>I have the same problem as you with Twitter. Nobody I know is on it, and when I've used it it's value is not at all apparent to me. Every time I try to use the platform it seems like a waste of time.
That's the whole idea. Twitter isn't meant to be productive -- just a fun waste of time, reading not so important news, gossip, and quips.
> Can anybody make a good argument as to why Twitter (in its current form) isn’t a major detriment to society?
Basically no one actually uses twitter. I only know one person in real life who uses twitter.
Twitter's problem is that 'media types' really like twitter, for one reason or another, and tend to blow everything that happens there out of proportion for off-platform engagement.
Personally, I really like twitter. I carefully curate my Twitter experience to follow people I'm interested in, mute people and words I don't care for (it's great never having to see "NFT" on twitter!), and block people who are actively harmful. I'm left with a pretty positive experience that has good community and funny jokes. That's how I use it.
> Your Twitter is a self curated feed of the people you want to see.
While that may have originally been the intention of the site, and it might even be what Twitter still publicly claims to do, that is not at all what they actually give you now.
A couple of years ago, Twitter was awesome for keeping up with interesting new work in my topic area. More recently, it's a sh!t show of angry, snarky people I don't know, ranting about things that I either don't care about or could easily find somewhere else.
Maybe these people are all friends of a friend of a friend. I don't know and I don't care. I only log in when I have something to post -- usually some sort of shameless self promotion for a new paper or a talk.
> Twitter has, for me, become a news stream and very little more.
It has for me as well.
I just checked and I have tweeted exactly once in the last year, it was when I was on vacation in march. Before that, it was August 1, 2013.
However I still frequently use twitter. I have a highly curated followers list which results in 70-80% of the tweets I see being relevant to me. When I am waiting in line, or waiting for my food at a restaurant if I'm eating alone, or am just bored, it is a great way to get highly curated content without having to do really anything.
I don't know if I've ever said this before, but some of the comments on the article itself are pretty spot on.
> I can´t see where is the problem with a platform in which you can choose who to follow and what tweets you ignore/pay attention to ??? works just fine for me. I devote some time to "edit" twitter, I mean MY twitter.
> The great thing about Twitter is that if your signal:noise ratio is wrong, you have no-one to blame but yourself: resolute use of the Unfollow button cures all ills!
It's kindof like reddit, if you unsubscribe all the defaults and follow topics you are interested in (some of which get crazy specific niches and have relatively active communities for how specific a niche may be) your experience will increase ten-fold.
> - I use Twitter a LOT to communicate with people I'd otherwise have no access to, because I don't have their email or they are too busy answering me through the company mailbox. Twitter makes everyone (except for celebs) reachable. If I need some guy at Google who write library X, I just send him a tweet.
That one is a killer-feature right there I've managed to discover lately.
Twitter completely sucks, because if you are just a normal person doing normal things noone will ever care about you.
BUT, in case you're interested in some very specific topic and the contributing people then you should give twitter a try...
> I agree that Twitter is a poor medium for writing. But Twitter gives you an audience (and retweets).
Does it though? I have a blog and occasionally tweet. My blog gets about 30 hits on an average day, mainly through search engines.
If I tweet, I get maybe 20 impressions. And those impressions are all that I get, nobody goes back and reads 6 month old tweets and there is no way to search for them.
Did you read what I said? I have stopped using Twitter. I don't tweet, I don't have the app, I don't engage in anything what happens there now.
I just occasionally peek in to see if I'm missing out on anything and surprisingly I don't. As a result I see myself (unconsciously) check Twitter less and less.
> You, instead, have twitter. You, are in the same trap.
> There is nothing of value there. No in depth news. No thoughtful information.
I think you're not aware of how much in depth, very specific information, and thoughtful analysis your can find on Twitter. Sure, there's going to be lots of crap, but you don't have to watch it.
> Pretty bad example. Twitter's been around for quite a while, and I still can't find anything useful to do with it.
Seconded. People say I don't "get" Twitter. I say, Twitter doesn't get it.
Not only is the community filled with conformist pop-culture freaks with IQs well below 100, but the entire system of followers and following is not efficient. The 140-char word count is not sufficient for a full thought; requiring the use of the Information Age equivalent of shorthand (I thought we got rid of this years ago).
When all is said and done, really, blogging is a far better solution.
> This might just be me, but I have Twitter streaming all day
Good lord, how do you get any work done? I have Twitter and FB relegated to my phone only, and I try to check HN ~twice a day maximum. The internet is too large and too interesting, if I'm not careful I'll just get sucked under.
> I am a fan of Twitter. It is a much better social network then Facebook and Instagram
I used to follow a lot of blogs of people on Google Reader, when it was shut down everyone just chanted "What's the big deal? Just use Twitter it does the same thing".
Now to follow the same creators I did before I have to experience everything with a side order of hot takes about American politics (I'm not American).
Twitter is one of the worst things to happen to the internet, I can't have any sort of healthy interaction with the internet and actually keep up with what I'm interested in anymore. It sickens me that every time a platform or service shuts down the answer from Twitter addicts is always "just use Twitter".
Seriously twitter is one of few things I hate with a passion. Everything about it stinks. I don't even use twitter but I randomly get rate limited: "you can't see this content because your rate is too high" - first time I click on twitter link in two weeks.
It's just mind boggling how it became so big while being so absurdly terrible.
> I'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've ended up with is the sense of having wasted an enormous amount of time and got nothing worthwhile in return
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
>The site is slow, the UI is god awful, and the spam is - as this tweet points - appalling.
I've probably used Twitter for 1 hour+ per day, every day, for years. I hardly even notice the spam. What am I doing wrong? Is it targeting specific niches? Clearly something is working.
> Twitter was not an overnight success. The first few years it was ridiculed as a big "completely useless" failure by journalists: the same people which now cannot live without it.
My opinion:
In fact Twitter is still amazingly useless and is a prime example of a product succeeding despite its flaws instead of because something.
And no, I'm not this negative towards everything simple. Snapchat for example has a point, I can see the point of it even if I use it even less than Twitter.
Twitter succeed because Google botched Google+ after first using all the oxygen in the market together with Facebook.
That's the whole idea. Twitter isn't meant to be productive -- just a fun waste of time, reading not so important news, gossip, and quips.
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