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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Honest question for people who still use Twitter: what keeps you on?

I deleted my account half a decade ago and haven't missed it.

I use Tweetbot and only follow accounts with interesting tweets and/or friends I've met online or IRL. Having a chronological-only timeline is super helpful in avoiding the toxicity that's so prevalent for 'normal Twitter'.

The few times I hit twitter.com, all I see is a Facebook-like list of popular/highly 'engaging' tweets, and all the interesting stuff I care about is buried somewhere deep in the infinite scroll.

I mostly follow scientists and technology minded folks (who don't have anything to sell). Unfollow and block most politics oriented accounts. There are exceptions but for me I often walk away from twitter having learned something substantial.

I see essentially no spam because I don't follow accounts that would spam me or receive a lot of spam replies. The people I follow are interesting. That's about it.

Yeah, exactly, I love learning about geology (esp sedimentation) and maths and medieval history and a bit of philosophy and some software stuff and a little tech business and conservation biology and a lot of various Star Trek accounts and a varying amount of news or political accounts and so on. If someone starts posting too much, I have to unfollow. I block all accounts that show me a sponsored post, and make sure to only do time-based time line. It's excellent content and fast propagation of news. I most often will link into y combinator posts from tweets.

The only spam I've seen is on #hashtag searches, especially #covid19 (with, in 2020 a ton of k-pop spam for some reason) and various crypto folks (with more spam in replying to true believers than sceptics, make of that what you will).

I have a carefully curated list of people I follow and who follow me.

I get a lot of value from one-on-one communication with tech expert, artists, authors, and musicians.

It takes some work to keep the lists clean, and you have to access Twitter via a 3rd party app like Echofon to avoid all the ads and crap the company throws into your timeline, but it's definitely worth it to me.

I don't follow anyone who even hints at crypto. That alone eliminates 99.999% of s(p|c)am.

Since you asked... I'm using my account because I'm a meetup organizer, podcast host (well currently on a bit of a longer break) and open source package author.

I find that Twitter and LinkedIn still bring me and my projects visibility. It helps my career (though the ROI might be better on other activities, tbh) and some people joined my team because they knew me from Twitter/my podcast. Every once in a while when I finish a small library or host a meetup event, I publish them on Twitter.

I don't engage in fights, I'm not an activist on the platform and I don't try to "growth-hack" and come up with cheesy threads to boost my profile. When people still try to start some fight on Twitter, I ignore their comment until they forget about it, especially if it comes from people who always stir up controversies. I don't block anyone, but I use the mute button often. I mute if someone posts threads, edgy hot takes and if someone is too political (even if I agree with them).

There are good technical content from many of my follows, but somehow "thread spam" that's designed to inflate engagement numbers still leak into my feed. Political and social activism get into my feed, too. When this happens, I mute, unfollow, click "not interested" etc to keep my feed in an acceptable shape.

I ignore messages asking me to do stuff for them for free, asking me to debug something, etc.

The political commentators that I like, I browse without ever liking or retweeting their stuff.

I feel that this way I get something out of being in these platforms without sacrificing my mental well being.

Some people post interesting things you can’t find elsewhere.

If I'm being honest, I'm on Twitter for the pure schadenfreude of seeing public figures — journalists, celebrities, politicians — get publicly humiliated in real time, usually after saying something inadvertently funny or embarrassing. I'm not proud of it, but it has resulted in some of the funniest content I've ever seen on the internet.

Twitter is excellent for laughing. I barely remember Facebook but even when it was just friends content, it was usually a little more serious or joyful, not witty and entertaining.

People whose opinions I rate post write ideas that I find interesting. I use "Latest Tweets" timeline mostly - only sometimes check "Home" TL. Never follow any Topics or similar - strictly individual accounts. Block or mute annonimous and/or rude/ugly etc liberally.

I follow people I like to read tweets from. I don’t bother reading replies to the tweets I like. I don’t tweet much. I don’t participate in conversations. That’s it. Twitter is pretty great for me. It is the only social media that I use actually.

As a fellow brazilian looking for a remote position, can I follow you? I was inspired by your posts here..

I do not write much on Twitter, even less about career. But I think I found you on LinkedIn and added you there. Feel free to ask me about anything you are curious

Best way to get customer service from brands. The CS at TMobile is terrible, for e.g., but their team on Twitter takes care of things properly and swiftly.

I follow musicians/bands that I like to keep up to date on their album releases and touring schedules, people that I think are funny on Twitter to get the occasional good laugh, and some friends whose shitposting and occasional complaining about life I enjoy or sympathize with.

I've started using it recently as a software/game dev and its just great place for people to easily and quickly share their content or progress, with lots of interesting things to learn about, I can imagine the same goes in other fields like artists, history buffs, etc.

Though some people are talented they can't help but bring politics into everything, and its just depressing to see the brainrot, I have to unfollow those people or block them sometimes if it's bad enough.

I find Twitter's signal-to-noise ratio for finding interesting things to be roughly the same as that of Hacker News, maybe slightly higher even. There's a lot of things in the frontend and mobile app development world that don't tend to get surfaced around here.

I do make an effort to only follow people I found interesting, and to unfollow uninteresting accounts. Something which you can't really do here, sadly.

It is the fastest way to surface new information. For example this XKCD actually happened during the 2011 earthquake n Virginia. Folks in PA and NY saw the tweets before they felt it.

https://xkcd.com/723/

The news about the Osama bin Laden raid first broke on Twitter. The news of the Mar-a-Lago raid first broke on Twitter. News of Heartbleed first broke on Twitter.

Every other platform has basically abandoned efforts to compete with Twitter in this area. Reporters are on Twitter because it’s faster than their own news sites. Google piloted a “real time search” product and gave it up.

In addition, I find a lot of hilarious humor content there. It’s amazing what jokes can fit into 280 characters and a couple image or short video files.

>Honest question for people who still use Twitter: what keeps you on?

Content. It's the only form of social media I use.

I don't really Tweet, I just consume. Once you follow people who are pros in subjects you enjoy, you can endlessly find content on the subject. No medium can react in real-time like Twitter. Plus, it's super convenient on the phone. As I mentioned in another comment, I hardly even notice any spam.

I filter out the twitter recommendation and vanity system as much as possible, sticking only to carefully chosen follows for things mostly unrelated to politics. I check it a couple of times a week and find it to be a lot more tolerable than before filtering while still allowing me to have an easy way to keep up with people I can't reasonably expect to move to platforms like the fediverse.

I'm in communities that function completely off of Twitter. Leaving twitter = you now know nothing about what's going on.

- I'm in a large community where discussions primarily happen on Twitter.

- There's a lot of really funny posts

- Anything notable that happens on other platforms will make its way there pretty quickly

Financial Twitter (fintwit) is pretty good for keeping up with what's going on in financial markets. Everything else on twitter is gutter filth.

This is why I don't understand Gamer Gate -- the people affected by it just had the option of deleting their Twitter accounts and never missing it.

I have a project that I want to get people to sign up for and it's kind of free marketing/advertising

It's a great place to find people with similar interests.

Curated following list

Recently I intentionally got my Twitter account locked (specifically via a tweet insulting Trump Jr. which had gotten my friend's account locked when he posted it originally in response to Trump Jr.) so that I could keep my page (with links to my website and current social media accounts elsewhere) up while denying myself the temptation to ever participate in Twitter again.

My mental health has skyrocketed and I have no regrets. If I need to read anything on Twitter I use Nitter or view Twitter through Brave with a custom ViolentMonkey filter to avoid that stupid "log in" pop-up.

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