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Comment by monk_e_boy | Hacker News Reader

Your dad sounds like me! I can #not @understand @twitter #at #all. Every message is 90% noise.

Facebook on the other hand, is full of interesting news from people I love. Technology has come a long way when I get more accurate news from my mums friends than I do from the local TV news station. Our village had floods and the local pumping station failed, Facebook friends (and shared posts) kept us all in the loop and organised sands bags, pumps and help for the elderly.

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I'm a pretty tech savvy guy, a pretty competent programmer and data analyst, and I cannot figure out how to use Twitter. I mean, I know physically how to create an account and tweet, and I've made multiple tries of getting into it, but can't find a use for it. So much noise.

If you think Twitter is too noisy, it's probably a sign that you're following too many people.

When I do check out someone's twitter post (e.g. sanders, or dan harmon) then the replies are total junk. HN has tons of interesting people replying, twitter posts have tons of junk/spam as replies.

This has been my experience as well. They could learn from the improvements that YouTube has made to its comment section.

Though, I realize that chronological tweet order is important to the core user-base.

I've been saying that for a while: twitter is YouTube without the video.

How is the user supposed to know how many people is a good amount to follow? I think that is Twitter's problem, not the user's.

It's definitely a problem, which is why I recommend following very incrementally. If you add too many power users at once, it gets noisy fast.

Or too many noisy people. Some folks can literally drown your timeline.

The problem is that I want to hear x's opinion on rails but I could care less about what music he's listening to now or what country he's traveling to now.

This is the exact problem that an algorithmic timeline is intended to solve.

Maybe not every tweet is as important as all the others. Maybe I want to follow a lot of interesting people, but not necessarily see every tweet about how much they like the hotel breakfast, or whether the conference provided a good enough AV system, or how good the broadband is in various SF neighborhoods.

Doesn't even sound like the GP is even following anyone. I've known a few people for whom the twitter interface and, well, really, the whole platform, just doesn't make much sense. It never clicks with them. None of these people had the "whoah... you're following way too many people!" problem. Almost the opposite, in most cases.

Yeah, you really have to cull it. If someone in your timeline isn't posting things you enjoy reading, remove them. I use it primarily as a media consumption device; I follow people who create and say things I enjoy. I only follow one or two personal friends. The idea of using it for any serious communication is ludicrous.

For me, every social media site is like this. The only reason I can even stand Tumblr is that half the blogs I follow only post once or twice a day.

Meaning absolutely no offense, I don't understand how this is possible. The whole point of twitter is that you choose who you follow - if someone is noisy, why not unfollow them and never hear from them again?

Is it maybe that you haven't followed anyone yet, and twitter is showing you miscellaneous junk because they're too daft to show you a "hey you should search for some people you're interested in" dialog?

While in theory it's possible , it takes a lot of work to curate twitter for a high signal/noise level, if it's even possible.

Personally i find that if you care for higher snr, curating blogs and newsletters works better.

Besides that , twitter is sometimes nice for conversations. But not so much as to be worth the hassle of using it.

Unless you're following spambots I guess we have different notions of signal/noise. If I follow e.g. William Gibson because I'm interested in hearing what he has to say, and he says something about a topic I'm not interested in, is that noise?

Gibson is smart and interesting, sure. But if he says something i'm not interested in ,yes , for me, on the web, it's noise.

Maybe trying to cram everything into 140 characters including links and hash tags is just too much for me. Look at all the replies to me, they are all written in normal English words with not a single #tag in sight.

I've mentioned this before, but Twitter is what you make of it—your experience is entirely dictated by who you choose to follow.

If you want to have a good experience on Twitter, here are my suggestions:

- Keep the number of people you follow under 1,000. I follow about 600. Any more than 1,000 and it starts to become information overload.

- Keep the quality of the people you follow exceptionally high. Look through their recent Tweets and see if they post content you're interested in before following.

- Unfollow accounts that add to the noise. Don't want to see every TechCrunch article? Unfollow them. One thing I've discovered is that individual journalists are much more interesting than following publications wholesale.

Holy crow, 1000? I follow about 40 :)

I follow about 4, but I heavily use hashtag searches for real time information. I started using it during the 2011 riots in London to see how my commute was being affected.

I follow about 1200 but the number of accounts that are still active are probably around 100. Lots of failed startups and joke accounts in there.

200 here but I'd guess at least 50 of those are dormant these days. Even with that, it's still quite spammy some days.

I've never got on with Twitter either. Most people I am interested in are on Facebook if they use any social media. Twitter is just boring stuff.

Twitter is the Two Minutes of Hate mixed with memes

I never got it either, beyond spamming links and self promotion. To me it was like sitting in an IRC channel, where everyone was force to write in a shortened, convoluted way. Trying to engage message threads was infuriating. I do see a positive side to it, mentioned earlier. It's a decent way of broadcasting real time news, and I think Twitter should focus on that aspect.

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