A Guide to Twitter
tasshin.com
tasshin.com
I used it for years, trying to follow interesting people or artists but in the end, it was just an amplified echo chamber of myself.
Everyday there was the shitstorm of the day. Absence of nuance was the norm (nuance is not prone to RTs, I believe).
Everyone there is trying to push its personal fight, which, while I generally agree with, is never the reason I come to Twitter. Yes I want the world to change about [society topic] but no, Twitter is just not the place for that.
In the end, I was mindlessly scrolling through rage and polarized opinions while I was coming to learn / love / occupy myself.
Maybe I did something wrong, maybe it was not for me.
I closed my account. I don’t miss it but each time I read an article like this I happen to think that maybe I missed something wonderful about Twitter.
The algorithm of what I want to see is so terrible I never bother with the default view. I've been using latest for years
They really want to feed you stuff you don't actually want.
But yes, they are optimizing for things like UAM and engagement, so to them almost anything that draws people back looks like a good product choice.
I’m not convinced “holding it wrong” is a good answer, but it seems to be that I and others are “holding it wrong”.
I have 2 twitter accounts, I follow people who post interesting tech things. Then they retweet some more polarised stuff from others, or even if enough followers like a tweet it ends up in my feed.
I would follow nobody if I unfollowed everyone who does this.
The truth is that humans are varied and while they might have a hobby (tech) they also have opinions about society.
It’s unfair not to assume that.
That's true, but:
a) in my experience, those tweets are the vast minority of what I see, probably less than 1%
b) I just ignore them
This happens in real life too. I have friends with broadly similar outlooks who, from time-to-time, say something I don't agree with. Sometimes I'll choose to engage, and this is always more productive than engaging on Twitter in similar circumstances, I fully accept that. But I'll often just change the subject or otherwise ignore them, and I find that's a perfectly viable tactic on twitter too.
What I've been thinking about is there needs to be the 2020s great data exfiltration of social media, the second Googlebot Crawler moment.
It has been three years since I've seen a hardcore user cry of "having limbs torn" by Twitter API changes[1] that shut down a free bulk access, and it still reads as vivid as if it was written today to me.
1: https://mizchi-hatenablog-com.translate.goog/entry/2018/08/2... (I know MT don't do languages half right but I don't have energy to translate manually either)
Professionally, tech and math are less filled with rage-bait, but Library Twitter is batshit insane, for example. And don't even get me started on if you write at all; writers on Twitter are a dumpster fire.
My local Twitter (Twitter for my town) is delightful, Seattle Twitter was a shit show.
This feature, besides being hidden, always felt unreasonably crippled to me. And they banned third party clients that might be able to implement it better.
I gave up on Twitter as a platform because Twitter Inc. refused to give me enough control over my feed. (This applies to banned accounts as well - I would have liked the ability to judge for myself, rather than have an overworked, outsourced, minimum wage moderator decide for me.)
This would open up a market similar to how you can use different spam reputation services with email, or different blocklists with ad filters.
It would also take the wind out of the sails of people blasting the social media companies for over- or under-moderation. Don't like what's being censored? Hire a different set of censors.
You should never be allowed to take a message sent to someone’s audience and transfer it to your audience. You should only be able to engage with their audience.
The only reason I imagine this feature exists is because it generates engagement and revenue for Twitter.
I’m not sure if this would really be worse; it would slow down viral retweets and could induce users to add context or reframe the shared item to better suit their audience.
I mean, imagine what it would be like if someone in real life just constantly repeated things their friends said, word for word, to everyone in the room. Yes, people do sometimes parrot things from other people, but more often it’s modified, filtered through their own understanding and viewpoint, adapted to the present context and audience, and selected for relevance and appropriateness.
But I don’t think that people wanting to reshare in a digital context would bother with the work of rephrasing. They already have the opportunity to add their own thoughts to a tweet they reshare. I suspect it would be practically the same.
The "adding context" bit didn't really happen, because quoting the tweet ate your own 140 character limit, and a viral RT is always going to get more exposure than your explanatory reply.
People like to share things they hate, especially on the Internet of the last decade
My national subreddit was a perfect example of that, most of the posts were posted by people opposing what was said in the linked article and willing others to rage about it too.
And this already happens, often between people who've blocked one another yet want to continue the personal attacks. It's all too easy to open a blocked tweet in Incognito Mode, take a screenshot, add negative comment, and hit post.
Which highlights just how confused Twitter is about what they want the "block" feature to be. As I like to say, Twitter is the only website where I get more permissions to view content if I log out.
