I’ve never had a Twitter account and I’m genuinely curious what everyone seems to love about it (or hate about it)
I pretend to be my cat, and I only engage with other people who are also pretending to be their cats.
Why pretend to be a cat when you can be the cat?
I follow a small number of people, browse the Followed feed in chronological order, and never miss a tweet from someone i follow.
I do not browse For You (algorithmic reccomendations), i do not keep up with drama, and i used uBlock to delete the Trending section from my sceen. I don’t get a lot of notifications, but if i did i’d have to get used to ignoring them.
This is the way. Twitter is inherently mediocre, but it is made interesting by the people on it, so if you follow the rules above you can have a pretty good time.
I used to follow my favorite bars, restaurants, and music venues. It was my own little list of happy hours, specials, and shows. I also sometimes added local animal rescues to see when they were having pub crawl fundraiser things. I never followed individuals.
You basically just get to argue with the worst people on the planet. Its terrible for your mental health and i wouldnt recommend it
I only used to have it for work. Altmetrics were largely driven by tweets unless any ‘real’ media took an interest. However, I mostly ended up using it to echo anti-Ryanair & anti-Tory views. Made leaving it quite simple. Also, a lot of science moved to Mastodon.
idk algorithm sometimes recommends some funny stuff
It used to be pretty fantastic for live journalism.
I used it as a newsfeed (for the broadest possible meaaning of “news”) with informed commentary attached. Most of the organisations, publications, writers and researchers I’m interested in were on there or would be injected into the feed by someone else.
Same as Reddit really. Just based on following individuals rather than topics.
I didn’t post much, apart from retweets.