Curating your own newspaper and never even tweeting once yourself is a compelling, amazing and totally underrated use of Twitter. Any issue of particular interest to you, follow as many of the key players and observers who tweet and get all the important stories, not just one newspaper's. And all the reaction to those stories. It is only for adults who are capable of assessing a source. If that's you it's amazing. The brevity is it's strength.
I use Twitter mainly for the news, since Twitter enables me to get a much more complete picture of events compared to traditional media. But it took me a long time to really grasp that I could use Twitter in this way. Initially I just followed some work colleagues when I had to create a Twitter account as employee of a company I worked at. Otherwise I would have probably never created a Twitter account as I just didn't see the purpose.
I think one of the biggest challenges for Twitter is on-boarding new users.
With regards to the platform itself: it would be nice if Twitter would had some sort of article quoting mechanism. It's not uncommon to see a Tweet with text from an online article included as a picture. I also do this myself sometimes, since it seems to me people are more eager to click a link if they get a much better grasp the linked content and 140 characters is just too little for this purpose.
>I think one of the biggest challenges for Twitter is on-boarding new users.
This is worse than ever, they invest most of their effort in getting you to follow their cherry picked celeb users for your country. Then they spend the rest of their effort trying to ban you.
It would be nice if Twitter had something equivalent to multireddits, where different follows could be attributed to different tabs on an account. Then I could have one tab for news, one tab for comedians, one tab for math/programming stuff, etc.
From there it follows that Twitter might prepopulate a few tabs with News, Entertainment, Video Games, etc. for new users the same way reddit does a default front page.
Can't you do that with Tweetdeck? I have a column for friends, a column for news, a column for tech, and a column for people I follow but are very noisy (ie people that would end up dominating one of the other columns).
Yes but twitter handles lists poorly - barely any UI or workflow around making lists easy to use and browse. Most new users dont know anything about lists or how to use them.
> when I had to create a Twitter account as [an] employee of a company I worked at.
How does that work? Were you in social marketing? If not, a term-of-the-employment-agreement required this? If the latter, that's the most horrendous thing I've heard today (other than, you know, assault, rape, murder, mayhem, and war)
I can't remember exactly the context, but there was a new website up for the company and they wanted to add employee profiles to the website. I don't believe I was forced to create a Twitter profile, but somehow I was inclined to do it anyway.
I would think this functionality is removed from the site by now. After all, employees might state things on their personal Twitter profile that the company does not agree with.
These days I try to keep my Twitter account more or less anonymous, so I can be free to say the things I believe or want to say. I make sure my Twitter account can not be linked to my LinkedIn / StackOverflow / Github profiles.
My problem with twitter is exactly the opposite. Each tweet might be brief, but there are _so many_ tweets to scroll through, multiple sources as they can repeat themselves or retweet. Then you add in _personal stuff_ that gets thrown in from these key players adding more noise.
I just don't have time nor willing to put in the "effort" to make twitter work. It is just not worth it to me to be on the cusp of breaking news vs being slightly behind with a curated reddit. Even better is making use of multiple focused multireddits like:
Funny thing is that third parties provided the equivalent of multireddits back in the day, by parsing the stream and sorting them into columns, and Twitter eventually introduced lists.
But all this has since languished, as neither their site nor their official apps makes it easy to show lists.
When I have tried to do this in the past major news events blew up my feed with many pages of similar articles which totally drowned out everything else I have no clue if the right way to use Twitter is to follow a ton of people or very few. If it's very few I don't see the point. I can just goto the sites directly and not have to deal with the wall of noise. My impression of how Twitter works is similar to reading a huge forum thread backwards. So instead of reading oldest to newest it's newest to oldest. Is that fair to say? Maybe I am using it wrong?. Did I change a setting years ago that had some terrible unintended consequence? Is this how Twitter works for everyone else?
On the mobile app it will show the feed where you left it and you read it upward to catch up in chronological order.
For me I follow about 30 ppl and remove the too talkative ones inorder for the feed to stay manageable and provide the right amount of signal. That's about 10-20 tweets/day. I think people that follow a lot of accounts must use lists or something else.
