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Comment by manmal | Hacker News Reader

What about Twitter?

I find twitter to be worse than facebook.. in facebook its more like i'm spying on my friends and they're letting me but on twitter it feels like you have to prove a point over and over and be something so people will follow you. Being a voyeur is easy, having to be a "socialite" on twitter is draining..

The people I follow that are popular are always posting.. 24x7.. its a wonder they get any work done.. but they're also people that appear to love talking on the phone and chit chatting about everything.. so if you're a socialite it may work better for you...

I find both draining, but twitter more so and i'm currently takinga hiatus from FB mostly over fake news, but considering a hiatus from twitter as well.. unfortunately though twitter is the way people in my industry communicate and get news.. (devops / distributed computing)

Maybe you're just using the wrong heuristic for Twitter? I never follow more than 100 people and periodically cull my list down to that if I go over. My goal is primarily to follow interesting people, especially other local programmers, people who are working on cool research topics I would otherwise miss, and friends who make me laugh. I remove anyone who is too noisy for too long, even if they are interesting. Twitter is by far my favorite social network and is generally high-signal for me.

Popularity seems like an anti-goal unless you're selling something.

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