A Guide to Twitter

I totally failed to use Twitter in any reasonable way.<p>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.<p>Everyday there was the shitstorm of the day. Absence of nuance was the norm (nuance is not prone to RTs, I believe).<p>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.<p>In the end, I was mindlessly scrolling through rage and polarized opinions while I was coming to learn &#x2F; love &#x2F; occupy myself.<p>Maybe I did something wrong, maybe it was not for me.<p>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.

Twitter is fantastic for me. Meet interesting people from all walks of life, interact with them. Just one example: I posted a (very crappy!) rendering of a piece of music yesterday as a New Years wish and got a super nice response from the original artist within a couple of minutes. In real life that would never happen.<p>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 <i>their</i> platform then toss them too. That way the atmosphere stays nice both for you and others.<p>On that note: Happy New Year hacker news.

I&#x27;m going dark on social media this year, twitter especially.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s just a waste of our time.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t go changing!

My number one gripe with Twitter is that a link to a tweet is not a simple static HTML page. Instead (guessing here, haven&#x27;t inspected) you get a page that loads some generic JavaScript, that reads in the URL and extracts that you are, in fact, trying to read a tweet with some ID, and then goes on to load the contents of that tweet by doing an &quot;API request&quot; to fetch its data (probably as JSON), and when the response comes in, finally the tweet&#x27;s contents are turned into HTML and inserted replacing the dreading spinner gif.<p>My number two is that it&#x27;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.

My rules for Twitter:<p>- Mute as many political&#x2F;controversial words as I can. I currently have 193 muted words&#x2F;phrases.<p>- Turn off retweets for every single person I follow. I don’t want to see them.<p>- 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.<p>- Never use the explore&#x2F;trending tabs. To this end I have a local user script that completely hides the trending sidebar.<p>These rules have made Twitter exponentially more enjoyable for me.

When I signed up for twitter many years ago as a student, I used it to follow tech people. It was nice to learn new stuff. But it also felt very limited. Who to follow? What&#x27;s just noise? How can I follow someone&#x27;s tech tweets and not personal tweets? How do avoid political rabbit holes? And why should anyone follow me back? Myself retweeted random stuff I cared about, wrote some personal tweets etc. So I ended up abandoning twitter for many years as I kinda didn&#x27;t find a use case for it.<p>Last year I made a new profile, though. Not a personal one, but dedicated to a single cause. It&#x27;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.<p>But the interface is confusing. Very hard to follow discussions when they branch out. And can&#x27;t follow new comments on something. The notifications are impossible to make sense of, and I don&#x27;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&#x27;t understand it all.

I gave up twitter, facebook and most all other social media about a 18 +&#x2F;- months ago (though was never a big user to begin with) - it is truly a cesspool (and yes, I realize that HN is a minor version of social media).<p>I even went so far as to modify my hosts file so that I can&#x27;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.<p>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).<p>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&#x2F;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&#x2F;Twitter sells advertising to the event.<p>Never forget: Zuckerberg&#x2F;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.

It doesn&#x27;t talk about what the return on (time) investment is. I&#x27;ve made several concerted efforts over the past 10+ years to use Twitter, with various accounts on various subjects, dutifully regularly posting, following, unfollowing etc. as per recommendations in articles such as this, but all I&#x27;ve ended up with is the sense of having wasted an enormous amount of time and got nothing worthwhile in return. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve being using it incorrectly, and I&#x27;m starting to think that actually might be the attraction for many people. The received wisdom seems to be that people are being manipulated into squandering their time on the social media platforms to view more adverts and increase their profits (with the underlying assumption that the time would have otherwise been spent on more fruitful pursuits), but I&#x27;m starting to wonder if many people actually <i>want</i> to waste their time for whatever reason, e.g. to escape the bleak realities of their grim existences.

I&#x27;ve bounced in and out of Twitter. I still can&#x27;t get over feeling like my connections with people are mediated by an algorithm. Like, I will be talking to X, Y and Z today because they posted and the timeline thought I&#x27;d like it. It felt so one sided too. I would comment and like their stuff much more than they would for mine, and it just felt, wrong... Like I was waaay too focussed on them, but sometimes that&#x27;s all my timeline would show me.<p>Also there&#x27;s people I really wish it wouldn&#x27;t suggest me to IRL that it does frequently. I don&#x27;t want to block these people, for the implication that has socially. I have for one but it was a Big Deal. I&#x27;d rather it not serve us to each other as often.

