If you're not famous, joining Twitter is painful | Hacker News Reader

If you're not famous, joining Twitter is painful

dbasch.posterous.com

90 pointsdiego75 comments

Lose your ego. Develop a genuine interest in other people. If you aren't interested in anyone else, then what reason do they have to care about you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_win_friends_and_influenc...

OK,

I actually have attracted friends on Facebook through my general wittiness and insight. But there, I'm not limited by some sharp character limit. With twitter, I really don't see the point (though I am writing a Twitter client just for thoroughness).

As the article says, what exactly makes anyone interested in my Twitter account. Especially - as far as I know, none of either my real or my virtual friends are on Twitter. If a few were, what would drag the others along?

A few of my Facebook friends do the one-random-sentence-per-hour thing. But usually those sentences are boring, the least interesting part of my "social networking experience".

Isn't the whole purpose of joining Twitter is to get your ego stroked? I fail to see any other legitimate use of it.

I use it almost entirely as a news feed, I only very occasionally post things myself.

OK, this is interesting.

Considering that a tweet is only 100-something characters, your use is essentially equivalent to following an RSS-like feed for a news site. The only difference is that the newsmaker can be anybody and you don't get to read a full version of the news article. Right?

(Personally getting news off Twitter isn't a reason I use it.)

If you follow a feed that basically just outputs an RSS-esque feed of titles and links, then yes, it's just an interface for RSS.

You can also follow people and/or organisations that editorialise in their tweets. For example, if you want tech news from BBC, you could get a basic RSS feed, or you could look to someone like Rory Cellan-Jones and could follow his work account (@BBCRoryCJ) which is basically just BBC stuff, but not the same info you would get from an RSS feed with some extras added in, or his personal account (@ruskin147) where you get more personal thoughts/opinions etc.

And another option, getting news from your friends - so, in theory, that can provide you with interesting content from random different sources that fit your interests, which an RSS feed won't do. So it's kinda like what a sub-reddit is to the reddit frontpage, except purely personalised on who you want to follow.

The other commenters said most of it already but here's what I do. I follow multiple headline accounts (BBC, Sky, Al Jazeera, Reuters etc), those tweets usually have a headline and a link to the article if I want to read the rest.

I follow around 100 accounts at any one time, and frequently prune the list so it doesn't get to busy or full of stuff I'm no longer interested in.

I also follow specific journalists, politicians, science and tech people who also often link to things they're reading which are useful background for what's going on.

By far the most useful thing is creating custom columns in tweetdeck for search terms. Think of it like this: rather than subscribing to an RSS feed for a site and hoping they post stuff I'm interested in, it's more like automatically generating a news feed on any subject you're interested in. I have a bunch of saved searches on all kinds of subjects, some of them may only get one or two tweets a week, but it keeps me up to date.

Another benefit to using searches is that it's a good way to discover people who are consistently tweeting interesting stuff so you can follow them. Without the search I would never have heard of or thought of following some of the people I do.

Yes. It is like massively decentralized news aggregation.

You can just follow any-old tag and see what comes up, or you can try and improve the signal-to-noise ratio by following the people you generally enjoy reading and create specific lists.

I've also found it helpful in big conferences. at the WCC2010 I switched streams (there was 16) a few times because the quotes coming out of other sessions hinted that the other one was more interesting/relevant to me.

...if you want it to be.

What it actually is is plumbing that you can configure more or less how you'd like. So it can be what you described. Or it can be any number of other things.

Then your curiosity, your imagination or both have failed to engage.

I got a job through Twitter once, along with countless examples of professional and personal advice, guidance and encouragement. I can easily communicate with far-flung friends without the freighted expectations of long-form letters. I can maintain a professional network and stay up to date on new technologies and open source code.

It's a decent chunk of why I have my career as it currently exists, if I'm to be honest.

Fair enough. I guess I just don't dig communicating via SMS-style messages.

EDIT: And, having pondered that some more, it's not even communcating. It's more like writing something on a wall hoping that your neighbors happen to see it and take interest. No, I certainly don't dig it. Although I can imagine following tweets of a person I'm really interested in, but that would only be 2 or 3 people--close people like girlfriend and relatives.