Imagine if your copy of the daily newspaper came with some stories greyed out because the authors of those stories saw something you said online once and decided they didn't like you, so now your paper comes with their stories hidden. But have no fear! You can just log out and read those stores.
What a weird feature.
My healthy uses for Twitter (as opposed to my using it as part of my studying of the impacts social media has on its users/trolling/shitposting) are:
1. Local events, governments, and establishments. It's a great way to get information on things like road closures, last minute weather adjustments, ideas for places to go around town, etc.
2. Professional orgs or academics in areas that I'm interested in. I prefer organizational Twitters because there's usually some sort of social media policy preventing them from Tweeting about politics.
Unfollow those people.
Twitter can be a good place for discussion, but you have to take control of your follow list. I think a lot of people end up following the most prolific Tweeters in their domain rather than the most interesting (who often post infrequently). The prolific Tweeters reach for drama to bait people into engagement.
If you don’t make a point of unfollowing the empty drama-producing Twitter users, your timeline will eventually fill up with their drama.
Even the most basic format for expository discussion, the simple paragraph, structured as introduction - content + examples - conclusion, won't fit on Twitter. It's a format designed to eliminate nuance and discussion, not to promote it. That means using Twitter constantly makes people dumber, i.e. less able to follow a complex argument or look at an issue from multiple points of view.
Someone who'se been Twitterized and Facebooked is someone whose communication skills have been reduced to one-liner blurbs and who lives in a closed siloed environment.
I don’t mind bad puns, but I cannot unsee this.
For some people, Twitter’s forced short-form focuses their content, cuts out all the bs, and reduces it down to its essence. It prevents them from being overly wordy, and is one of the best available antidotes to modern information overload.
And if the essence of subject is fundamentally nuanced, the twitter discussion still can be too, though it may take multiple tweets to address all of it (a tweet-storm).
If a subject requires long-form, then people tend to write that in a blog post or a paper and link it on twitter, and then discuss whatever aspects of it their followers have questions about.
But again you have to do what the OP article says, and only follow people with shared interests and who meaningfully engage with their followers, and don’t just use Twitter to broadcast stuff without then discussing it (eg accounts with less than 1000 followers).
"Propaganda consists of taking a complex idea, simplifying it down to the point where a small child could understand it, and then repeating, repeating, repeating."
Twitter is the ideal platform for that kind of approach, isn't it? I don't think it's healthy for people to spend a lot of time on Twitter for reasons like that.
They are fun and informative. Discussion ensues easily.
Often these are rough drafts on outline form for a blog post, or summaries of an existing one.
(For the pedants: no, forums like this are not social media.)
My tip for using Twitter: just be yourself, and treat your timeline as your livingroom. If people are rude toss them, if they use your livingroom as their platform then toss them too. That way the atmosphere stays nice both for you and others.
On that note: Happy New Year hacker news.
I struggle with this. Because there are bits of my character that are popular, and there are bits that aren't. Some things that I say resonate with lots of people and get lots of fake internet points. Other things, not so much.
After an incredibly short time "being myself" I find it almost impossible to not think of how what I'm posting will be received, rather than how much I want to say it.
If I have an unpopular opinion, I know that posting it will cause a shitfight and I don't want to deal with that. So I don't post it. I end up only posting the things that I think will be received well. That's not "just being myself", that's putting some fake mask over myself in order to be popular, and that shit wrecks my mental health.
How do you "just be yourself" on Twitter without dealing with this? Do you not have unpopular opinions? Do you avoid posting opinions that will start a shitfight? If a post you make does cause a lot of negative comments, how do you deal with that?
I have lots of unpopular opinions, on Twitter as well as on HN. I could not care less what others think of my opinions, as long as we can converge on a set of commonly shared facts that's already profit in my book. On HN this typically manifests as downvotes, but just like I am not particularly attached to the upvotes I learned over time to not worry about the downvotes either: they're not necessarily a reflection of whether you are right or not but it's merely a popularity thing and that's not the right yardstick to measure opinions by.
Lots of people have toxic or bad opinions that are shared by such a large number of their neighbors that they believe that those are right, regardless of what the state of those opinions is when viewed through a more absolute lens.
In the end it's just like your street: leave it a little bit cleaner than you found it and things will over time improve. Litter and degrade and over time you'll come to live in a garbage dump.