&gt; You are the one who chooses whether to enter the hellsite or the heavensite.<p>That&#x27;s naive because pushes the narrative that corporate run social media are just a neutral platforms with no agenda. That&#x27;s simply not true. The algorithm™ is optimised for retention and the best way to retain is, unfortunately, echo chamber and provocation.<p>&gt; I started using Twitter on a regular basis as an experiment in early 2020.<p>Ah okay! I didn&#x27;t read after that point, maybe the article should start with this quote.

I loved the section about search tips and the vim-like shortcuts for moving up-down.<p>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&#x27;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.

You can use Twitter as a useful source of information and news while avoiding the time-wasting and toxic aspects, and sidestepping Twitter’s manipulative algorithms. The key is to make strategic use of lists and never look at your timeline:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lee-phillips.org&#x2F;howtotwitter&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lee-phillips.org&#x2F;howtotwitter&#x2F;</a>

&gt; If they mirror your interest, you two can take it up to the next level. If there’s someone you want to become friends with:<p>&gt; 1. follow them<p>&gt; 2. reply to and interact with their tweets<p>…and, based on first-hand experience, get blocked.<p>Presumably, because the <i>other</i> 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.<p>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.

I love Twitter, it&#x27;s helped me reach a lot of people for personal and professional work. Two things that annoy me about twitter.<p>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&#x27;ve missed tweets from people I followed 100 or 200 follows again. I hate this!<p>Two, it doesn&#x27;t seem to do a good job normalizing tweet frequency across accounts. So I can&#x27;t follow big tweeters like foone because my time line gets destroyed by their many (but still good) tweets.<p>Anyone have a solution for either?

I started using Twitter very early, in 2006, and was fun for a while. But I don&#x27;t remember exactly when the timeline and recommendation changes totally ruined it.<p>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&#x27;t see those anymore on my timeline, yet I see from other accounts... for whatever reason<p>Then they started showing random tweets from people you follow follow. That&#x27;s when I started to use the site less and less because most of the time my interaction was clicking on &quot;not interested in this Tweet&quot;. Totally out of context stuff I don&#x27;t care about.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;s just a mess. Wish we can &quot;reset&quot; our accounts or something to blank state

I never really got into Twitter. I could never understand the point of posts limited to 140 characters and my severe lack of self esteem means I live my life believing that nothing I say is worth hearing or in any way remotely interesting.<p>In saying that, every time I&#x27;ve tried to &quot;do&quot; 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.<p>The fact that I&#x27;ve never quite &quot;got&quot; Twitter has meant that I feel no attachment to it, and don&#x27;t care if I remove it from my life, so it&#x27;s not like I&#x27;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.

I&#x27;m like an alcoholic with Twitter. I can&#x27;t use it in moderation (trust me, I&#x27;ve tried). Either I&#x27;m on it 24&#x2F;7 or I&#x27;m completely out (haven&#x27;t used it for the last ~6 months).<p>If it weren&#x27;t for the benefits to my business (it&#x27;s one of the best marketing channels), I would have deleted my account years ago.

I try to use Twitter, but I need two accounts, one for Norwegian and one for English.<p>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.<p>etc<p>There was some hype a few years ago about how artificial limitations created &quot;interestingness&quot;: Snapchat and Instagram and Twitter were held out as examples, and I guess this was around the time Yo (with the single &quot;Yo&quot; button) was released.<p>But personally, while I saw the benefits of Snap and Instagram I have newer seen any benefit of Twitters model.<p>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.

This is all fine and good, but apart from very very few people who meet a few colleagues this way, it seems like a giant waste of time.<p>Negative toxicity is obvious, we know that&#x27;s &#x27;not good&#x27;.<p>But I feel even the novel useful bits of Twitter are &#x27;mostly rubbish&#x27;.<p>The best Tweets are generally longer statements made by individuals, pointing to research more in the vein of &#x27;microblog&#x27;.<p>In fact - what I think would be useful is a <i>non</i> social &#x27;microblog&#x27; where people can make posts of highly relevant information of arbitrary length.<p>I don&#x27;t think anyone other than journalists really benefit from Twitter.<p>I think that we should pretend as if it does not exist, and anything said or done there &#x27;does not count&#x27; in terms of anything.

It seems like someone made a huge personal investment on twitter and is now trying to convince others to do the same in order to increase the value of whatever they achieved there. Maybe Twitter is amazing for you, that&#x27;s great. You can keep it.

