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Comment by Mizza | Hacker News Reader

Flip side: I would destroy Twitter.

Twitter is absolutely the worst thing to happen to the internet. Low effort, inherently self-aggrandizing and standoffish, literally impossible to express a complex or nuanced thought. The only people I know who regularly engage with Twitter are extreme narcissists and conformist thinkers, and yet all of Twitter considers themselves to be the Important People. This mentality has crept into all spheres of public life.

Good blogging requires effort, effective communication and something interesting and original to say. Those days are long gone.

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All you have to do is viciously mute/unfollow people and words that are remotely in the sphere of something someone might get angry about.

My twitter feed is 95% weird humor and cool art/tech projects. It takes some work but it's doable.

I agree. Not to mention tweeting seems to carry the highest risk of destroying your career and/or social life of pretty much any other online medium. It probably has something to do with the whole "casual communication" focus. People tend to put a lot more thought (and time) into a blog post.

I think it's been years since I posted anything on twitter.

My honest recommendation for Twitter: Don't use the built-in systems to follow anyone. Keep bookmarks on people's profiles and visit manually if you want to know what they're up to. The timeline is a terrible idea. Twitter works really well for me because of this.

I'm not sure I understand, what's the problem with following people and using the timeline (maybe even in a third party client that sorts it chronologically)? What do you gain by only navigating to profiles manually?

The timeline is controlled via algorithm, and either filters or selects things to show you based on an uncontrollable process which is likely just meant to make you more outraged, annoyed, etc. to keep you engaged with the platform. Not only is that unhealthy, but it doesn’t make for an enjoyable experience almost by definition.

But if you only follow people which profiles you would want to visit manually you wouldn't see all this outrage?

You might miss other more positive or neutral messages from those people.

I don't think messages are filtered out, they are just shuffled to show you the ones first that the algorithm thinks you like best.

But if you don't check frequently enough or read long enough then it is effectively filtering out tweets that aren't near the top.

Can't you just set the timeline to show latest tweets first to avoid this? The alternative is certainly terrible (though mostly because it hides a bunch of tweets I actually wanted to view rather than because of any outrage), but the option to disable it is there.

AFAIK no. But there exist third party websites and apps that do. Or at least used to; Twitter may have changed it since I last used TweetBot.

tweetdeck.twitter.com[0] works really well for this. It does not "filter" your feed in any way (as far as I know). You follow a hashtag you see every tweet for that hashtag. You follow a user and you can filter out "retweets" and "likes" to only see what the user posts (I wanted to see what @POTUS tweets and it's nothing only retweets).

A column in tweetdeck can be a user, a search, a list, a hashtag, and more. Every column shows ever tweet and they mostly come in realtime.

[0] https://tweetdeck.twitter.com

Counterpoint: Twitter is the preferred social media among scientists, and a good place to keep up with the latest papers and developments. The quality of discussion on science twitter can be pretty good too, despite the character limit.

I'm skeptical that anybody's Twitter is on par with the quality and engagement you see from something like Terrance Tao's WordPress blog. Unless you're including the linked content for preprints and the like, I just don't see it. The depth just isn't there. As a way to survey news in a field, sure, twitter definitely has value but the content on Twitter itself isn't really what I'd consider quality.

I think the popularity of Twitter is due to people not wanting to express complex or nuanced thoughts. If it weren't Twitter, somebody else would be in that space. It seems to me that the ones who are participating in such networks never intended to put too much effort into their communication or arguments anyway.

It's a supply and demand issue, not a tool's existence.

If you carefully curate who you follow, Twitter can be more like a bunch of subreddits, with the added signal of knowing who's posting. So it ends up a being great way to keep up with small communities.

I really understand your feelings. A ton of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news, make Twitter a terrible platform. It looks much better than Facebook. Many people are being controlled something to say what some want to hear. Attacking and harassing users is what I see every day. I don't know where we can find another platform that gives and updates us.

Twitter is great for pushing current events or initiating discussion on less well thought out topics.

It's not a good place for conversation. And that's ok, as long as users understand these limitations and there's an alternative (blogs or forums) that interested participants can turn to.

I find twitter great for following astrophysics researchers and optimization/DL researchers.

I have never understood the appeal of Twitter. (Or short Facebook/G+ status update type content) I mean, what is so great about seeing lots of really short posts? You can't say anything truly meaningful. It's just a bunch of pointless noise.

It's a replacement for RSS subscribe

Honestly, the only thing I really like about Twitter is Moments. They aggregate the current trend from various tweets and compile a good enough summary to get you upto speed. But this is so deeply buried in the UI, it's a shame.

Twitter is the best because it's about the individual , not the groupthink. Most aggregators fail hard because groupthink destroys them, but on twitter you can follow individuals and ignore everyone else. You are not forced to follow trends (like in most aggregators, even here) , and you can even follow people banished from most aggregators (e.g. Trump)

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