There's nothing particularly constructive, no suggestion for "fixing" the problems you articulate, it's a human being—you— talking about their perfectly valid feelings—that Twitter is a waste of focus.

If you can understand why you feel it's valuable to post this rant on HN and have a conversation in public with those who choose to reply to it, you can understand why people post rants on Twitter.

p.s. If HN was nothing except these Ask HN posts, it would be Twitter. What makes it HN is that this kind of post is infrequent.

p.p.s. I don't object to this post on HN or the value of having a conversation about what makes another social media site good/bad/meh.

For example, this forum is moderated, Twitter is almost completely unmoderated. This forum allows for longer replies but bans pictures. Twitter forces you to create threads, but allows pictures.

I doubt anybody in the middle of an argument would cool down and change their minds, but it does provide an opportunity to go look at something else and forget about going back and dropping that zinger you planned to launch...

It's pretty orthogonal to my views otherwise, but its the only thing that can explain how social media distorts things. Giving every Tom, Dick and Harry a mouthpiece that can reach millions is probably a maladaptation to a healthy and productive society.

A person who before might have before just been a village or local kook, can now be a guiding voice to millions, with little effort on their part, and little way for the rest of us to push back.

• Encourage other people - if you like the work someone is doing, tell them!

• Be positive - a feed full of negativity is zero fun to follow.

• Share what you're working on - people are drawn to other people in motion.

I also am very careful about who I follow. I don't "hate-follow" anyone. And I'm pretty liberal with regard to muting stuff.

There is a big trend right now (or always?) of people grifting on Twitter, and I mute every single one of those people. It's all the engagement-bait stuff that you're probably super familiar with. Questions that aren't questions, half-baked thought threads, and hot takes that are only there to gin up "engagement."

I recorded a podcast[1] with some friends recently about how to use Twitter as a human being and not a grifter. They were both super anti-Twitter and I was able to swing them my direction a bit. I think most people just follow the wrong people and get sucked into the hate machine.

There are definitely corners of Twitter that are a lot of fun and very valuable!

[0] https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1434287141887021058

[1] https://share.transistor.fm/s/c854b56e

Another excellent example of this positive and no BS version of Twitter (though probably well-known on HN already) is Andreas Kling [0] (creator of SerenityOS).

[0] https://twitter.com/awesomekling

I think you nailed it with that.

One of the things I'm fond of saying is "being excited is underrated." If you're actually excited about something you're working on, or something cool that someone else is doing, be excited! I think lots of people try to hard to be "cool" instead of potentially letting themselves look silly by being excited. (Also this goes well beyond Twitter, into real life.)

It blows my mind that anybody would actually do this, but I guess it's a thing.

I use it to collect people I follow, post some snarky tweets that amuse myself and my wife, and occasionally interact with people I normally wouldn't otherwise.

In that regard, it's successful.

For the people you're following, it's massively successful as a platform of promotion. I'm constantly looking to the people I follow for their takes on current events, and I love how unfiltered/direct it is, given the length restriction. If I like someone consistently, I'll seek them out on other, probably more-profitable for them, platforms.

If Twitter depresses you, I think then life is probably generally depressing; there's nothing uniquely "useless" or "meaningless" about Twitter, no more so than posting this comment on HN or literally anything else that's to be swallowed by our sun going supernova in a few billion years...

If you don't occasionally go back and prune the former tweets, you may find yourself interacting with many new people!

Likewise, don't try to deliberately gain followers; if you're doing interesting things and posting about them, you'll gain followers anyway.

But also, if you don't enjoy Twitter, you don't have to use it; you don't have to have a "presence" there if you don't find it useful and productive.

Also:

> Tech twitter thinks just because they are good at programming, they have a valid view on topic Y.

Those users exist everywhere. Many people would say the same about many HN users.

I'd slightly alter this advice to: don't hesitate to use the "turn off retweets" feature. On a per-follow basis, you can individually decide whether you want to see retweets from each individual account you follow, and it's a great feature. Some accounts are good to follow on their own, but unbearable if your feed is full of everything they retweet.

There are people I know, who I consider friends, but don't follow on Twitter because they're too high-volume and would drown out the rest of my feed. (I use reverse-chronological and do actually read everything.)

However I do not relate to your experience of it. Over the years I've curated a nice set of people to follow and I've had extremely rewarding experiences. I've learned a lot, invested in companies, received investment, all stemming from interactions I've had on Twitter.

I definitely occasionally see some of what you're talking about and it creeps into my bubble but I'm diligent about tracking down how it got there and unfollowing whoever pushed it into my field of view.

If I can be frank your post here is an example of the kind of stuff I usually push away. Fairly absolute stance with little articulation/empathy of the opposing viewpoint. Taking some of the genuinely negative behavior and implying it must be the entirety of everyone using Twitter.

