Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Twitter can and could be a lot of things, and it certainly is no longer the thing it was when it started. It’s mostly why I rarely use it anymore. As a microblogging tool, I think it was great. At a conference? “Heading down to $BAR_AND_GRILL with John.” “Finally! Sunshine in Seattle today.”

But at some point it turned into what I consider the cesspool it is today. Yelling at the wind. Building my “personal brand”. A lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. But mainly a low signal-noise ratio, just not worth my attention. Maybe it’s what some signed up for, but it’s not what I signed up for ten or so years ago. And perhaps because Twitter itself can’t seem to figure out what it wants to be, it turns into something a lot of others didn’t signed up for, either.

What do I know, I don’t use it much anymore. But perhaps if they had a better defined mission, and a more narrow view, they’d keep the smaller number of users they end up with. But I guess when you’re building with other people’s money, the mission is “MOAR USERS!”

My best use case for it is following people or entities of note in the industry who pretty much keep on point about their particular niche without diverging into much else (aside from some self promotion, but that’s to be expected and I don’t mind since I receive value from their comms).

Ya know, I thought I'd go that route, but I must have chosen poorly. Many might have held the line for a while, but eventually degraded to about a 20:1 cat/food picture:"what I followed you for in the first place." But they owe me nothing, they can do as they please.

And perhaps that's the problem, perhaps Twitter was better suited to having a dozen, fifty or so people that you follow and who follow you. People you might not know intimately, but at least kinda know. So while you might have to put up with "awww, look at Ms. Sylvia Plath, isn't she the cutest cat?" on ocassion, at least you might have some context. IOW, the way I viewed Twitter back in the day was a lot more personal and less public than it turned out to be.

You’re describing using Twitter initially the way WhatsApp was initially envisioned: broadcasting statuses to friends —which kind of worked but the problem is was it was either DM or broadcast, no group or list concept to keep things fenced in.

So, I basically use it as a broadcast listening platform tuned to chosen sources and works well in that regard.

I see twitter as a good personal bookmarking tool that's exposed to the world. I use it for myself but also hope once in a while a client or employer sees my profile and thinks my view of the world and what I read is interesting. So not personal branding in the sense of growing my brand but more so in the sense of having of track record of my authentic interests, ideas, and shares.

Yeah, Twitter had an eternal September moment. For twitter though, it came almost immediately. By design.

What we, the digital elites, need, is a tool with a high barrier to entry for users. Simply requiring 2FA to login should do it.

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