Twitter is, ostensibly, about everything. I've found it easy to filter out all the stuff I'm not interested in, but observed as a whole, without any filtering, an awful lot of discussion is about politics or social issues, and they are naturally divisive and cause conflict.
On Twitter other people can retweet my unpopular opinion and comment on it, tagging me on their reply. My feed fills up with people being nasty to me. I can't deal with that in a mature, adult fashion, as it immediately triggers old trauma. I curl in a ball and retreat. I had to leave Twitter.
I'm sure there'll always be people who disagree with something you have to say, and Twitter seems to give people an easy way to do so through retweets, but it's better than constantly muting parts of yourself.
Also, I'd probably just block and move on I suppose, I really don't have any frame of reference since I rarely interact with people I don't know online.
This. I don't find it difficult - in the same way that I wouldn't walk into an office or a bar and shout something divisive, I just avoid talking about those kinds of things. I just steer clear of politics, really.
For example, I'm from a purple area in a purple state and I'm a homosexual who converted TO Christianity as an adult. Twitter considers my existing to be an incitement to a shitfight: Any random innocuous sentence could set SOMEONE off.
This is why the only Tweets I make (as opposed to using it to read other people's Tweets) are shitposts. If it's all going to be a shitfight, it'll be a shitfight on the ground of my choosing.
There are some amazing posts on twitter, but how much crap do you have to wade through to get to them? Nuzzel was great at filtering down to the most relevant article, but twitter caught and killed that company, it's acqui-hired CEO promising to move some features into twitter but they never materialised. Twitter wants me to consider the uninformed and the informed alike, just so they can monetise my eyeballs, and in 2022 that's just a waste of our time.
I think of my information diet as a classic signal to noise problem. My goal is to unearth thought provoking articles, twitter it might take an hour of slog to get one nugget, whereas hacker news offers about one per minute, and at the other end feral wastelands like the youtunbe comments section you would be lucky to get one gem a month.
All of which is my round about way of saying that I love HN! The comments here are often more insightful than the article, and I feel that time spent here is actually time well spent. Happy new years to all the hackers, makers and grinders out there. Don't go changing!
I'm finding that I'm part of a growing minority. A large proportion of my friends have also dropped all social media (usually the more interesting friends). I do wonder where this is going.
The line I draw, personally, to distinguish "harmful social media" from the rest of the web, is per-user algorithmic feeds optimized, by default, for "engagement." That's the mark of a surveillance capitalism extraction beast, and that sort of thing is well demonstrated to be absolute poison to humans.
Hacker News (and to an extent reddit, though they're trying to get away from this as far as I can tell, and the algorithmic front page certainly doesn't qualify) have a single consistent "global state." If I'm logged in to HN, I see the same global state as other people do, and as a logged out user sees (subject to a few tweaks like seeing dead/flagged content, which I can't do logged out - but again, I believe everyone with that setting turned on sees the same thing).
It's not trying to reorder the front page to engage me - it's simply a global state that can be modified by the bulk aggregate of user interaction, or moderator interaction, and that's reflected to all users.
It also lacks the "bottomless bowl" endless scrolling style interface that encourages endless scrolling looking for something interesting. You can see other pages, but the standard view is top 30, and then you have to take a concrete action to see other stuff, not just scroll. It encourages a quick skim of the top stuff to see what's interesting, and then going to do something else because it's not going to change that rapidly. In terms of UI design, that's quite respectful to user attention, and is consistent with "HN tries to be useful, not to extract all the behavioral surplus it possibly can from as many users as possible." It is what it is, take it or leave it.
The upvote/downvote system is prone to some harms, but HN tries to avoid most of that by keeping the vote views invisible to everyone else - you have to evaluate the comments by their text, not by what other people think of them (though the more insightful stuff tends to filter to the top, as it should). I would like an option to hide your own responses in the settings (similar to the "I need to work" delay option), but there's a small Chrome extension that does that - Hacker News Demetricifier or something along those lines.
So while you can argue that it's "social media" by some definition, it's absolutely nowhere near the same design or motivations as the human-toxic systems we also call "social media." YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter being the worst. I understand TikTok is pretty bad as well, but I'm not in any way familiar with that system.
“Social media” is a young person’s game. And some old people too but for different reasons.
I wonder what’s the next big thing. And no, it will not be Zuck’s VR chat scam.
Anything but, in my opinion, though different social media websites gather a different demographic age wise.
Young people do have time, which is why you see them a lot on TikTok (or for Millennials, why you saw us waste our 20s on Instagram and FB).
You know who else has time?
