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Comment by pjerem | Hacker News Reader

I totally failed to use Twitter in any reasonable way.

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.

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> Everyone there is trying to push its personal fight

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.

I fail to understand how a format that limits 'discussion' to a few sentences at most per post can be a good medium for anything other than dumbed-down one-liners.

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 used to think that was the case too, but it’s not universally, it depends on the person.

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).

Perhaps there are some uses that make sense, in terms of weather reports or things like that. However, in terms of "reducing it down to its essence", some propaganda expert (Ivy Lee maybe, or others) of the 1930s said something like this:

"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.

Sure, but you have to follow the other advice of following people who are 1) subject matter experts and 2) engage with their followers regularly. Propagandists typically aren’t SME’s and don’t engage in discussions with their followers.

A lot of people write a series of tweets that reads like a short, high density essay.

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.

See also: the increase in bad pun tweets with more followers.

I don’t mind bad puns, but I cannot unsee this.

One of the problems is that people have this innate inane drive to "be their whole selves" online these days. This leads to someone whose basketball commentary you enjoy also posting ragebait about the technology industry on the same account. I'd rather follow specific topics than whole people.

The real problem of Twitter IMO is their retweet feature. This feature fuels hate and unfair attacks.

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.

No. The reason it exists is because people like to share things they like. If you removed that button people would copy and paste or screenshot and share.

> If you removed that button people would copy and paste or screenshot and share.

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.

Funny story; before there was a dedicated button, people did precisely this. You'd see tweets of the form "RT @Someone (their message)"

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.

I never said it would be worse. Just that it would happen.

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.

> people like to share things they like.

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.

Maybe the people you are referring to are professional trolls? At this point I have little doubt any popular website is infested with them. Globally. It's so much worse than even a decade ago

>If you removed that button people would copy and paste or screenshot and share.

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.

> 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.

And that's fine. It would still detach that new thread entirely from the old one, so that the target of the ire wouldn't get a million notifications about how they deserve to die or whatever.

If Twitter wanted to stress the sharing feature in a genuine way, they would put your comment below (not on top of) the post you are re-tweeting.

No, it was initially made as a micro-blogging service inspired by AIM and LJ, neither of which were primarily made for sharing. The Retweet button and the sharing aspect came later.

If I'm standing in a circle with you and three other people and I start talking about you like you're not there, about how what you just said is really stupid, about how I can't believe you'd ever say something like that -- we all understand why that's rude. But that's exactly how a retweet functions (and it's how a lot of twitter threads function, too (when somebody starts addressing somebody else in the thread about a third person as though they aren't present)). I try very hard not to operate my twitter presence that way and yet I catch myself doing it, too, because it's how twitter is built!

At least when I still used it, you could choose not to receive retweets from accounts you follow. (But it had to be set one followed account at a time.)

It's strange, but my personal experience could hardly be more different. I mainly use it for work in the gaming sector and, to a smaller extent, tech. I occasionally see rage and strong opinions, but it's a very small minority. Most of the time, it's useful, informative content. I do hide trending topics, which I think helps, but even before I did, my experience was nowhere near as negative as yours.

I see this exact exchange every thread about twitter.

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.

> they retweet some more polarised stuff from others

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.

I have my Twitter accounts with 2k follow_ing_(not followers) and there should be literally 200-500 tweets/second that could fill my timeline during daytime. Of those, one or less shows up on Tweetdeck Web, and suspiciously little are relevant to my interest. I even missed a "meta" content of a past season and learned about from someone else very recently. I'm not getting anything.

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)

Why not just make use of the list feature , or set the timeline into chronological Order, or use the topics feature ?

So much of it depends on your professional bubble. I've got some wildly differing bubbles, and my uncurated/unlisted Twitter experience is sheer chaos.

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.

Twitter is good for a few things, but they all have alternatives.

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.

It was like this for me until I muted any word that was remotely political. All of a sudden it was like a toxic fog had been lifted and I could see clearly again. The article really undersells the importance of muting words. It changes everything.

Have they removed the 200 muted word limit? Or at least implemented word stemming?

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.)

Replying to myself because maybe there's a startup idea in the above comment: convince one or more of the the big social platforms to let users opt out of default moderation, and "subscribe" to thirdy party moderation. (Moderation-as-a-Service?)

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.

is that a real feature (muting a word), or are you muting people when they write any political word in one of their messages?

Go to https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords, you can mute words you don't care about. The feature is a bit hidden in the settings, but the twitter experience is way better once you remove content that makes you angry.

https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac5...

I muted the word “trump” and it made an incredible impact on my twitter experience.

it's a feature.

I did the same. What really ruined the product for me was the “X who you follow liked this”. If I wanted that shit I’d follow the person.

That's because you're using the "default" view which mixes up the order of your tweets and inserts stuff like this. If you change the view by clicking the sparks icon at the top left and selecting "latest", it simply becomes a reverse chronological order of tweets by people you follow

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

I had it set to that and still saw them - I quit over a year ago, perhaps they changed this since and removed all the recommended stuff.

I noticed that if you do that they start injecting the same stuff into your profile notifications.

They really want to feed you stuff you don't actually want.

I just disabled all of the keywords one by one. It took some time but at the end of that it was very quiet. No more sponsored tweets either.

You can train it not to do that. When I saw those in my notifications, I kept picking the option that is something like "see less like this" and I haven't seen one in months.

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.

Isn’t it ridiculous that you have to thoroughly vet people you are to follow for quality tweets, switch out of the default view, and train a machine learning algorithm just to make twitter somewhat useable? Thats not like using a computer tool, thats like trying to ride a stubborn horse.

Yeah, I don't like it. But I recognize that a) my needs are different than most, and b) we are all caught up in a capitalist system where incentives for exploitation abound. So if I can get by with a few tweaks, I'm ok with it.

It took me a long time to figure this tip out... But also noticed it reverts back to default view after a week or so (on mobile app). Like they wanted to force the "X who you follow liked Y".

I've not had it revert on mobile so far. It does revert on desktop after a few weeks

This thing is ruining my experience as well. I don't want any time of suggestions in my feed. I curated it so that there's only people of tech who talk mostly about tech but my feed is pure garbage now filled with political comments, holidays pics etc. of people I don't even follow.

Can you explain further? It sounds like you do follow that person based on the message.

They follow person X, but not profile Y which had the tweet X liked. Thus they don't want content from Y in their feed.

I see. I consider this a double edged sword, but the positive edge is sharper: the people I follow tend to like things that don't annoy me more often than not. I do agree that it would be useful to be able to configure what appears, though.

This is _exactly_ my take on Twitter, I noped out of it and other social media 2 years ago and I feel much happier.

(For the pedants: no, forums like this are not social media.)

I only follow technical people & topic accounts, and unfollow if i see them posting any political content.

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