Once you have a decent set of friends you're mutually following, it's kinda like an open IRC channel. Dip into it when you have a moment, see what people are saying, maybe answer a question or congratulate a friend who had something to celebrate. Maybe dump a little rant. People you know might reply, and so might your hangers-on. Maybe you want to reply to what either of them has to say.

The message limit is like any other limit - sometimes it's a pain, sometimes it's a restriction that leads to succinctness and focus.

> it's not even communcating. It's more like writing something on a wall hoping that your neighbors happen to see it and take interest.

It needn't be even remotely like that.

You're kind of arguing from ignorance. And I can't, for the life of me, see why. It's okay to not know about some things. And it's okay to not have your curiosity draw you to certain things. But when it's pretty clear you have no idea what you're talking about, why go on asserting that ignorance as fact instead of asking questions and learning more? Why enshrine your ignorance in lengthy words, insisting others take a bite?

Here's what it's most like, for me:

IRC. Where you're the bouncer and the channel contains whomever you'd like.

The messages are brief but that's their only resemblance to SMS. 140 characters is more than ample to share thoughts or directions toward interesting content. There's plenty of communication, if you choose to use it that way.

> You're kind of arguing from ignorance. And I can't, for the life of me, see why.

You can't see why because I'm not arguing in the first place. I'm just describing the things as I undestand them. I may be wrong, but that's why I'm describing them: so that other's can explain them to me if they feel like doing it.

Now to the point. I am trying to learn about Twitter and see if there is any value to me. I visited your twitter account, and I saw that most of your tweets don't have replies. I don't see this as communication. To me, it feels more like begging for attention. I don't feel like this is something I'd like to be doing (or at least feel like I'm doing).

And, as I wrote in another thread, I think I now know what my problem with Twitter is. I'd like to follow some developers I like, but every time I go to their twitter account, I see a lot of personal and/or vacouous stuff. I just don't feel like reading about their personal life or random thoughts on things. And this seems to be a big part of any personal Twitter stream.

"I visited your twitter account, and I saw that most of your tweets don't have replies."

When I look my TV, or read a book, I rarely answer the writer, anchor, redactor... Still it is communication. Not like "communication with friends", more like "mass communication". It still allows you to share your opinions, bring new ideas, etc. People will only answer if they think they can add additional value or disagree, else they'll just read and enjoy or not.

Look, you are on HN, and comment here. You don't expect every member of HN to answer all your comments. Think of Twitter has an enormous HN where you can choose who you read comments from.

> I'm not arguing in the first place. I'm just describing the things as I undestand them. I may be wrong, but that's why I'm describing them: so that other's can explain them to me if they feel like doing it.

It's fine to post-rationalize it that way but your initial comment left very little room for that interpretation. Questions generally work better than assertions for addressing curiosity.

> I don't see this as communication. To me, it feels more like begging for attention. I don't feel like this is something I'd like to be doing (or at least feel like I'm doing).

Not really sure what to tell you. You're also not seeing all the direct messages that pass between people, responding to certain things privately, or the many @replies that aren't parsed into the public web interface due to flakey clients. But whatever — you're finding ways to reassure your preconceptions and that's totally your privilege. In the end, though, "not my cup of tea" is a very different sentiment from "I fail to see any other legitimate use of it."

What you call vacuous I call personality. The people who work on interesting things are worth getting to know personally. I've enjoyed meatspace drinks and, again, entire paid gigs through getting to know people this way. A good friend who was fucked in unemployment land scored an amazing gig through just being fun and personable on Twitter. Thus same friend managed to introduce me to some people I really admire through the same means.

So if you want to view Twitter through this boring-ass lens where you have no curiosity about your fellow humans, well, I guess it's not surprising you're not going to get much value from it. Like much of life, it's what you make of it.

> It's fine to post-rationalize it that way but your initial comment left very little room for that interpretation. Questions generally work better than assertions for addressing curiosity.

