they may find valuable. Friends and colleagues reciprocate and send me interesting stuff. Sometimes we have a video call and catch up and discuss opportunities to collaborate. I sign up to people's newsletters, and subscribe to journal alerts and mailing lists. My inbox is a steady stream of interesting conversations and announcements. I skim Hacker News, Tildes, and MetaFilter for new links. I read the comments because usually people are insightful and the interface is clean and lets me focus on the content. I could probably get some use out of Twitter as a way to stay up to date with specific people, if I wasn't so turned off by the UX. A service that allowed me to follow people and then just emailed me a daily or weekly digest of tweets from people I follow (maybe ordered by some metric like retweet, which I also don't grok) could be cool.

mewse-hn 4y ago

I'm 40 and never "got" twitter either. I started to dip my toes in it very casually over the past year or two, but now the Elon Musk acquisition got me to bail. I don't have much regard for people who consider themselves "extremely online" because they spend hours in the vast echo chamber of the twit-sphere - especially journalists. Everyone knows the superior option is posting to weird esoteric message boards with an orange bar at the top

criddell 4y ago
Musk has said he wants to make Twitter a free speech hub once again. On Twitter, people are asking him if he would take down the video of the Buffalo supermarket gunman killing shoppers or leave it up and so far I don't think he's answered. Musk wants to make changes, but it isn't clear exactly what changes he would make.

WalterBright 4y ago

I discovered that Twitter replaces having an email list for business. You aren't spamming people, they sign up to follow you. The idea is to keep your tweets interesting to people who are using your products and services. A corollary is to not use it to post personal stuff or politics. I wish the technical people I follow on Twitter would leave the politics out, I follow them for their technical insights.

xen2xen1 4y ago
Seconded. I've tried to follow technical / subject folks, but the politics is constantly there. Maybe next try I'll block the folks who crap out the politics so I don't follow them again, which I've done multiple times.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  It's not that I mind them tweeting their politics that much, it's that I don't want them annoying my followers.
lapcat 4y ago
> I wish the technical people I follow on Twitter would leave the politics out, I follow them for their technical insights. You need a very large muted keywords list.
bachmeier 4y ago
> I wish the technical people I follow on Twitter would leave the politics out, I follow them for their technical insights. I think this is a significant flaw in the design of Twitter. You should be able to follow a subset of someone else's tweets rather than the binary all/nothing we have now.
- munificent 4y ago
  Honestly, it's a significant flaw in the design of humans. When interacting with a human, I did not sign up for them being a complete holistic personality with hopes, dreams, beliefs, history, etc. I just want direct access to some personally chosen subset of their brain. Why do I have to deal with their messy... ugh... peopleness?

matsemann 4y ago

I've recently done the same. Had a dormant firstname+lastname twitter profile for years. But made a new one for a niche a few months ago. Only follow and interact related to that niche, and I get lots of engagement on the stuff I post. 900+ followers already. What I think makes a difference is that the name of my account tells what you can expect. So if someone sees a comment from me, the chance of them following me is higher as they know I will only post related stuff, compared to following some random person making a single great comment, and then getting all their other stuff in your feed. I now also chat regularly on DMs with other people in the niche, get recognized sometimes IRL and end up in conversations based on it etc. So actually been some interesting months. Edit: I guess this also depends on the niche. For me that niche is just a hobby, which means that most of my interactions are pleasant. So pretty different experience compared to if one's following controversial topics/figures.

joshu 4y ago

twitter is a game. the main move is saying things that get a reaction. your score is the number of likes/responses/follows. getting follows let you get a bigger reaction.

pohl 4y ago
I bet that, for most people, it's just a feed. Most Twitter users probably just follow what's interesting and doom-scroll without tweeting. It's only really a game for the minority that wants to call attention to themselves.

conductr 4y ago

I've tried it and I just have no desire to scroll, or contribute to, another endless feed. My inbox is bad enough. I'm ok missing out on it. I never once said, "dang, if only I was a daily twitter user I would have [insert any type of benefit to my life]".

wrs 4y ago

I still don’t get it. Why would I want to talk to my friends in public? In a medium specifically designed to propagate out-of-context sound bites? Surrounded by trolls of all ideologies? I stopped posting anything on Twitter because there was nothing to say that’s worth the risk.

