Comment by erickhill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erickhill | Hacker News Reader

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It took me about 10 years to finally "get Twitter". I used to use it for professional reasons, posting what I considered relevant content. For the most part no one really cared. The engagement was almost always nil. Sort of like saying something intelligent, out of the blue, to a crowded stadium of people doing the same thing.

Then, 2 years ago I created a new account that ONLY focused on a personal hobby of mine: retro-computing. I posted photos, links to cool articles, experiences from my workbench, etc. To my surprise, I began to get a lot of engagement. Like, 25-50X more than what I used to ever get on my professional persona's account.

I made a point to only follow back people who posted similarly to my own laser-beam focus. This takes a lot of time, but I have cultivated a stream of content I very much enjoy reading and scanning in my off-hours or lunch breaks. If you post about politics, or food, or cats, or simply whine or are acidic by nature, I don't follow those accounts back. I'm looking for good vibrations for a pastime hobby - that's it. And to my surprise (and those that know me personally and professionally that I've explained this to) it has worked beautifully for that. No one is a jerk and no one is trolling, none of that.

I've actually made several online friends around the country and the world as a result of the past 2+ years on Twitter.

Now, is my experience normal? No. If I were to guess it's probably in the top 2% in terms of the joy it brings me (vs. the rest of the user population who just hates to even look at Twitter anymore). And I totally get that.

I hope the service keeps going for my own greedy self-interests. But I also recognize that Mastadon may be the future, too. Or something else.

It's sort of how I changed my usage with Facebook. I deleted my personal account and created an anonymous account on FB that only is used for FB Groups (in, yes, the same hobby). These are closed groups that are moderated.

And holy smokes. It works.

Go figure.

Remove the YOU from social media, and use it to have fun about whatever it is you do to have fun, and it can actually be ... fun.

I think you're really on to something here. The details are different, but it reminds me of how I use social media.

Most of my engagement consists of a private Slack groups with groups of friends who enjoy discussing various topics. (And within these groups I tend to subscribe to only the channels that I find more interesting.) Similarly, on Instagram I have one account where I follow a group of close friends I've mostly had since high school, and another where I mostly follow a bunch of car related channels I like. Having that separation and ability to go and seek out a specific kind of content is fantastic. (As opposed to just being subjected to a fire hose "feed" of whatever an algorithm thinks will be engaging.)

Actually, I resisted RSS in the past for much the same reason. Even though you curate the feed, I vastly preferred having a bookmarks folder of blogs and other sites I followed, which I could then pick and choose from to suit my mood, than to have it all served up in a reader.

It would be nice to see things move more in this direction. For example, the default Facebook view, rather than a general news feed, could be a set of groups you belong to, along with ad-hoc groups of interconnected contacts, encouraging you to pick what genre of updates or conversations suits your current mood. Even then I don't know if it would be siloed enough to capture the same benefits, but it would be a step in the right direction I think.

I emailed slack about a year ago suggesting that they were totally missing the boat on slack as a social network. I am in 4 slacks and only one of them is professional. They were not interested.

They've got a lot on their plates already; probably best not to try and dive full into social network for now. Plus you'd have to be really careful not to lose the separation that makes it good in the process.

They can't be seen as a consumer product while marketing for enterprise dollars.

IMO Discord already is what Slack as a social network could be.

Agreed. Discord is also what got me off of Facebook entirely.

Discord today feels like how Facebook used to feel when it started: I'm actually friends with everyone on there, and we're having real conversations.

There's also 100% less politics, moral panic, virtue-signaling, outrage, ads, "fake news", Farmville invitations, and similar garbage.

It's nice.

Sounds a lot like going back to the anonymous/pseudonymous usenet groups and forums that we had before 'social networking' became a buzzword.

Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations? Why not use a blog, personal site, or forum where instead of just posting a link you can also write your thoughts about it, etc.? I get not wanting to bother with running a personal site or maintain a blog, but there are tons of hobby forums.

Personally, I never got the appeal of Twitter, and while I did enjoy early Facebook, since it jumped the shark I use it primarily as a long-term contact list for people that I don't talk to very often so that we'll still have a way to connect if one of us changes email addresses/phone numbers before the next time we talk.

> Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations?

It has limitations, but it also has a lot of reach. A blog might not reach the people you are trying to share things with.

I think a lot of the appeal of twitter and fb is a matter of perspective, that it's more appealing to people who barely were on the internet before these apps. A lot of these users never even knew web forums existed, and I hear them now after seeing those and they complaint because it's "too complicated" and "too much to read"

Extrapolate that and compare it to these same kids going to apps like instagram or tiktok which are even more visually-heavy (and less text) with content that it's even simpler and more optimized for user reach than user participation.

> Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations? Why not use a blog, personal site, or forum where instead of just posting a link you can also write your thoughts about it, etc.?

I actually do. I run a forum that I treat like a blog and link to my posts (and other members' posts) of interest.

I use Facebook in the same way you do - for participating in local motorsports. All the clubs organize via Facebook groups, so it's the only practical way to stay active in the sport. I'm using the personal account that I've had since 2005 but I don't post anything publicly anymore.