Please re-read my initial comment. It _was_ a question followed by a statement of truth. I'm not post-rationalizing anything.

I don't like the way this conversation is going. Thank you for your interest.

Come on, dude, just be real. Your "question" was so loaded a team of pack mules couldn't shift it:

"Isn't the whole purpose of joining Twitter is to get your ego stroked?"

And it got, appropriately, down voted into the earth's core. You showed up, you were a little flip, it turned out you're not seeing the whole picture. Just own it and we'll all have a good time learning things.

he did, you're belaboring the point too much

> You're kind of arguing from ignorance. And I can't, for the life of me, see why. It's okay to not know about some things. And it's okay to not have your curiosity draw you to certain things.

Please, ignorance has nothing to do with it, the author has kind of hit the nail on the head. First of all, he's correct insofar as nobody really wants to follow uninteresting or anonymous people. And the hard truth is that the majority of us are not interesting nor famous (me included, I've only got 2-3 followers, even though I follow around 30 people).

If your number of followers/friends/fans on Twitter/Facebook/Google+/etc. is how you measure your self worth, you might want to readjust your values.

HN Karma is a much better method. :P

Exactly the reason why I never really liked Twitter; people seem to care about obtaining a maximum follower count and do not really look at quality. Once obtained, they 'look down' on people who have 'less followers'. Sad. Same sadness as Facebookers with thousands of friends. Maybe go do something useful? Twitter can be fun and when you get followers because you are interesting (somehow), it's fine. If you actually care however how many followers you have and if you monitor and really care about your follower growth, there is something emotionally wrong with you IMHO.

Sounds like Twitter is really an MMORPG with a uniquely minimalist set of gameplay mechanics.

Ha! In THAT case, they did a great job!

The article would suggest they just need to work on tuning the leveling system- the initial grind is too much for some newbies.

> Once obtained, they 'look down' on people who have 'less followers'.

It's only really douchebags who do this. The only thing that's good about more followers, is that more people will hear what you have to say. This is a good thing. "Status" in all shapes and forms is a pretty retarded social construct to say the least. I don't care if you have followers, have a nice car, have a cushy job or have an iPhone. I care about what someone does and says.

But a lot (LOT) of people spend their entire day comparing the size of their ehm things with others and only 'feel happy' when theirs is bigger. Twitter (and Facebook as well) shows what happens everywhere, in most houses of most people, but then in public. That's what makes it, for me, quite bad advertising for the human race, even the more technological inclined.

So what, why do you care? A lot of people use their cars as a status symbol, should that stop you from using a car?

I don't care, but most people do :)

Most people do not drive sports or luxury cars. Most people on twitter do not have thousands of followers. Maybe most people desire such things but most people seem to get by without them.

Doesn't say they like it; I know plenty of people who look in envy when their neighbor buys a slightly more expensive middle class sedan and will replace their own as fast as they can, even though they can impossibly pay for that. So no, they don't get by, they just do it on a different scale; no sports cars, but with big screen tvs, middle class cars etc. You think most people buy the latest 3d tv because they want to watch stuff in 3d? Some people probably do, most just want to have something more than others.

If you only want to be on twitter for your ego and you don't actually have the ability to massage that ego, then who honestly cares.

The three suggestions in this post... just no. I get why people follow celebrities, I don't want to myself, but many people do so fair enough. But follow random people, and get random people to follow me? Twitter is a communication tool, just like email, Skype, whatever. It's quite possible for it to be useful with the people you actually know, you don't have to use it as service for finding people you don't know to make yourself look popular.

You're missing the point. The most value I get from Twitter comes from interacting with other people, especially in serendipitous ways. It's not about being followed by random people at all; it's about following (and being followed by) people with whom you could have interesting conversations.

So you want a synchronous relationship in an async medium?

Twitter isn't about having the maximum number of followers. It's just another way of communicating and get news and updates from people / groups / whatever more instantly.

If you find it painful to not have 180k followoers then you're kind of a looser. Sorry to say it like this. But this kind of attitude lead people to mass-follow anyone to have some follow-back and that's creating spam and it's kind of borring for normal-non-followers-needy twitter users.