criddell 4y ago
Twitter is sometimes the best way to reach customer service people who can actually help you with your problem. For me, that's my number one use case.
lupire 4y ago
Because public is easy. You don't have to make coordinate plans of who to include where and when. Twitter is like a pub that people are always at.
Underphil 4y ago
Yeah, I hear you. I do get Twitter but am still not interested in what it offers. To each their own, I say.
incomingpain 4y ago
My first account was infosec twitter, I mostly would comment with positivity and was utterly ignored. So I let that account go away. After Elon made the offer to buy twitter because of censorship I created a new account to test to see if I get censored. I never said anything at all. I was busy liking or following people at first but I connected to my country's politicians and that was enough for me to be shadowbanned. >I stopped posting anything on Twitter because there was nothing to say that’s worth the risk. To me it's not so much risk. If you're a platform who ideally wants to maximize activity on the platform. Censoring me because of world-view is really bad. Why would I waste my time commenting while shadowbanned? I just uninstall and stop.
- smw 4y ago
  Doesn't the term 'shadowbanned' mean that your posts are just invisible to other users, without them telling you that? How would you know if you never posted anything?

thebradbain 4y ago

I _love_ Twitter. I think it's the only social media website that rewards "power users" (to a fault). It has a horrific onboarding experience that I imagine leaves many would-be regular users stuck in a "now what?" rut. Its moderation is too lax (no, really, it is. Try posting some of the things * waves hands * "both sides" complain about on any other mainstream social media network – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok – and they'll be near-instantly removed there yet likely allowed to remain on Twitter. This goes for pornography, bots, extremist tweets, targeted harassment, slurs -- even with good account-following hygiene, you'll see these things at the top of tweet replies, possibly promoted into your feed as a "viral tweet", etc. This discussion about "censorship" wouldn't even be a discussion if Twitter just more strongly enforced its guidelines it already has established. As it is, my opinion is that every decision to remove something seems personal only because you'll see so many other tweets obviously breaking the rules, leading one to wonder "why me") Yet still, despite it all, it's the only mainstream social media network where it actively feels like, to me, being part of the conversation. In the same people say reddit is about the communities you curate, so is Twitter -- but in my experience, even moreso, because the majority of people on it (or at least those in my circle) are real people, not hiding behind avatars or usernames.

jsemrau 4y ago

I never liked Twitter as a platform. We use it as a free instant news datasource for out investment platform (finclout). For that it works well. IMO the benefits are : 1. Relevant traders are posting interesting insights. 2. Community engagement. 3. Up-to-date information. Besides that I try to stay away.

soneca 4y ago

A more informative title could be ”I finally got how to win on Twitter”, because that’s what this person wanted. They wanted to “win”. That’s not what I want. I “got” Twitter from my first time using it. I wanted to follow a mix of diverse people around topics that interested me and be informed on new and old things about these topics. And I never minded reading personal stuff from those people. I actually enjoyed to learn about their other interests or funny remarks.

affectsk 4y ago
Low-key yeah, I do want to figure out how to win, but I haven't gotten there yet. Your way of "getting" it is perfectly fine, too - if that's what you want out of it. Right now I do enjoy reading people's personal stuff, but they have to be the people I care about at least to some extent. So what I wanted out of Twitter was the ability to be heard, not just to listen. That's the part that I kinda figured out. Winning is a different story.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
EricE 4y ago
No kidding - I wonder how many of those accounts he interacts with are just bots :p

oneoff786 4y ago

I’ve enjoyed Twitter as a way to find experts on Ukraine. But it seems pretty niche. It only seems useful to me for extremely recent events on unfamiliar topics.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

pessimizer 4y ago

What is twitter? 1) Major-, mini-, and micro-celebrities making declarations in a quotable form, and 2) their fans and anti-fans either trying to figure out a witty way to compliment them, ridicule them, or become them by adding to or topping their declarations. How to do twitter well? Specialize in a subject or two. Join defacto voting rings through popular hashtags within your subject's community and subtle hot-keyword-of-the-day stuffing. Steal jokes from nobodies. Reply to every tweet from a popular account. Bait popular accounts into fights.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tootie 4y ago
This is accurate. Casual users will not ever acquire a following and may never tweet. It was advertised back in the day as "public text messaging" to send small updates to your circle. That died a long time ago and they never really updated the branding. Now, it is for celebrities big and small. Lady Gaga can reach a few million people, a charismatic geologist can reach a few thousand with earthquake facts. It's good for industry people discussing niche topics with an open audience. It's good for some businesses to reach customers. There's a modicum of interactivity. I setup a pretty solid feed of high-quality commenters and publications. I still quit in under a year.

jpswade 4y ago

Twitter is simple, its purpose is to broadcast in short form. Like newspapers, magazines and radio and TV before it. Twitter's power is its reach.