Old people and retirees. Hence the FB political rage problem. Oh, and unemployed young NEETs, but Reddit is more their speed.
I think you're locked into a certain worldview that does not necessarily line up with reality. I see people on social media that definitely do not fit your picture, and that's the vast majority of them. 'Young' people, lets say under 25 are a small fraction of what I come across on Twitter, and old people and retirees are an even smaller fraction.
As for FB, I couldn't tell you, I have been there twice and decided that it wasn't for me. But Twitter is chock full of working professionals.
Each social media's most active class is a group of people that has more free time than the average person (for whatever reason). Twitter's is just 'highly educated people with the free time and autonomy in their (likely WFH or unsupervised) jobs to fuck around online.'
My friends who work at academic institutions and who do creative work for a living have way more free time than your average office, retail, or service worker. That's why Twitter is such a cesspit when it comes to anything around social class.
Everyone just talks at length about things that happen in other spheres. Social media is a pale shadow of reality.
I think of traditional social media as focusing on individuals rather than topics (like Hacker News or Reddit). Once you start giving power to individuals rather than ideas or topics, the community becomes toxic and unpleasant for me. Individual focused communities, where likes and followers determine value create deep centralization and power for those that wield it and frequently devolve into paid advertisements and/or product placement schemes. Topic based communities are of course not immune to toxicity and paid advertisement (as seen on Reddit). Despite that vulnerability, I've found the best social communities to be based on ideas and topics rather than those celebrating individual ideas/content.
I find the discourse and topics on this site to be excellent. It's absolutely my favorite site on the web. If Hacker News ever follows in the footsteps of Reddit by optimizing dark patterns for monetization, such as paid ads, I'll be deeply disappointed. For now, though -- thanks to all that contribute to making this site great!
At least on reddit (which is generally even worse) you have notifications allowing you to carry on the conversation for a few weeks...
If it wasn't for the quality of the community here I would have stopped returning to HN a long time ago. (What happened to my relation with Slashdot.)
My number two is that it's simply frustrating as late-comer, seeing all the established users talking to each others, while you must try to shout witty replies into the void in hopes that some of them are worthy enough for any of the cool kids to engage.
I wonder if modern version of twitter could be made, more orientated around an “algorithm” that mixed things up a bit (like tiktok) rather than just a followers / no followers hierarchy of things.
- Mute as many political/controversial words as I can. I currently have 193 muted words/phrases.
- Turn off retweets for every single person I follow. I don’t want to see them.
- If someone I follow consistently posts things I find uninteresting, I mute them instead of unfollowing so I can still find them easily if I want to.
- Never use the explore/trending tabs. To this end I have a local user script that completely hides the trending sidebar.
These rules have made Twitter exponentially more enjoyable for me.
Last year I made a new profile, though. Not a personal one, but dedicated to a single cause. It's much more fun to have this hyper focused profile. People follow me because they know what they get. I interact only with related content etc.
But the interface is confusing. Very hard to follow discussions when they branch out. And can't follow new comments on something. The notifications are impossible to make sense of, and I don't even get that many. I had to learn the etiquette on how others in my area uses tweets, retweets, quote tweets etc, and I still don't understand it all.
You can use Google Voice (if you live in the US) or getsmscode.com, though. I've used the latter a lot for multiple sites and it's mostly reliable, better than free alternatives and it only has a very minimal cost ($0.1-$0.5 per verification text). Although it should be noted that sometimes Twitter will randomly force you to re-verify your phone number a while later, and the numbers on this site don't last forever (the US ones generally last for at least a few months, while Chinese ones likely won't work the next day already), so your account may be locked forever unless you manage to successfully appeal to Twitter (which can take anywhere between an hour and 6 months to get a response, whether it is positive or negative).
[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/phone-numb...
I even went so far as to modify my hosts file so that I can't even get to twitter, facebook, instagram or LinkedIn (and several other places), just to resist the urge to follow a link that would bring me down the rabbit-hole.
Once you realize the entire business model of these social media giants is pretty much like a boxing match promoter - i.e. get the two sides to hate each other, and watch the groups fight it out online (and sell ads to make a profit).
It is not a coincidence that Americans are now strictly divided about just about every topic - and it has become pretty acceptable to wish death on anyone that disagrees with you on anything - that was not a mistake by Zuckerberg/Dorsey et al - that was by design. The more people hate each other, the more willing they are to get into the mosh-pit of social media and fight it out - while FB/Twitter sells advertising to the event.