There's a difference between having 180k followers and having 0. Having 0 is painful because you tweet into nothingness. My observation comes from trying to get many of my friends started with Twitter, only to see that their tweets get lots in the continuously-scrolling timelines of the five of us who follow them back to get them started.

No you don't tweet into nothingness: your feed is public which means that you can for instance show your last tweet on your blog/homepage/... and use twitter as a quick update tool for visitor of your blog/site/... Also, you can use hashtags to join a conversation (this is done better with groups in status.net). In the same time start to follow people who say things that interest you (news, links, personal update, event coverage...).

If you're not interested in any of the use cases above, then why start using twitter at all?

First off, no reason to downvote me because you disagreed with my comment. My point is that if Twitter is trying to get past the point of people who do the things you say (savvy social media people) and cross into the Facebook mainstream, they need to give people easy ways to be heard.

My post is from the point of view of the company, not the potential users. Why start using Twitter at all is exactly right, and a problem for Twitter.

I don't have the down arrow on comments that are replies to my submissions or comments, and anyway I wouldn't have downvoted you. I disagree with you but that doesn't mean your comment is stupid or anything, we are discussing and I see no reason to downvote you here (but I won't upvote you either, of course ;-)).

About our discussion: I get your point, but I think that simply for the usage I described there are still a lot of people/company who can benefit from Twitter (or equivalent, like status.net).

Then make or add friends before starting. Twitter makes this crystal clear when you open an account. Respond to people, engage - it's not that big of a problem.

Are you really complaining that Twitter is too hard? It's taken me a couple of years, but I've accumulated over a thousand followers on Twitter. Some of those came through my blog, but most came through Stack Overflow where I'm a moderator and active contributor. The point is that you have to actually do something to make people want to follow you. Why would people give you their attention (even micro slices of their attention) otherwise?

Also:

> I don't want Twitter to start looking into my Gmail and follow people who are on Twitter.

seems at odds with:

> This is why you should be very afraid of Google+, they give people an instant audience. That's very powerful.

Twitter is NOT about mindlessly collecting a vast number of followers ... unless you're a CEO trying to market your various companies.

Seriously folks, look at the author / submitter ...

"CEO of Flaptor, maker of IndexTank (indextank.com) Hounder (hounder.org) and Trendistic (trendistic.com) among other things."

... this is the blog of a CEO who is trying to build a reputation and / or brand awareness. Nothing wrong with that, but keep in mind the intent of the author when reading the OP.

"First, let's admit that part of what makes Twitter interesting is egos and follower counts. There is clearly a pecking order on Twitter that doesn't exist in other social networks. If you have 10k followers you can tell off some loser with only 500. When you join Twitter you are the bottom bitch."

I guess this is how folks with something to sell see Twitter. It's not how anyone else I know who uses Twitter socially (as opposed to as a marketing tool) see Twitter.

>There is clearly a pecking order on Twitter that doesn't exist in other social networks. If you have 10k followers you can tell off some loser with only 500.

There is something about this attitude that is genuinely evil.

I've been using twitter since very early in its life, and I have to admit I never conceived of it in such an awful, high-school-popularity way. I use it as a mini-RSS feed to follow people and technologies I find interesting.

Honest Question: is the OP's view the mainstream or minority attitude of the twitterverse at-large?

How about following people you actually know, and then using twitter as a communication medium?

Yuuuup. Twitter is just a communication mechanism. If you're not leveraging synergies and monetizing your social media with new configurations of value that's not a problem in the least. Twitter is not some multi-level marketing scam that you need to exploit. It's a way to keep up with people you like or people you are interested in, famous or not.

Social media gurus preach brand awareness and engagement, but the truth is most people care more about the actions of a common squirrel than you.

http://twitter.com/#!/common_squirrel

This is a matter of expectations. What did you expect?

I opened a twitter account when I noticed some people who had interesting things to say and who did this on twitter. My expectation was a little "news" feed. Then, while I was at it, I tweeted some things of my own, mostly expressions of political opinion and insights. I also retweeted some things I found interesting and worthy of attention. Suddenly, I had 3 followers. I did not expect that, but I thought that it was great that someone was listening to me. That did not change my expectations nor my behaviour.