munificent 4y ago

I find it strange when people make broad declarative statements about a social media platform. There is no singular Twitter experience any more than there is a singular "America" experience or "web" experience. Twitter is a vast heterogeneous sea of semi-overlapping distinct communities. My Twitter is not your Twitter. I'm happy the author "got" their Twitter but they way they got it isn't how mine works. My mental model for Twitter is basically like a giant cocktail party. Imagine you're hanging out and you want to find a couple of cool people to talk with. You've maybe got one or two people you know around but you want to meet some new ones. So you throw out a joke or tell a story to them, but maybe just a little bit louder in case it perks someone else's ear up because you have something in common. Over time, you find yourself in a corner of the room surrounded by your tribe, having fun, telling anecdotes and connecting. Throughout the night, people come and go in the group, but it has a vaguely stable vibe of certain common interests. Every now and then someone totally random wanders by, joins the conversation, gets a little confused when they don't get the weird in-jokes, and wanders off. It becomes a great evening because you discovered some new people you have a lot in common with. That's Twitter for me.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dynamic_sausage 4y ago

Twitter is great for threads posting science-related curiosities, you just need to follow the right people. Here are two awesome accounts of general interest https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973 https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973 https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3 https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3 It also makes sense to follow experts in one's field. Gabriel Peyré regularly posts computational math stuff of superb quality: https://twitter.com/gabrielpeyre https://twitter.com/gabrielpeyre

russellbeattie 4y ago

Twitter is about writing a quick thought to get it out of your system and hoping some of your followers actually sees it, which statistically, they won't. I wrote an analysis 12 years ago about it (below). With the passage of time it's clear that without AI algorithms, Twitter (and other social networks) would be totally useless, instead of mostly useless, as it is today. I didn't get how good AI was going to get back then so I assumed Twitter (which was only 4 years old at that point) was a fad that would eventually fade. Missed that call. Instead it became the greatest tool for spreading misinformation that humankind has ever created. Woops. I stopped using Twitter on January 20th, 2016 and deleted all my previous tweets, likes and followers. I only have an account now as a placeholder. I encourage you to do the same. https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-firehose https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-fireho...

affectsk 4y ago
Enjoyed the article! Phased attention and transient information is exactly how I see Twitter myself. Trying to stay on top of everything is out of question. I think of Twitter as an ongoing party that I can drop by, see what's up, chat with a few friends, make a few new friends, have a little fun, move on until next time. This approach only makes sense when you have a "community" of people on Twitter that you "belong" to. That's the part I was missing back when I tried it originally.

handsaway 4y ago

This is... an almost obsessive level of thinking about Twitter. I don't know why you would force yourself to use something you clearly didn't need. I do find it funny that he found a community of people focused on getting followers on twitter to tweet to about twitter. This has reinforced my decision to avoid this website at all costs.

affectsk 4y ago
Gotta learn from the experts!
Underphil 4y ago
Some people really struggle with FOMO.

bekantan 4y ago

I picked up Twitter in 2021 after a longer break. Today I prefer lists over following and have several prioritized lists per interest, e.g. P0, P1, ..., Pn for programmers. When I want to see what's going on, I start with level zero. Very few people on my lists tweet every day. I enjoy reading people who tweet about new insights within their current area of interest - this rarely happens more than once per week. I aspire to have such account myself. I don't mind staying silent if I don't have something interesting to share.

RajT88 4y ago

I don't know if you really "get" twitter until you've had a throw-away tweet from 7 years ago dredged up and used to try and destroy you.

affectsk 4y ago
I guess that's one benefit of not having started earlier!
madeofpalk 4y ago
The best I've had is being suspended for a 7 year old "kill all boomers" tweet :(
- fartcannon 4y ago
  How old were you when you posted it?
- remram 4y ago
  Ha! I got that too! I tweeted the classic joke "old people should be killed at birth", which made sense in context. Got a few likes in the moment. 4 months later, account suspended, had to delete the tweet to get it back. I'm still puzzled by what happened.
- xigoi 4y ago
  Would you mind if someone was suspended for tweeting “kill all black people”?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - EricE 4y ago
    Humourless people like you are why we can't have nice things :( Talk about taking things out of context to the extreme!
    - 4y ago

m1117 4y ago

Twitter is crazy and amazing. I stopped using it and a year ago I came back, its getting better!

lizardactivist 4y ago

I'm sorry to hear that.

dhosek 4y ago

I rejoined Twitter earlier this year after a bit over a year off. This time around I focused on the stuff that I liked: interacting with other writers, so my college friend who teaches at the Naval War College and tweets a mix of politics and cats, I don’t follow this time around. And a lot of prominent Catholic figures that I used to follow, I don’t because a lot of Catholic Twitter is arguing about stuff that I don’t want to deal with in what is ostensibly my relaxation and socialization space. There are only a handful of people in my feed who I’ve met, but it is much better the way it is. I’m also liberal with my use of the mute and block buttons (I keep blocking ads for clickbait sites but the Twitter algorithm hasn't caught on to that yet).

isthmus 4y ago

Yeah, it's a newsfeed timesink. It's just gotten better as the feed has improved.

