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Can anyone tell me how people like Clay Shirky are using Twitter? I read Twitter by occasionally surfing to the website and scrolling through the backlog of Tw

Can anyone tell me how people like Clay Shirky are using Twitter? I read Twitter by occasionally surfing to the website and scrolling through the backlog of Tweets from the fairly small list of people that I follow. Which is to say: I'm probably some sort of neanderthal. In this mode, hashtags are kind of useless. But apparently the cutting-edge users of Twitter spend their days plugged into a client which lets them do nifty tricks like following hashtags in real time. I tried that last month, using TweetGrid. It was hypnotic, and kind of fun, but way too much volume. And it featured spam and trolls. Finally, I understood why some people complain about Twitter spam! It would appear that anyone can create a random Twitter account under a fake name and start spewing arbitrarily-hashtagged crap! So I lost interest. But apparently many people have not. Do other folks just inhale all the hashtagged stuff, spam and trolls and Amazon-hating hysteria-inducing agents provocateurs and all? Or do serious Twitter users just follow so many people that they actually find the hashtags useful, just to sort through the Tweets from people they are following? Is there some nifty client software, which everyone but me knows about, that does something different from either of these strategies?

cstejerean 18y ago
Following a hashtag in realtime is only useful if it's something with somewhat low volume and on a topic that spammers wouldn't bother with. For example the #pycon hashtag was quite useful during the PyCon conference. Most of the time however hashtags are useful to easily identify what a tweet from someone you already follow is about, and can be handy I think when you need to skim through a decent number of tweets.
silentOpen 18y ago
I'm relatively new to Twitter but I think the answer is "no". The interface really does suck. Imho, Twitter has very good uses that many people like and suggests many more potential uses that would be powerful except the platform itself is a piece of crap. Twitter is powerful because of its users, nothing else -- MIT's zephyr has supported all of Twitter's use cases and more (and better) for ~20 years now. If it's easy to understand, people with little imagination have an easy time understanding it and heralding it as revolutionary. It's not.

cstejerean 18y ago

Following a hashtag in realtime is only useful if it's something with somewhat low volume and on a topic that spammers wouldn't bother with. For example the #pycon hashtag was quite useful during the PyCon conference. Most of the time however hashtags are useful to easily identify what a tweet from someone you already follow is about, and can be handy I think when you need to skim through a decent number of tweets.

silentOpen 18y ago

I'm relatively new to Twitter but I think the answer is "no". The interface really does suck. Imho, Twitter has very good uses that many people like and suggests many more potential uses that would be powerful except the platform itself is a piece of crap. Twitter is powerful because of its users, nothing else -- MIT's zephyr has supported all of Twitter's use cases and more (and better) for ~20 years now. If it's easy to understand, people with little imagination have an easy time understanding it and heralding it as revolutionary. It's not.