Follower count? Who cares? I have 12 followers. Among them are a handful of people that I respect very much, and I feel quite honoured that they are willing to listen to what I say. This feels much more important to me than 100000 people following some sort of lolcats.

I posted this in the article itself, and I think it's relevant here:

The concept of location-based communications is a very powerful one. Imagine that you were new to an area, and you wanted to meet locals with similar interests. You should be able to create a tag about something that interests you, and broadcast it out to people within, say, 1-2 miles and invite like minded people out to coffee, or a movie, or some sort of similar event. This provides a way to create real-life followers and build interests off of that. If nothing else, I my end up writing something to do this myself...

I've wanted an app like this for a while now, I'm hoping that I'll be able to build it on Google+ when their API comes out.

Get an autofollow/unfollow program which just follows people based on keyword, followers list, following list, etc. You put a couple of interesting tweets, and interesting username, and a background and profile image. It follows those people, see who follows back and then after a certain amount of time unfollows the ones who don't (or everyone) pretty easy way to get a lot of people seeing your tweets.

Why would people follow someone that doesn't actually exist? Twitter is for people you already know, people they know, and then people that take your interest along the way. It builds on existing friendships, as opposed to starting with nothing. You might get lucky if you say good things to the right people, but if you have no friends in real life, don't expect to be Mr. Popular on Twitter.

I never cared much about my 'follower count', yet I've had some fantastic conversations and gained a lot of valuable info via Twitter. I've got barely over 100 followers, and a small proportion of them are people I know in real life. Maybe twitter should be promoting the use of hashtag topics more, since that's where I've found new people to follow and gotten followers by contributing.

if you don't have anybody who wants to follow you, and you don't particularly want to follow anybody, then yes i suppose joining twitter might be a confusing process. but that's because twitter isn't suited to you.

tailoring a social web service towards antisocial people is probably not a good business strategy.

Like all social media, its no fun if you have no friends.

Even as a marketing tool (and the same applies with a blog), you cannot expect an instant return. You start with zero followers just like a blog starts with few readers. You don't give up just because no one's listening, you create a bit of history by effectively loss-leading - writing content that no one will initially see and contributing to what you might want Twitter to be. Over time, through search, links from your blog and interacting with other Twitter users, you will build up some interaction and (if that's what you're there for) influence.

I suppose the impatience and expectations of new users are that challenge for Twitter, though it'd be nice to see more people realise this for themselves rather than wait to have it solved for them.

As a premise for a blog post this isn't a particularly veiled attempt at armchair quarterbacking twitter, and closing with 'k, now go follow me everybody!' clangs instead of adding to the argument. I guess people who use this reasoning as their entire purpose for interacting online turn me off to the point that I don't anticipate ever joining Facebook, and still find very little compelling about G+. People post to G+'s generic-looking interface instead of blogging, and get piled on with comments, losing both personality and clarity in contrast to something like Tumblr or traditional blogging. Twitter and Tumblr are two great tastes that taste great together, however you want to utilize them in my opinion.

I'm with the author of the article on this one. Call me egotistical all you want but yeah, I tried Twitter for a few days and got really bored with it. The author's complaints basically mirror my short Twitter experience. If I tweet something and literally have 2 or 3 followers who will see it, why not just send an Sms? Pointless.

So, I need a larger group of followers, no? But what motive does Twitter have to get me to bust ass and try to build a follower base? None. I already took the time to build a friend base some other social network and I'm in no mood to start that process again.

As a means of getting up-to-the-minute news and information,Twitter excels. But yeah, count me out.

Just subscribed a short time ago and didn't have the same experience. I started following some interesting people, from my point of view, and I immediately got followers.

I suspect that some people follow new subscribers with similar interests so that they follow back expecting the new subscriber to see who they are.

The other thing I did was to tweet a private message to some known person who answered me. So this might have caught some attention too if it was seen by others. Since one has to follow both people involved in a "private" communication to see the exchange, this could motivate people to follow me.