TheRealNGenius 4y ago

Ah yes, figured out Twitter... ...although to express this, you need more than 140 characters...

egypturnash 4y ago

Damn this sure is a lot of thinking about how to Twitter. I just started following my friends after their Livejournal posts turned into incoherent auto posted collections of the day’s Twitter replies and that was basically it. Well until the past few years when it suddenly became POLITICAL RAGE MATCH and I started running a Mastodon server for myself and some of my friends…

fortuna86 4y ago

It's an RSS feed for people.

aendruk 4y ago
It used to be literally this. > If you'd like to keep up with Twitter updates without logging in, try subscribing to Twitter via rss feed. […] Find an rss feed for a Twitter page in the sidebar of any public profile page https://web.archive.org/web/20110228080118/http://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/107-my-profile-account-settings/articles/15361-how-to-find-your-rss-feed https://web.archive.org/web/20110228080118/http://support.tw...
- lapcat 4y ago
  I deleted my Twitter account in 2012 because they removed RSS support. (I returned 4 years later, because unfortunately my leaving did not kill Twitter.)

fleddr 4y ago

A lot of people are familiar with the 90-9-1 rule regarding social networks. 90% is just lurking and never tweets, 9% might occasionally tweet, and 1% writes most tweets, or more accurately...writes the tweets that generate the most engagement. What not everybody understands is that this rule pretty much also applies to every individual. If you have a 1000 followers, you should very much assume that 90% never even sees your tweets. 10% might see it, of which possibly 1% bothers to lift their finger and like it. An even smaller percentage might make the gigantic effort of typing a comment. These numbers roughly play out on the author's twitter profile where the typical post has 0-1 likes with the occasional outlier of 3-5 likes, and in general...almost no comments at all. So the roughly 500 followers add up to this tiny amount of actual engagement that you can substantiate to about 5 people. It's a very rough guidance, but dividing followers by a 100 can't be far off in trying to come to a meaningful following. If you think that's pessimistic, consider this extreme example: https://twitter.com/nytimes https://twitter.com/nytimes The NYTimes has a stunning 53M followers. When you scroll through their feed, notice how the typical tweet struggles to even get 100 likes or comments. There's the occasional outlier regarding politically impactful tweets, but even those fail to impress. If we are to take their "typical" tweet and round that up to 100 likes / comments, which is already optimistic, we're talking about an engagement percentage of 0.0002%, or 1 in 5,000 followers engaging. When you do this same exercise for somebody that truly gets Twitter, Elon Musk (for better or worse), we're talking about roughly 1 in 1,000 followers engaging. This doesn't even account for bots. And it also doesn't go into the issue of actual engagement typically being of a very low quality, hardly enriching. In my view, both Instagram and Twitter are not great for community building or rich conversations. Good old forums, reddit, HN, Discord and even Facebook groups are vastly superior at it.

lapcat 4y ago
I wonder if Twitter wasn't better in the early days when there were no stats, and a "retweet" was just someone typing "RT" followed by copy and pasting the tweet.

lewisl9029 4y ago

So I had a Twitter account since 2009 but never really used it till a few months ago. I have some mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I really love the consumption side (following people and reading their tweets): being able to follow interesting people and populate my feed with all kinds of great posts about topics I'm interested in. I've honestly been learning a lot and getting exposed to a lot more perspectives I'd never have been exposed to from just passively scrolling over the past few months. This alone makes it more than worthwhile in my books, and makes me wish I started using it sooner. On the other hand, the production side (actually posting my own tweets) almost always feels like shouting into a void given my rather tiny follower count. I've done it enough times with the same outcome to the point that I've mostly given up on actually posting my own tweets, and have toned down my engagement on the platform to just replying to other people's tweets and retweeting things I find worth sharing. I'm not saying this needs to change, it's the system working as intended. I imagine people with high follower counts probably get enough engagement on their tweets to make it a completely different experience, and it's totally fair. They've spent years building up an audience, I haven't, and the difference in reach/engagement is a natural consequence of that. Though this is why HN still feels so special. Everything I write here stands on its own merits. Good comments rise to the top and bad ones get ignored/downvoted into oblivion. The algorithm doesn't care about who's writing it. Sure, it's not a perfect meritocracy. There's a ton of luck involved, famous people in the community will still get their usernames recognized and noticed/upvoted more often as a result, and the downvote-for-disagreement culture breeds a lot of groupthink. But I still love this place despite all of its warts.

