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Comment by throw_it_away | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: I've tried Twitter a bunch of times, tried to engage with it for a couple weeks, then given up when I felt that either the tweets were not curated enough for me or that nobody was listening to me. Is there some guide for technically literate people to start using Twitter effectively? Right now I use Feedly and blogs to serve this purpose, but the appeal of real time news a la Twitter seems quite sweet, if only I could tap into it.

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Yes, please! From other peoples' descriptions, I can rationally understand what benefit Twitter brings them, but I have never been able to replicate that for myself.

I have always walked away, convinced that it's a real-time medium that requires constant attention, because I find it to be nigh impossible to read up on any discussion ex post facto.

That is especially true for any discussion with more than two participants — those are tree-ish in nature to me, and for the life of me I cannot figure out how anybody makes sense of them in Twitters one-dimensional chronological organisation.

Help please?

To steal someone else's metaphor, try thinking of Twitter as a river. If you try to bottle it up or consume it all you'll drown. If, on the other hand, you dip in for a swim as you please, you might find it all bit more manageable. As the rush of tweets flows by you, just check out some, then turn your phone off and carry on. When you load it again, don't feel you have to go back and "catch up" or give it the constant attention you mentioned.

YMMV, but I also think the emphasis on "conversations" is a bit misleading. Lots of people do have conversations on there, but I personally love it for breaking news, link-sharing, jokes, and photos. If your frame of reference is a forum with posts, or an article's comments, or a real-life conversation... you're going to have a bad time.

I've heard this too; it drives the completionist in me nuts. After reading a Twitter stream for 5 minutes, I look up and wish I had caught up on the news, or read a short article from Instapaper / Pocket.

I have no doubt this says more about me than about Twitter, but I never could never see a way around it. Similar experience with Reddit, comparing the default front page to one tailored to the subreddits I enjoy the most. Of course I gave up on Reddit too after a while...

(sorry for the delay, I'm on CEST, and it was close to my bed time)

Thanks! Maybe I should try to treat it more like the worlds' biggest IRC channel then. I will give it another shot some day…

I didn't get much out of twitter until I had a community I became involved in and had a product I wanted to promote. Though I don't have a ton of followers I mostly use it to track what other people are talking about and start conversations when possible.

So to answer your question, I think users get the most out of it who have a need or want for actively engaging in <em>something</em>. My followers who I do interact with most are either other creators or heavily-invested fan.

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