Never forget: Zuckerberg/Dorsey and many others got rich by dividing Americans and amplifying the hate on both sides to be able to sell even more ads while they fight it out online.
Same for me. I did try to avoid any drama and keyboard wars, but it's simply not possible with how often the algorithm pushes political topics into the trends.
I'm thinking about blocking it in my router, i don't think i'll be missing out
I try to be a 'force of good' on whatever platform I join, over the years my focus has shifted considerably and that in turn made me decide to quit certain social media websites (for instance: fieldlines, slashdot), and join others. I'm not the most social person in person (to put it mildly) so this allows me to compensate for that to a certain extent.
Sure, people also use Twitter for that. And almost everything else. As a kid that was surely a big part of why I read huge quantities of SF novels.
But that doesn't mean that the only point of having a beer or reading a paperback or using Twitter is time-wasting escapism. I learn a ton from Twitter, getting insights and experiences from people I never would have heard from otherwise. Other people get real community out of it. Still others find it professionally useful: networking with colleagues, finding jobs, keeping up with their fields.
So maybe you're using it wrong and maybe it's not for you. But your inability to get something out of it doesn't tell you much about the experience of a lot of people.
Also there's people I really wish it wouldn't suggest me to IRL that it does frequently. I don't want to block these people, for the implication that has socially. I have for one but it was a Big Deal. I'd rather it not serve us to each other as often.
That's naive because pushes the narrative that corporate run social media are just a neutral platforms with no agenda. That's simply not true. The algorithm™ is optimised for retention and the best way to retain is, unfortunately, echo chamber and provocation.
> I started using Twitter on a regular basis as an experiment in early 2020.
Ah okay! I didn't read after that point, maybe the article should start with this quote.
See how messed up the internet is? I'd like to read on the same topic after five years or so.
To build a reasonable case, defenders of social media must at least acknowledge the toil and difficulty of making your feed anything but a rage inducing time sink, as well as the fact that the sites themselves are not your allies in doing so.
I decided to try building an audience to sell my ebooks better last August, but the connections I made with fellow authors was the better outcome (similar to what's mentioned in this article). It has also helped me to become better at highlighting single concepts instead of users losing focus when faced with a wall of features.
> 1. follow them
> 2. reply to and interact with their tweets
…and, based on first-hand experience, get blocked.
Presumably, because the other advice given by Twitter users to Twitter users today is “block based on a single tweet”. This makes Twitter excellent if you have a witty personality with a preexisting crowd of followers or friends, but otherwise the time and effort you spend trying to connect goes into the void.
That’s why I prefer HN instead. It doesn’t lend itself to profiling others, following and blocking is not the perpetual drama, and contributions to discussion are the focus.
One, it seems to weight tweets by newer follows higher. I keep my follow list to pretty exactly people I want to hear from. But often I see I've missed tweets from people I followed 100 or 200 follows again. I hate this!
Two, it doesn't seem to do a good job normalizing tweet frequency across accounts. So I can't follow big tweeters like foone because my time line gets destroyed by their many (but still good) tweets.
Anyone have a solution for either?
For the latter, consider putting those big tweeters on lists instead of following. You can check in on them occasionally via the list.
I have also tried lists but Twitter's lists are a truly second class entity compared to accounts. You can only have 4 show up on your time line and they show up quite infrequently.
Lists not in my time line I never remember to check.
Personally, I just stick with the latest tweets view and occasionally pop into the ranked timeline to get a different slice on things. But if you want more control, you might also consider a different client, like tweetdeck. Or having different accounts for different purposes.
Apart from the main timeline they used to only show tweets from people you follow liked which was OK, at least acceptable. I still see these time to time but became selective? I see it from some accounts but not all. A person I follow stopped tweeting and I thought something happened but alas they are still active liking tweets but I don't see those anymore on my timeline, yet I see from other accounts... for whatever reason
Then they started showing random tweets from people you follow follow. That's when I started to use the site less and less because most of the time my interaction was clicking on "not interested in this Tweet". Totally out of context stuff I don't care about.
Final nail in the coffin was the topics. Just randomly filling your timeline with random tweets because I assume some AI thought I might like that but it's worse than the Youtube recommendations. Just because I like ONE Tweet the AI started promoting everything related to that content or the account made it.
It's just a mess. Wish we can "reset" our accounts or something to blank state
In saying that, every time I've tried to "do" Twitter, I just find myself in this space where I feel a mix of sadness, anger, hatred and other negative emotions because 95% of Twitter is either people assuming the worst in everyone, calling other people every horrible name conceivable or just generally being another awful person in a sea of awful people.