> I think people that follow a lot of accounts must use lists or something else.
What I have done is use Twitter as a real time newsfeed, and do not read all the tweets I missed. I open twitter and look at the current tweets, possibly scrolling back a few hours. If I missed something, who cares. If it was important it will likely show up here or some other aggregating new site I frequent.
Twitter is also great for real-time reactions when watching an event on TV. It's akin to people watching the Super Bowl for the commercials. For some shows, the tweets are better than the show and offer an additional level of entertainment.
Just about any story about Twitter mixes people who don't get it and then people who rave about it.
Perhaps it's just a different way of getting news. If there's a topic that is interesting, it's much easier to find a niche subreddit to follow or go straight to the source. I don't know what experts or subject areas avoids the inevitable "now let's show how clever we are", "share our personal life incessantly", or "argue with some Internet idiot over something really dumb with 140 characters".
If one of those experts has something really interesting to say, it's not the Tweet, it's a blog post, it's a site, etc that will bubble up through other sources already curated and Twitter can be skipped. Again, it's very possible there are specific subjects where it's great, but personally have yet to find them. I've never seen a Tweet that had value by itself and the site adds nothing of value to my Internet experience. I hate it when people link to tweets because you wonder what can really be said in that medium which isn't just some witty retort.
It really depends on what you're looking for. For instance, twitter can be good for niche areas. There's no subreddit for local politics in most places; even places that have one don't have one that's very active (look at the NYC politics subreddit). But it's easy to follow a few local reporters, politicians, and activists on Twitter to get a sense of what's happening.
It's also quite useful for up to date information. If I'm trying to find updates about what's happening at an even - especially if I'm trying to find information from multiple sources - Twitter is often the best venue. If I'm trying to find a summary of what happened days later, yeah, a blog post or article would probably be better.
Of course, you can emulate some of the functionality of what Twitter does on other platforms. But the same can be said for most of the web. Blogs are a good example - I'd argue that it'd be much easier to use a personal web page from 1994 to emulate what a blog does than it would be to use a blog to emulate what Twitter does.
To make the most out of Twitter, you do have to choose who to follow, and who to unfollow. Some people either don't understand that or can't be bothered.
If you use it that way, great, but it's not really a social network, but rather a personalized news feed with comments. Which brings us back to the OP: Twitter doesn't feel very social,
And once promoted content started bombarding me in Twitter, I went back to RSS. Unfortunately sites are dropping RSS, though most WordPress sites have an unpublicized feed.
i used to use rss for podcasts too but most just use dedicated services now they are a lot harder to find these days and im sure your right about the rest.
Why should all networks feel the same? A news feed where I can ask questions and get personal answers from real journalists, politicians etc. feels very social to me.
How is it not? The vast, vast majority of the people on facebook (I have like 1.2k friends) don't seem to ever post anything except maybe a pic once in a while.
Likes are similar to retweets.
Seems like such an absurd distinction.
Twitter is also fast and snappy compared to obese FB. It's basically noble in comparison.
I've always disliked Twitter but it does fill a very useful niche. News and sentiment will always bubble up first on Twitter. I think the potential of Twitter as a real-time stream of world events is, to this point, really untapped.
A niche product that has revenue in the billions and hundreds of millions of users. That's not a bad niche. I think Twitter should embrace this and do as much as they can to serve their fans and stop chasing growth.
Hacker News is a niche product. Should it branch out into celebrity news to grow their audience?
I use my main Twitter feed for development news and info sec stuff so the people I follow are pretty visible in those industries.
My news feed is done through feedly, which includes more mainstream news, celeb gossip, architecture and other random topics I'm interested in.
If I combined the two, I'd go nuts in a day trying to sort through it all. I've learned over time to curate my own feed and to never "cross the streams" if you know what I mean. It works well and instead of trying to filter thought so much cruft, I have specific apps for the topics I want to keep up on.
I've been thinking about a read-only Twitter client that doesn't require an account at all would be appealing for the exact use-case you laid out. I don't want to Tweet or have followers.