Twitter tends to reflect yourself and if you're honest with yourself you'll often see that you seek out the things that upset you.

The one major gap in that is I'd love to be able to follow or add to a list just an accounts tweets but not their retweets, there are some people I follow that I love their work but they retweet to boost a lot of random chaff I don't really want, so I can't follow or add them to a list because they just dominate/pollute the feed.

Lists in particular are a good tool because you can quasi-follow someone on a private list where a) it doesn't show up in your follows if they're someone/thing you don't want showing up in your follows and b) you choose when to go see those things so you can self regulate easier if it's not something you can/should see all the time.

Like HN, keeping it short has its advantages and I've also learned-by-reading how people say it short and with impact.

One has to be super careful about pruning accounts that are predictable, RT too much, or waste time attacking straw men.

My Twitter posts are just quotes that I post mostly for myself, for the future. The hardly get any likes and I don't care if they do. People-pleasing is a dirty and dangerous business.

If I could get rid of the explore page, I suspect my Instagram would be similar too. I mute most people I know in real life except for a few treasured friends who post fun, wholesome things, who aren't trying to show off or induce fomo. My actual feed is more photographers or people who share art/design stuff. So that's all good stuff.

Here's a little write up that explains how:

https://medium.com/@okrutny/how-i-gain-hours-of-productive-t...

In terms of what Twitter is used for by everyone these days ... I don't get it. Every time I've created an account and tried to "get into it" I ended up getting bored and never returning. Someone somewhere must find some kind of a use for it since it's still a thing. But I just can't figure out for the life of me what that use is. When people explain that they use it to follow people/pages they like or keep up with the news I keep finding myself using better tools (for me) to do those things. I guess I'm out of touch but I can't figure out for the life of me what problem exists that Twitter actually solves. Then again, I really don't use a smart phone at all either so maybe that explains the disconnect. Now get off my lawn.

I'm a news junkie Twitter is my main source of current events/news. I mostly follow journalists from outlets I consider trustworthy, subject matter experts in areas of interest, and comedians who I find funny on podcasts.

This obviously won't work well if you're goal is to gain a following though, so the experience of those users who are growing their follower count their will have a drastically different experience from mine.

I've actually changed some of my own opinions based on tweets. The tweets expose me to new ideas or perspectives, and lead to research, reading, and in-depth discussion with people. This is valuable to me! In my current life, getting together with people and being exposed to this kind of intellectual stimulation is not always easy. Twitter allows an asynchronous, distributed way of having this kind of discussion.

I have met a few people IRL from Twitter, including authors, activists, and "makers" I admire.

I don't know how peope build a following, but that's not really my goal. I post on a variety of subjects: technical, artistic, political, and lots of random photographs from my walks. I have very few followers (although I am amazed and impressed by some of the people who follow me).

But I also know that I've been using it wrong for over 10 years. I have two accounts with zero overlap. One that's kinda tacked to my real name and where at max I followed 200 people, of which 75% I've met in person - the 'lowest interaction' would be: met at a conference and had a beer or something. The other account is for some different field of interest, but I'm also only following and interacting with ~100 people. The result is that I only barely notice all the drama and repeatedly don't get all the fuzz. It feels more like IRC than social media, because it's a net positive and I can mostly opt out of the bad stuff.

It's fascinating that you can keep your bubble so well inside this larger ecosystem, but as I said, that's why I don't get how the company is still alive if the majority of users would be me.

I'm hoping at some point ML folks get fed up with all of the rage and migrate to a dedicated forum (Yann LeCun's Google+ group used to be great, same for /r/machinelearning a few years ago).

Why are so many smart and insightful people on Twitter? Because it's easier than blogging or microblogging? I see links to their interesting threads referenced on Reddit or HN and I follow those links, but I can't bring myself to care enough about Twitter (or Nitter) to actively follow anyone.

I guess if something is valuable enough on Twitter I'll hear about it elsewhere. Not sure if that approach holds up.

I'm looking forward to whatever replaces Twitter. I've been waiting for that thing for about a decade.

As you walk around hearing people talk, everyone is getting a bit drunk, so their conversations sometimes get a bit out there and more extreme out of context.

Also, the bar gives free drinks for people that get into arguments, so there's incentive to interject randomly into conversations with your own view point.

And anyone that drinks socially knows drunken arguments aren't particularly productive most of the time.

Very true. Even Twitter replies are often like a "dialog" of monologues.

Of course I don't post anything other than comments on art.

Now, I like/use Twitter for a few reasons;

- I can write/rant/complain or blurb out something without worrying about feedback or trying to get into a conversation.

- I watch people that I admire/like/appreciate via Lists. Twitter does the job of putting them in the timeline based on that. Other topics creep up, but I just ignore them.

- I don't try to market, grow, "engage" but instead just browse and tweet when I feel like it.

