Gardening Your Twitter

If you set twitter feed to "the latest tweets as they happen" (as opposed to "show top tweets first"), you don't get the "so-and-so liked this tweet" etc in the main feed. Combine that with turning off retweets for people if they're retweeting annoying garbage and you don't have to mess around with lists.

At this point I wouldn't recommend anyone expose their face or true identity to the internet. There was a time idealistic people thought that removing anonymity from the internet would somehow make it more civilized, but bad actors (e.g. most people using the internet regularly, it seems) have proven the lack of anonymity just makes it easy for people to find new and inventive ways to harass and insult you. For all the non-cis non-white non-males out there, people don't even need an excuse to attack you anymore beyond your non-cis, non-white, non-maleness.

The blog author seems to grasp tentatively toward recognizing their own privilege, but fails to mention that they have 31,000 twitter followers and, having started their own business, significant adoration from the Twitter tech crowd. I can imagine Twitter seems like a great place to be when you've been elevated by the community. Everyone looks up to you, everyone thinks what you have to say is important. Life is a lot different on the internet for people who don't have that same following. I don't think trying to curate an online persona and manage a Twitter account where you reply to everyone is a valuable use of your time when you're still trying to find a way to consistently feed yourself.

> So if you aren't a cis white male

'cis' is such a weird/annoying term; it's like saying 'pre' instead of 'prepubescent'.

(Sorry, I know that's tangential to your point, but where else will I make grammatical complaints about the discourse of social issues than HN?)

Author here: I’m gay, not cis.

But: I agree that women have it even harder - I can only share my own experience though, in the hope it’s interesting to some folks.

Seems like the author thinks that protecting yourself is exclusive to non-cis, non-white, non-male folks. I guess they've had a relatively rosy experience on Twitter thus far, which is a tad mind boggling!

Some of this is backed by studies I've read, and some of it is my own anecdotal experiences, so take it for what you will:

Sharing your identity on the internet is dangerous. Deliberate bad actors aside, there is a whole world of people out there with varying life experiences and tribal knowledge that they use to perceive the exact same world you perceive when you consume online content in a potentially different light than you do. Though you're looking at the same thing, because of the lens of your life experiences, two things that are exactly the same can be perceived two different ways by two different observers. Sometimes this does something innocuous like making someone engage in healthy debate with someone they otherwise wouldn't. In other cases it results in a lot of assumptions that the observer may make both directly and indirectly about you and what you said.

When you're out and about in the real world what stops an observer from making the very same assumptions that lead them to an outcome online is the lack of notion that they know you. An online profile, and things like pictures, establish in peoples minds the notion that they know you somehow (whether they'd like to admit it or not, their actions are influenced by this phenomenon). The author kind of touches on this phenomenon when they mention that profile picture changes can result in decreased engagement, but some studies have pointed out that it can indicate that your followers already have an unhealthy relationship with you and feel some autonomy over your life choices or at the very least your digital presence.

From here you're one tweet away from being someones virtual punching bag, subject of a mob, etc... all of these things are abusive but doubly so if someone can determine real world information about you and carry that poor outcome from the digital landscape to the real world landscape. My point is that all people, on any given day, are capable of abusive behavior and unfortunately it is still on you to protect yourself from them, whether they have a history with abuse or if they just had a bad day and you were the thousandth bee sting they've felt that day.

While insulating yourself from abuse online is doubly important for marginalized groups that suffer from a larger pool of deliberate bad actors than cisgender, white men we shouldn't ignore the fact that anonymity, and the concept of protecting yourself, is useful to everyone.

People don't read blogs but they read tweetstorms. Tweetstorms remain on the platform and can be linked separately. As soon as you have an external link, most people aren't gonna click on it.

That you're using the term "tweetstorm" indicates to me you haven't been using Twitter for some time (5+ years) so if that's the case you should know that the UI for threads has improved dramatically, both in the authoring and reading contexts.

To each their own I guess?

I personally would way rather people share in a place where others can pop in & comment, start their own mini-threads amid the existing conversation. I'd rather have pieces of the thread be re-shareable (retweetable). I'd rather see the work evolve over time than come off as one giant artifact.

I also like this pattern of threads running over time because it resurfaces ideas. This makes these threads a great implementation of Gwern's Spaced Repetition[1], whereas I may skim your blog post once but I will not see it again, in all probability.

This complaint that "you should blog" is widely loudly echoed again and again, and frankly I don't understand it. I do think it is good to recollect, to recap, after the threads have been long tread, as I think it's good for findability long term and I think it helps us as authors & to generate prestige. But blog posts are tragically woefully un-interactive, are an ancient, unevolving medium alike carving things into stone. It's not effective, it's not interesting, & it lacks so many neat & powerful capabilities that we could do so much better on. I for one thing the blogs (have a niche but) are highly overrated. Rarely do the blog-post desiring people go into why they want blog posts, why they dislike twitter. In this case, the only specific thing mentioned is a tweet being quoted/embedded out of context, as a strike against threaded conversations, which, I for one, think is radically massively outstripped by how powerful & capable it is that we can quote/embed pieces of the convo.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24857437

Yeap. The part about the examples of "best performing tweets" being memes were actually kinda cringy.

I created twitter about a month ago with the intention of using it like a multi-purpose RSS feed and reader. I decided to only tweet about updates and new content from my side. And then to find others that work in areas I care about and follow them. Trouble is - nobody else seems to use twitter like that. They post memes, retweet things, share their political opinions, ask questions, get into discussions, and I see all of that when I follow them. It's just too noisy, currently haven't deleted it but heavily considering the option.

I would like to do this as well, is this a Twitter setting or a 3rd party solution?

I absolutely hate this sort of thing. You've participated in dozens & dozens of conversations, had all sorts of interactions. And now when people go back to reflect, on their lives, on what happened, on conversations they had... they'll find a big black hole. A vanishing point where ulucs once was there but has deleted himself.

It feels anti-civil to me, to put yourself in public, to participate in public activity, then to mask & cloak & hide all your activity after the fact. While platforms allow this, I think the civic world has an obligation to prevent you from doing this.

If you want to be non-interactable on the medium after time, I'd be ok with that. We can make affordances. But burning all the books is a bad thing. You are too important, too interesting, your contact with the world too notable to let you continually incinerate your online self.