bitwize 4y ago

Twitter is the Great Banality Laser. Every evil genius needs a death ray. Elon just bought himself an informational one.

inopinatus 4y ago

My rules for Twitter: * Maintain exactly one public tweet and one like * Delete all other tweets within 24..168 hours * Ensure that your # of followed == # of followers (this is for comedy, not metrics) * Never quote or re-tweet * Never reveal any personal or professional information * Have an entirely cryptic bio * Don't take it in the slightest bit seriously * Don't invest any mental energy whatsoever in ephemeral trash like social media The only winning move is not to play.

sydthrowaway 4y ago

This is basically blogspam.

wallacoloo 4y ago

i'd be really curious how the author approaches DMs. microblogging didn't make sense to me until i realized that the timeline can just be used as an approach to easily create surface-level connections, with the more fulfilling interactions happening in DMs (or more often, Matrix chatrooms, since i use ActivityPub instead of Twitter and in my corner Matrix is ubiquitous).

karaterobot 4y ago

I "got" Twitter in 2007, which is why I stopped using it in 2007. Whenever I click a link to something someone has posted in Twitter, and I see what I view as a useful or insightful tweet, I momentarily think "maybe Twitter isn't so bad after all," then I scroll down to the replies, and see the other 99.9% of what Twitter is, and close the tab.

alliao 4y ago

i think the varied way of how people using it speak volumes of the strength and weakness of the platform, it's not the same tool to all people and that's fine. It's still got a little bit of that internet magic which is direct access to unfiltered opinion from domain experts from the early 90s. I remember being able to email authors of books I'd read instead of snail mail that got me very excited.

Kim_Bruning 4y ago

Not sure he gets it now either. It's fairly easy to get on the order 1K followers just talking with people and having real conversations. I actually got into some interesting discussions relatively early on, even with people of radically opposed opinions. But ... twitter is not (or no longer) great for conversations, as it is very hard to track down conversation threads or suss out context. It took a lot of effort to stay on the ball and keep track of all the variables in a multi-way conversation between very different kinds of people. In the end I felt I was getting less out of twitter than I was putting in, so I no longer have a twitter account.

steve76 4y ago

bradfitz 4y ago

rendall 4y ago

If anyone's interested, I wrote a Chrome extension that hides Tweets that say "so-and-so liked" and other such tweets, imaginatively called Twitter 'likes' hider. Open source. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-likes-hider/dkcgnebncpfljfaaplmedjnfjifffagj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-likes-hide...

sylware 4y ago

? twitter is still hostile to noscript/basic (x)html browsers. nitter for all?

ryzvonusef 4y ago

>Here are a few good reasons to be on Twitter: >>To stay informed about what's going on (in the world, in your country, in your industry, in your community, in the niche you're in). >>To meet and connect with like-minded people, find new Twitter friends with common interests, and expand your social circle. >>To promote your business or sell your products and services. Twitter is a great way to do it without being pushy. >>To share your thoughts, feelings, and experiences with the world. Create serendipity around yourself! >>To help people who are currently at the stages of their lives that you've already gone through. Share your lessons! >See? This instantly makes Twitter more purposeful. ----- compare and contrast with another outlook on twitter i found recently: https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/16/23075683/jeff-bezos-twitter-elon-musk-posting-troll https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/16/23075683/jeff-bezos-twitt... >I cannot believe I am about to explain Twitter, but for those of you who are not on the social media platform fondly referred to as “the hellsite” by its most committed users: the dumbest users and the smartest users post the exact same way. Sentence fragments, inconsistent punctuation, half-baked ideas, and a strong propensity for trolling are all among the power users’ most consistent traits. >Trolling is crucial, actually. See, one of Twitter’s major engagement mechanisms is the quote-tweet dunk, where you post someone else’s tweet to make fun of it. This means that Twitter heavily incentivizes bad behavior. Sure, a good own will drive engagement, but so will an obviously stupid take that provides other users with an opening to dunk, thus spreading your original tweet further. There is no incentive to be reasonable. I’m going to say it again, because this is a fundamental law of Twitter: there is no incentive to be reasonable.