- If I don't like what someone says, I unfollow or block specific keywords. Words such as Cricket, Wordle, etc., are blocked. :-)

- I follow people whom I mutually respect and/or admire or people I knew loooong back and have nostalgic relationships from the early days.

It seems like sound advice. I tried it, but Twitter still didn't "stick" for me. Primarily I did not find curating my own experience to be work I enjoyed doing, and it certainly did not net me a return that justified the investment of my time or mental energy. So I stick to re-directing individual tweets to nitter.net.

I call Twitter a "hate laser." Hate bounces back and forth between camps of angry people and is amplified until it shoots out and causes damage in the real world. Twitter isn't the only platform like this or even the most toxic, but I think it does the most harm by virtue of its size.

Virtually all discourse on there is toxic, but especially anything that touches politics. The political position doesn't matter. No matter what it is the content is always a barrage of lazy memes, brutal ad hominem, and the violent dismemberment of straw men.

This is a good summary of many threads on HN (particularly political).

I'm just here for the awesome discussions and posts that I happen to find interesting.

I think this is the echo chamber effect. Twitter culture is to block people you disagree with. Gradually, you become trapped in self-reinforcing clusters of opinions. You get the short-term reward of not having to engage with opinions you don't like, at the long-term cost of lack of exposure to new ideas. Your identity becomes sclerotic. Your tweets become your treadmill. Over and over again.

The trick is to not follow accounts that talk about politics and to ignore people when their opinions are not based on their expertise. Also ignore accounts that are too sure about their own opinions.

I have a private account with about 100 lists which I step into at my own leisure. You don't get promoted tweets when viewing a list, and the signal to noise ratio is better than Twitter's 'You may like' / Topics BS. I don't use Twitter to chase fame and reject any follow requests I get since I enjoy my privacy.

Any little thoughts I have during the day are kept in my journal, not broadcasted publicly where I would probably regret tweeting it a year later.

Shortly after I made that account, I decided to do an experiment to see how quickly I could gather followers, even though I had next to no tweets. All I did was click through random accounts and followed them. Surprisingly, many of them followed me back. It only took me a few days of clicking around to get a few hundred followers. If I had kept it up, could I have amassed thousands?

I stopped that experiment quickly because I didn't really care. It told me everything I needed to know, and I had no motivation to go back.

Its continued relevance is a bit depressing, IMO. It's hard for me to imagine that the average person actually gets more out of it than they put in, despite how clearly it can be beneficial for certain individuals and circumstances (as can be said of nearly anything). Overall, my impression of Twitter is that it is largely composed of negativity and snark, and the way it works seems to create more collectivism and mass social illness. If Twitter went belly-up, maybe I'd be kind of happy about it?

Maybe they were all there to start just hidden from view but the world was better with them hidden from view IMO. It's not the same as writing an article/blog which requires the reader to spend several minutes to engage with. Instead it's more like being at a party or conference but instead of just talking to the 2-4 people near you everyone is shouting out "look at me!", "look what I made!", "believe my way!".

We talk about how the algorithms surface "bad" things but I'd say even without the algorithms the platforms (Twitter, Instagram, etc...) at a fundamental level, promote bad behavior (showing off, bragging, etc...). There's a reason cultures for 1000s of years looked down on this kind of behavior. These platforms by bad luck of their design, promote it.

Low stim internet usage would be things like looking up the actor from that one movie, and then getting the name. When you get the name, you get a low level of stimulus. You just go "oh yeah, right".

High stim internet is an unregulated and extremely addictive drug. So much of the internet is meticulously designed to elicit the biggest possible emotional reaction from its users, who may then get caught in the undertow of looking for the next big emotional rush.

Content is irrelevant; the same content could be styled as "FIFTEEN AMAZING FOOD HACKS, NUMBER EIGHT WILL BEAT UP YOUR FATHER!" or it could be styled as "hey did you know you can crunch up breakfast cereal and use it as breading"

Twitter, reddit, instagram; these and many other sites are just ranches for people who are caught up in the undertow to spend half their day on, bleeding out personal information to whomever wants to buy it.

So I guess I'm not baffled by how negative it is, how little you gain from it once you're on it long term, or why peopl euse it long term despite that. It's a drug. They're addicted. No one's stopping the pushers. It's not going to stop on its own.

i find twitter to be overwhelmingly positive and interesting - you're just using it wrong.

Almost any reminder that people are having conversations there (especially politics / social commentary)... or forming thought about the world there, makes me fear humanity.

Basically I just keep it around since some (like here on HN) think that it's valuable to prove you exist using an established account.

Why?

There are three sorts of people who have a significant Twitter following.

There are people who are famous in "real life" who people follow because they want insight into the minds of celebrities, and a little bit of access because they might get a reply. You can only join this group by doing something noteworthy offline. Your following will grow quickly as your offline life becomes more notable.