I use Twitter in an almost identical fashion, and I experience absolutely no toxicity, trolling, or other bad behaviour.

Twitter is, like many things, what you make of it.

“Twitter is, like many things, what you make of it.“

With a default mode of garbage.

It's just hard to ... make it there.

What makes Facebook stand out here to me is just how difficult they've made for people to do create isolated social networks on a personal level, at least in my experience. It is possible to limit your Facebook feed to friends and family and filter out people spewing garbage memes and obnoxious political points. However, I have not yet found a way to turn off Facebook's annoying habit of trying to "prioritize" posts in your news feed even if you do not want to. There seems to be no way to say "I want to see all of the posts in chronological order from a select group of friends". Even the "most recent" news feed order does not seem to work as advertised, often skewing stuff posted a couple of days ago towards the top.

I do have some family members on Facebook and in the past I would use Facebook to do things like share vacation photos, intended mainly for family members and close friends and the like. This now seems like an impossible task to do reliably -- there's no way I know that someone who hasn't seen my photos and want to will see it, from my perspective. So for me it's back to the ol' Smugmug and email. (I imagine there are other social networks that are able to work like I want, but most of my family isn't on it, and all of my family has email. This just works for me.)

Facebook does have "groups" which do work quite well as you mentioned, and Facebook works well from my perspective as an announcement / engagement platform for businesses and hobbies. Much of their core social network however seems broken to me personally.

(Regarding the parent linked article, I'm kind of curious where they are going to though and a better understanding of the reasons behind the shift. Most articles I've Googled don't seem to dive very deeply into these things beyond vague demographic musings like "Facebook isn't cool for teenagers" and mentioning Instagram and Snapchat as the replacement. The analysis level isn't even standard media depth to me, even more so than usual. If I look for articles on other things in relative decline where I do have a fair bit of insight -- like say NASCAR racing -- the general media articles actually seemed to (sometimes) make an effort to explain the often seem to make more efforts at explaining the declines, because the reasons are often multi-faceted. I have to believe that any Facebook decline is driven by a lot more details than "my parents are on Facebook".)

I did the same thing with trying to avoiding politics and entertainment, and just following programmers and development thought leaders. Yeah... They almost all wind up being political too. I simply cannot find a way to find interesting accounts that don't wind up talking about politics and current events. I don't care. I don't want to use Twitter for that, but apparently, Twitter doesn't want me to use the service for anything ELSE. (And, before someone suggests it, yes, my list of muted words is already long.)

A few years ago I remember trying out twitter and following John Gruber. Back then I was interested in what he had to say about Apple, but instead I got a mix of Apple stuff and, IIRC, inane baseball updates. I remember thinking that it felt like a real step back to have such a mixed feed, compared to just subscribing to his daringfireball.net RSS feed.

^this is how I use twitter as well. Thriving community in this tiny corner of the web, focusing on neat electronics projects and interesting tech or creative hobbies.

^^This is how I use twitter too. Mostly small selection of communities on the web that we all share our experience's and help each other out.

>Remove the YOU from social media, and use it to have fun about whatever it is you do to have fun, and it can actually be ... fun.

This doesn't change the fact that 99% of things people give credit for to social media can be easily done without mediation through a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Neither does it change the fact that Twitter and Facebook have a whole slew of horrible social effects. Centralization of the web, political polarization, emergent mobs trying to ruin people's lives, rise in depression and suicide rates, normalization of global surveillance, normalization of censorship, etc, etc.

Jaron Lanier has some interesting thoughts on the economy behind some of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc_Jq42Og7Q

Thing is the overwhelming majority of social network users just couldn't be bothered to use other solutions before this, and can't be bothered to do so now. How many were on online forums for example?.

>Thing is the overwhelming majority of social network users just couldn't be bothered to use other solutions before this

Did you ever stop to think why? It's not like the barrier of entry was high. People simply did not find it worth their time. Chances are, big social media isn't worth their time either, but people are kept there by social pressure and purpose-built addiction mechanisms. And you're spinning it as if this is some kind of positive thing.

Connectivity is like food. The benefits to the person don's scale linearly. Forums and IM were already above the bare minimum. They were like a hearty meal. Social media today is like having a binge eating disorder.

I sort of do the same thing. Mostly hobby/interest stuff.

I have a hard and fast rule of not friending anyone I see regularly or have a real private or personal relationship with (No family, no neighbors, no current coworkers). Avoids so much drama.

It's the same for me on reddit. After following only the subreddits that interest me, the engagement upped my knowledge and enthusiasm. Prior to that I didn't get reddit at all - now it supplements my HN addiction.

That's kinda what I want it to be. Topic focused or such.

It's just finding those folks is hard.

I don't post personal stuff, I'm also not really intrested in that.

I use Twitter to see the thoughts of influential people and even interact with them which I could have never done otherwise.

Out of curiosity, what do you get from that?

An expanded mind. Learning from smarter people.

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