Exploring trends on twitter doesn&#x27;t work. I&#x27;m in Germany. There is a list of terms currently trending. I click on one. And if it is even remotely not superspecific in general or to German language then I will get shown tweets from whatever part of the world and that mainly. My trick is to add &quot;lang:de&quot; to the search but that is annoying and doesn&#x27;t work reliably. They should have a way to actually explore a trend - if &quot;Covid&quot; is trending in Germany all of a sudden then this is likely not directly related to some tweet from India about &quot;Covid&quot;. So annoying.<p>I mostly go on twitter to get perspectives from my professor of choice on Corona stuff:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;stohr_klaus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;stohr_klaus</a>

I went dark on social media about nine months ago. It&#x27;s been great for my mental health.<p>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.<p>I have new accounts and I only follow and post around a single interest of mine. Even my Facebook account is anonymous.<p>My system works well. I plan to keep using it across 2022.<p>HN and Reddit have shown me that single-subject media is typically positive and fun.<p>I have no idea what my real friends are up to unless I see them or text them.<p>I like my life this way. It feels like my world is smaller but it also wonderfully quieter.. in a good way.

Good read, but I don&#x27;t believe it&#x27;s possible to make friends online in the true sense of that term. I&#x27;ve been doing things online for a majority of my life. Forums, gaming, chatting with strangers. I&#x27;ve made many &quot;friends&quot; this way, but they&#x27;re not people I know. We&#x27;ve lost touch over the years, and I wouldn&#x27;t ever turn to them for help because we don&#x27;t know each other that well anyway.<p>Twitter is the same. The best you can have is acquaintances, peers&#x2F;colleagues, or followers.

Twitter can be really useful for academia where the character limit forces you to condense the main points of your research into one or a couple of short bullet points. Together with a small gif and links to project page and arxiv, this makes it really easy to get attention for your work and follow that of others. Sometimes it is even possible yo start some meaningful discussions there.<p>You have to carefully curate who to follow though.

In the last 12 months, I have dropped all social media, in this order: FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit. I almost removed my HN account too but decided it is in a different league (for now). Deleting them has had little effect on my life, to be honest, either positive or negative (except for FB which offered a much stronger ratio of negative&#x2F;positive than the others and am glad it is totally out of my life).

Incredibly helpful guide. Had no idea about most of this.

I think a lot of the advice in the article is also relevant to having conversations in other more limited (but still sizable) communities like some topic specific slack or discord servers, or certain forums. Maybe even some rare subreddit but they’re less likely to be structured to support a conversation. Twitter always just seems so vast and complicated that it’s hard to fathom.

I started using Twitter to follow my new boss and his colleagues in a new to me industry. I stopped several months later because the legitimate &quot;social action&quot; content I was exposed to was overwhelming... I know the world is not perfect, and I try to improve it here and there, but I cannot take the full weight of all that must be fixed on my shoulders at all times.

My guide to Twitter: don’t use it.<p>Your mental health will thank you.

I would make more emphasis on the Muted Words list: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;settings&#x2F;muted_keywords" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;settings&#x2F;muted_keywords</a><p>That&#x27;s what makes Twitter bearable for me.

My story with Twitter is extremely similar to that of the author. I joined in April 2007 and was seventeen at the time. I think I totally understand the author&#x27;s position on most subject, but I would be less enthusiastic nonetheless.

Seems likely that this is the 2022 version of the Submarine. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;submarine.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;submarine.html</a><p>Kudos to the new executive team at twitter.

When I see someone that gained 35K followers in a year, I feel skeptical. How?<p>I’ve seen numbers even on viral tweets, and the number of followers gained is really low.<p>So there has to be more to to getting followers than just writing good content.

This is a thoughtful guide, and I enjoyed reading it. Ironically, you could never publish something like this on Twitter itself, which is why I&#x27;ll continue to stay away.

Twitter for me is a news source but not a social network.

Great guide, but some suggestions go a bit overboard. I can&#x27;t imagine to &quot;invite them to do a Zoom call&quot; people I follow in Twitter :)

Been using Twitter lately; so much evangelising web3 there... I did not see that coming.

Obligatory, if you find your twitter experience garbage mostly because of algorithms that keep suggesting things to you that you explicitly did <i>not</i> follow&#x2F;sign up for in your feed (random ppl&#x27;s tweets liked by someone you follow, entirely viral retweets, replies from strangers to ppl you follow, &quot;suggested people&#x2F;tweets&quot;, etc) then save yourself the trouble and simply bookmark realtwitter.com[0]<p>It&#x27;s a very simple search filter redirect that removes most of the garbage[1]<p>Throw in uBlock or some ad blocker in your desktop browser and you&#x27;re good to go.<p>Never use twitter&#x27;s mobile app except to tweet or view notifications.<p>[0](realtwitter.com) - not clickable in HN but you can type that into your browser bar<p>[1](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;search?f=tweets&amp;q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3Areplies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;search?f=tweets&amp;q=filter%3Afollows%20-fi...</a>).

&gt; was 15, and I loved reading Metafilter, Digg, TechCrunch, Lifehacker, and 43 Folders<p>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).

would love a tl:dr