Then there are people who are subject matter experts who tweet genuinely interesting things whose followers are authentically interested in what that person says. You can join this group by being an expert in something and tweeting about it. If it's interesting the following will grow slowly.

And lastly there are people who just want a Twitter following because they think it would reflect how important they feel they are. They just haven't been noticed yet. I'm in this group. I enjoy tweeting. I often think I should be noticed more on there because I'm funny. I don't have any regrets. My followers do though.

The question that was asked was not meant to denigrate the many people that have found useful ways to connect and work with others.

I don't care about follower counts on Twitter, and in fact, "delete" all my tweets every month or so. I don't really place much importance on my tweets, either.

I make heavy use of topic-based lists and when I really want to soak stuff in, I use TweetDeck.

Properly curated, it's a great source for news and nuggets of info, joy, and laughs.

Twitter has a place in society but we need to understand that it's mostly people's passing thoughts which can be very wrong.

Keep in mind that we need to be very careful where we get our information from since once an idea get in our thoughts, our mind gets primed with that idea and once you hear it again it becomes more credible. I suspect that's how people end up believing some out of the norm ideas.

I stopped using it since to me it's not worth trying to understand what's true vs what's not at scale. I just don't have the time to figure it out.

Sure, there are well researched opinions but they get polluted after the replies start. Again, people's opinions but who has time to figure them out.

But this kind of problem is also not unique or even particularly aggravated on Twitter or social media in general. Funnily enough I think it was the post-modernists like Baudrillard who first forcefully articulated this problem, but most of the time people talk about post-modernists as if they enjoy the fact that culture and politics have become dominated by symbols and simulacra. I've barely read anything on the topic, but that's my understanding.

I should add the important caveat that mass non-symbolic politics is possible, so I'm not advocating some kind of blunt "anti mob and everything 'popular' is the mob" position. But wherever you find that, it probably won't be on Twitter.

If you follow serious, like-minded people - who don't push out garbage at random, there is a lot of things you'd get to learn. If you'd contribute meaningfully, you'd make some good industry connections as well.

ML community is very active on Twitter. Part of the reason why ML is going hot still is because the information dissemination rate is pretty high. If ML was active on Reddit or Facebook primarily, I can't imagine newest developments would reach out to others as fast. People use bookmarks & like to make curated reading lists, or look out for seminar/talk announcements. Overall its a win-win to people who are invested in it.

Twitter is for following my favorite sci-fi authors. Daily outrage can take a hike.

Personally, I use twitter to rant about politics, occasionally post something programming-related, but mostly for shits and giggles. Although I follow quite a few Twitter influencers like Naval, most of my feed are just local people that I like, that have nothing in common with my career, who post pretty mundane stuff about their lives, sometimes — nudes. I've met a lot of these people in real life, sometimes just for drinks, and more than a couple of times it developed into ONS and serious romantic relationships.

A while back I made it a lot better by running a script that turned off retweets for everyone I followed at the time. New people I follow are on Retweet Probation and it's always kind of amusing when I decide to turn off someone's retweets because they're mostly sharing stuff designed to create outrage and I see next to nothing from them any more.

I miss Livejournal.

> Imagine looking back on your life when you are 60 and seeing that you tweeted stuff with no effect WHAT SO EVER and you did this for 30 years of your life. Isn't this so depressing?

"You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it." - Morpheus

To give you an example of those tweets, I frequently post stuff to the effect of "taking a dump".

But I also recognize that sales and marketing folks exist for a reason and don’t fret too much. If and when I start a business, I’ll look into it.

- I’m fast to follow, fast to unfollow. I try a lot of folks out, but am quick to drop them if the value is not there.

- I try to only follow people not orgs. So, I tend to follow individual reporters instead of the main newspaper account (for example).

- I don’t tweet. In fact my account is private with no followers so I couldn’t even if I wanted to.

If I ever get back to it, it’ll be in write-only mode

Funny, I’ve thought the same about HN.

I've seen people that I respect appear to lose their sanity from things being said on it. An example is Sam Harris, who is of course a brilliant author and neuroscientist.

He's gone from a person I respected a lot for his thoughts on atheism and spirituality to being a person who I've heard dedicate hours of podcasts to basically complaining about what people say on twitter. As an adult, it's almost shocking to hear someone intelligent revert to anguishing about the same things misguided teenagers might concern themselves with.

He's not the only one. It appears famous people who use twitter end up using it as a scope into what they might perceive the real world to be like. However, what seems to be the discourse on twitter has no relation to the discourse in my neighborhood (in Western North Carolina) or my previous neighborhood (East Village, NYC).

So no, OP, you're not the only one baffled. I'm extremely baffled.

Why? Fake Internet Points only matter when you have something to sell.

Not true. If you get 1,000,000 HN karma, pg gifts you a pony.