> - 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 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.
> Most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets from adult U.S. users.
One of the things I disliked about communities moving to Twitter away from bulletin boards/forums was that before, I could write something and people would read it. But when I made a Twitter account I would tweet something and nobody would read it. I was more or less forced to be a consumer of information because I had very few followers. I suppose that's why Twitter is popular among celebrities and busy people: it is largely a one-way communication channel.
If you stick with it I'm sure your follower count will grow ever so slowly, but I never got over that hump because it felt so dumb tweeting out into the void. When I used Twitter I mostly used it as a bulky RSS reader. These days, many of the interactions I would've wanted to have on Twitter are happening in chat apps. I'm quite happy with this.
> I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a set of follows which will engage them. Seems like twitter can't either.
The problem is that many people think of twitter as a tool to talk to someone. In reality it is a tool to subscribe to people. Micro-blogging is a stupid word, but it is true. You get use out of twitter by treating it like an RSS client:
Find feeds with content that interests you (personal things of friends, musicians, artists, game devs, people talking about political issues that interest you, activist groups, etc.) and subscribe to them.
That covers the use case of the average person. If you feel ambitious you can also become a content producer, but that is of course a real investment.
> Who needs a Twitter account aside from journalists and attention-seekers?
Twitter is what you curate it to be. To me, Twitter is kind of the publishing platform Linked In was trying to build. Smart people posting interesting links (to their posts or others) and people discussing.
However since Twitter is what you make Twitter to be, garbage in garbage out. I quit Twitter for about 2 years but then unfollowed every account and started fresh. Now I use it all the time, way more than Facebook, etc.
> 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.
> Either people like your stuff and want to share it, or they don't.
Eh not really. Consider my use case. I don't tweet, retweet or anything. My profile is set to private. I mainly use Twitter for updates on the local public transport (and sport scores). Last week for instance the metro system had a really bad failure. At the end of the day, their Twitter account posted a big apology and you could see whoever was manning it had played a blinder by helping as many people as they could. So I "liked" it as a form of appreciation. I do that a lot.
I don't think I'm alone on this either. I know lots of people who use Twitter for practical things (traffic updates etc.), I honestly can't think of anyone who actually tweets though.
If like goes, I'll just use retweet as a replacement to show the same emotion. Except I'll be retweeting to an empty audience deliberately.
>> Now I use an email mailing list, and 100% of the people who want to see 100% of the things I send.
I totally agree that you should have a direct channel (email) to your internet friends.
I think what Twitter can offer is to let new people discover you. Email lists don't grow that way on their own (people won't really forward your email to their friends, but they retweet your tweets and so their friends find you).
Couldn't agree more. Some good info gets distributed that way, but so does even more crap. It does tax people's ability to filter.
> Twitter has an atrocious UI.
Sure, twitter.com has a terrible UI, but there are many other UIs available that are better
> there are a lot of us (dozens of us!) that won't touch Twitter with a ten foot pole.
There are a lot of us who do use Twitter too. I'm connected to probably over a hundred fellow developers, sysadmins, computer scientists, etc. One step away through them are thousands, and we do learn from each other every day. (More so than here, that's for damn sure.) Avoiding Twitter means missing out on that, just like using only Twitter would mean missing out on blog content. It's a high price to pay for fashion, and people who avoid or dump on Twitter for that reason seem to outnumber those who do so out of genuine principle by a large margin.
I will not talk about the ethics and privacy issues of Twitter but about user experience and quality of content on feed.
The quality of content on your feed is as good as the people you choose to follow. Choose selectively, block and mute liberally. Keep doing this, and your feed will be fantastic.
I use Twitter only for work. I set my Trending country to some country I have never heard the name of outside of trivia books containing nation capitals.
And my Twitter experience is fantastic. Have meaningful discussions, learn new things, gain new perspectives.
> Twitter as a concept really only has a single novel idea: being able to (sometimes) directly speak to people that you would normally never have the status or prestige to contact
What? I've been on Twitter a long time and this is just nonsense. It's about being able to speak to people.
> customer support for a company that has terrible phone lines
How is this "never have the status or prestige"? It's "don't have the time or energy to sit on hold for hours" at best.
> If I could go on Twitter and only see stuff from people I follow I'd feel the same as you about it. But they make it almost impossible not to be barraged with other stuff too, and not just ads, but hate and insanity that I tried hard not to follow. Those are the things that drove me away.
The only sane way to use Twitter is through a 3rd-party client: no ads, none of that Notifications spam and other recommendations
> 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.
> 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".
> 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.
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...
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