This is almost a blog
My Twitter experience is probably positive on net. I don’t tweet much, and most of what I do tweet is neither important or serious. I’m not a big social media type. I mainly use Twitter because I want an online presence and that’s the platform I can best handle.
Here is what has kept me from abandoning Twitter for more than ten years:
Use Twitter’s search to find tweets on a particular topic. You can’t subscribe to topics, but you can follow/list people that tweet mainly about topics of interest. I try to avoid people that are constantly tweeting strong political opinions and conspiracy theories. If I wanted that I’d go back to Facebook.
Use patience. Over time you’ll start seeing retweets of good content. Follow/list those people.
Use Tweetdeck. Create lists on particular topics. Put the high quality accounts in lists that you check multiple times per day. Put the accounts with limited usefulness in a different list that you check every so often. Constantly move people between the lists. The high quality lists are the only thing that make this work. Don’t set your standards too high though. You need enough tweets to make it worthwhile to check.
You should tweet every once in a while. Just be careful to not tweet things others find valuable or interesting. I retweet content I think is worthwhile and I write tweets that are not worth reading. There’s no good reason anyone should follow me and that’s very much by design. If I had followers expecting content, I’d feel compelled to come up with content, and that’d be yet another source of stress. I shoot for halfway between “dead account” and “account worth following”.
I mostly try to avoid accounts with more than 100K followers. Not in all cases, but most. One thing I’ve noticed is that those types take Twitter seriously. Their objective is to get as many retweets and likes as possible. Unfortunately, that means the reliability of the information they tweet is not at the level I’d like. It’s easier to tweet original content if you’re free to make stuff up. Same for generating outrage, putting your own twist on the events of the day, or arguing for a particular viewpoint.
(Closely related to the previous point) Twitter’s only fun if you can interact with others. Many accounts refuse to interact with anyone outside their inner circle. They’re on twitter to promote themselves and promote their friends. That makes for a boring experience.
Keep an eye open for people trying to establish hierarchies. They’ll tweet something like “the sun rose in the south today”. It’ll have 478 likes. You’ll reply “How can the sun rise in the south?” They’ll respond by attacking you for having a small follower count. What you’ll notice is that the only people liking and retweeting the exchange are the ones that support the bully. There will be 82 people dumb enough to retweet a claim that the sun rises in the north, south, east, and west. Just like the real world, Twitter has sewers, and you need to get the heck out of there are fast as possible.
Familiarize yourself with muting and blocking. If there are too many tweets on a topic you don’t like, mute that word. If you don’t like misinformation, mute or block the people posting it. There are few things more important to maintaining a sane experience than the ability to block.
Post written by Lance Bachmeier