Comment by thewhitetulip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thewhitetulip | Hacker News Reader

The problem of Twitter is that many people (including me) have tried to use the platform n number of times, but either it is too cryptic or too useless for us in day to day life. I don't use Facebook much, I do use HN/Reddit/Quora and sometimes stackoverflow. I use the platforms which teach me something, reddit taught me a lot of things across all domains, HN teaches me new things everyday (it is also my news source), Quora and Stackoverflow are also nice, they give me some advantage.

but I can't say the same with Twitter, if you see my twitter page, I use it only to tweet to nasty companies who keep pestering me with SPAM text messages despite my DO NOT DISTURB feature!

For me, twitter has relegated it's position to become the tech support medium, I really do not understand why they do not make this a feature. A friend had got a counterfeit phone from an Indian ecommerce site, he found out after a month, after calling the site, they said "sorry, 7 day return policy", I put that on twitter, one month later, he got his money back.

I found twitter incredibly useless and had many fits and starts. Now I'm at the point where I use the mobile app everyday multiple times per day.

I gave up tweeting entirely. I have 6 followers and only 3 of them are people I know in real life, however none of them tweet. So twitter isn't a text messaging replacement for me.

I just accepted that Facebook is a much better place for me to put a thought and get feedback from people I know.

I follow ~150 people. The main blobs are pros in a video game I play seriously, and politics professionals, and science/tech professionals, and media outlets.

I don't follow any celebrities or people who I think are just brand pushers.

Now every time I go to twitter I know that I will have a new set of interesting content to pursue. New conversations about strategies or video archives from the game universe. Breaking news with commentary by politics minds I care about (no hacks or rank partisans). Interesting science and tech links from other like minded people who are keeping up.

The real problem with twitter is that it is completely nonobvious how I eventually came to like it. I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a set of follows which will engage them. Seems like twitter can't either.

> I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a set of follows which will engage them. Seems like twitter can't either.

The problem is that many people think of twitter as a tool to talk to someone. In reality it is a tool to subscribe to people. Micro-blogging is a stupid word, but it is true. You get use out of twitter by treating it like an RSS client:

Find feeds with content that interests you (personal things of friends, musicians, artists, game devs, people talking about political issues that interest you, activist groups, etc.) and subscribe to them.

That covers the use case of the average person. If you feel ambitious you can also become a content producer, but that is of course a real investment.

I use Twitter to keep up efficiently with all the things I care about. I think where Twitter shines is as a very finely tuned filter for specific interests. I am interested in certain specific health topics. I am interested in certain tech topics. I also am interested somewhat in some niche political/economic topics but don't want to see THE BIG POLITICAL STORY OF THE DAY because that's everywhere. I have three different accounts for each of these interests. If someone crosses topics, like posts THE BIG POLITICAL STORY OF THE DAY politics in the tech or health account, and politics has been leaking into just about every social stream on the planet lately, I block the retweet source for that account or drop them if they tweet off-topic enough. So I think that's the strength of Twitter right now vs all the other social sites: With some work you can create a relatively distraction free feed of highly specific news. In contrast, on Google News I tried to do this, but you can't get rid of the "Top Headlines". It won't let you do it, probably because somebody somewhere relishes the power of telling everybody what to think is THE BIG POLITICAL STORY OF THE DAY.

For me, twitter has relegated it's position to become the tech support medium

And that's fine. Is it OK for other people to get more out of it, though?

Twitter's problem is that the vast majority of tweets are never seen, or barely seen, by anyone. This means that for most people, there is no incentive, in the form of social acceptance, to tweet anything.

It's not the platform, it's the content.

I feel maybe you haven't been lucky enough to find your content-suppliers.

There's some gold there in the nooks and crannies.

You hinted at the problem: it's nearly impossible to find on your own.

I think this is making the same mistake that you see from a lot of new programmers asking "what should I write?" Unless there's a specific group you want to follow, maybe Twitter isn't for you.

On the other hand, if you have some interests and you know some people who are active online about those issues, odds are extremely high that they're on Twitter. Follow them, then follow people they retweet, then follow people they retweet, and so on. Don't hesitate to unfollow people who are crapping up your feed with stuff you're not interested in.

Twitter is a beautiful web of connections, and you really only need a handful of starting points to build a feed tailored to your interests.

That's sort of my point though, unless you have that one person or group you know you want to follow there's no reason to sign up. Which makes sense, but isn't really good for Twitter.

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