The fact that I've never quite "got" Twitter has meant that I feel no attachment to it, and don't care if I remove it from my life, so it's not like I'm losing any sleep over it. But, it also helps immensely that removing Twitter from my life is like cutting off a necrotising limb that you never needed to begin with.
There are millions of positive, thoughtful people using it for things other than "being awful". I follow a bunch of people in the ADHD and autism communities and get a ton out of hearing what their lives are like and how they're dealing with things. I also follow a bunch of academics so I get to hear a lot about niche topics from people who are world-class experts.
Twitter will show you whatever it thinks you want. If you follow a lot of awful people and engage with a lot of awful stuff, it will make sure you get plenty of it. But if you switch to the "latest tweets" view and are careful about who you follow, you can get a lot out of it.
Also, as somebody who used to have severe self esteem issues, I really encourage you to find a therapist you like and respect to work on that. They, plus the underlying issues, can make almost anything unenjoyable. As long as we have biases toward seeing ourselves negatively, anything that invites us to be ourselves will feel negative.
Edit: Fresh from the top of my timeline, here's an example of the sort of positive niche content from the ADHD/autism communities, a discussion of experiences with medications for ADHD: https://twitter.com/HolSmale/status/1477308561256558595
If it weren't for the benefits to my business (it's one of the best marketing channels), I would have deleted my account years ago.
I find having a manageable timeline a super useful tool to catch up on interesting or important news. But every now and then I notice that even with a old-fashioned timeline I spend too much time and I look over who I follow and cull people who post too things I forget the second I've scrolled past and instead keep the people who post well-thought-out things infrequently.
I also cannot tell Twitter that some of my post are probably most interesting for programmers, others for people living close to where I live.
etc
There was some hype a few years ago about how artificial limitations created "interestingness": Snapchat and Instagram and Twitter were held out as examples, and I guess this was around the time Yo (with the single "Yo" button) was released.
But personally, while I saw the benefits of Snap and Instagram I have newer seen any benefit of Twitters model.
And yet it stumbles on, driven by network effects years after first WhatsApp, then Telegram and Signal and Matrix have explored and found niches around almost everything Twitter could have been useful for.
Negative toxicity is obvious, we know that's 'not good'.
But I feel even the novel useful bits of Twitter are 'mostly rubbish'.
The best Tweets are generally longer statements made by individuals, pointing to research more in the vein of 'microblog'.
In fact - what I think would be useful is a non social 'microblog' where people can make posts of highly relevant information of arbitrary length.
I don't think anyone other than journalists really benefit from Twitter.
I think that we should pretend as if it does not exist, and anything said or done there 'does not count' in terms of anything.
I mostly go on twitter to get perspectives from my professor of choice on Corona stuff:
Ironically, it was Reddit that brought me back. The reason is there is freedom to being anonymous while having all your posts public. Like HN.
I have new accounts and I only follow and post around a single interest of mine. Even my Facebook account is anonymous.
My system works well. I plan to keep using it across 2022.
HN and Reddit have shown me that single-subject media is typically positive and fun.
I have no idea what my real friends are up to unless I see them or text them.
I like my life this way. It feels like my world is smaller but it also wonderfully quieter.. in a good way.
Twitter is the same. The best you can have is acquaintances, peers/colleagues, or followers.
You have to carefully curate who to follow though.
Your mental health will thank you.
That's what makes Twitter bearable for me.
Here's mine:
RT @
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Kudos to the new executive team at twitter.
I’ve seen numbers even on viral tweets, and the number of followers gained is really low.
So there has to be more to to getting followers than just writing good content.
It's a very simple search filter redirect that removes most of the garbage[1]
Throw in uBlock or some ad blocker in your desktop browser and you're good to go.
Never use twitter's mobile app except to tweet or view notifications.
[0](realtwitter.com) - not clickable in HN but you can type that into your browser bar
[1](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=filter%3Afollows%20-fi...).
I think the author means 42 Things, which was one of the first “Web 2.0” sites (and back then basically meant user generated content and ajax-y features).
how to go about doing that is the meat of the article, and is worth reading if that sounds like something you would want to do.
The idea that stands out to me is that twitter is some form of multi-user kinopio.club [1],[2] when you connect tweets into threads and when you use the search engine properly.
[2] Show HN: Kinopio.club – visual thinking, brainstorming tool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132631