I've been on Twitter since the beginning and have had the same experience. Start following some people, post some interesting things and you'll get followers.

Another way to get followers is to either pimp a product or complain about a product. More often than not, you'll get some followers and you might get a response.

Either way, I've loved it. It's very stream of conscious and a great sounding board for me.

If you're not famous, getting a reservation is painful...this is the truth for a ton of things. Stoking the fire never hurts. Funny thing I tweeted at this guy and got no response.

Tell that to the teenage kids who were using twitter to communicate to people that they were under assault. They were able to do it discreetly, without having to vocalize themselves by a phone call.

Twitter has it's usefulness, but not everyone has realized it just yet. I hope that changes - maybe the upcoming integration with iOS will allow it to. Depending on how far it's integrated, it can provide developers some amazing tools to work with.

No more painful than starting a blog, a podcast, or even a GitHub account. You have to actually produce stuff to get attention in any case.

If you don't have friends to talk to and to listen to on a social media service, don't be on that social media service.

> Help me find newbies like me, who want to follow and be followed!

This is otherwise know as a "business opportunity".

I have zero followers (I only really use it to respond to other people), and Twitter is incredibly useful to me. It lets me easily and naturally interact with well known/popular people I otherwise wouldn't normally have any reason to interact with.

I thought this article would be about how hard it is to get a decent Twitter username now that spammers have taken up so many of them. That was my biggest challenge, but Twitter doesn't really seem to care about the problem.

They would rather pretend to have 400 000 000 users than eliminate the crap accounts.

Why do you even want followers? What makes you so interesting?

I'm not famous, and twitter is awesome. I use it to keep up with my friends and it works fantastically well. If you don't have friends who use twitter or don't have friends maybe your experience would be different.

I think there is a development opportunity here. Certainly there are analytic questions that seem interesting. Imagine a kind of slider control that could be used to filter out who you interact with. The slider would set the popularity threshold. You may prefer your account to interact with accounts that have roughly the same number of followers as yours, with roughly the same number of followers and the same karma.

In this system, following someone is no longer a binary proposition: you follow someone at a given threshold. If your threshold is set below the number of followers of the account, you don't see their tweets, and they don't get to count you among their followers. As you move the slider, your view of Twitter changes to match the threshold: accounts you may have followed at the higher threshold drop off or become visible as you change settings.

Why do this? Well, if you're a new user, you may be tired of contributing to someone else's power-law distribution. Why should you enable the rich to get richer? Why not join a system where you can interact with other users at comparable levels? Twitter is losing the Johnny-come-lately's anyway. So there is an opportunity to encourage interactions that go beyond the discouraging power-law phenomena in which a few users have most of the followers.

As Satan said, "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven." A follower threshold feature could enable this, and it might generate interesting analytics.

So people still don't understand Twitter after all this time huh?

It never gets old reading comments, or in this case a whole blog post coming from people who are unable to grasp how Twitter is actually one thing but is repurposed for a myriad of others, much to the enjoyment of many of its users.

I just don't understand the blog post anyway. "It's dumb to try to rack up followers just for a number" right after "I can't get any followers".

Find a way to use Twitter to get content from people you like. My Twitter is a combination of an RSS reader and a way for my friends to share quick thoughts or links. There is overlap with Facebook and overlap with Google Reader, but there is lots of content that I get from Twitter or discover on Twitter... that I can't find elsewhere.

I feel like if people spent more time following people they knew or developers they like or project/product managers, etc, they would actually see the value in Twitter, rather than trying to take this ivory tower approach.

I think I now know what my problem with Twitter is. I'd like to follow some developers I like, but I just don't feel like reading about their personal life or random thoughts. And this seems to be a big part of any personal Twitter stream.

that's the benefit of being able to quickly (and silently) unfollow someone. Personally, I use a "3 tweets in a row that are annoying = unfollow" rule. It works well for me. And anyways, you'll often be surprised at how someone you respect professionally can be ver entertaining in their personal life.

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