Someone Explain Twitter to Me

I’m using Feedly as well and love it. Syncs across all my devices and let’s me categorize all my stuff so I can have for example a newly made Twitter category, gaming news, news/politics, and tech. In all honesty I think a part of why mobile games never clicked with me is because if I find that I have 5 minutes I open up feedly and just start scrolling to see what’s new. Also has a nice bookmarking system so if you see something you like that you want to share or read later you can.

1 Like

I really like Inoreader cause you pull to read an article or click through if you wanna support the site

2 Likes

So here’s the thing: moving things from my (RSS) Feeds to my Boards (which I use as categorised Read Later) is a good use of 5 minutes. But it’s basically reading the contents page of a newspaper (or a mix of all the newspapers I subscribe to). To once again go back to the before time, Feedly is Firefox Live Bookmarks (or later Google Reader) while Twitter is solidly a child of Digg and LiveJournal.

Twitter is reading some off-the-cuff notes from the authors of those articles and my friends. The articles that surface on my Twitter feed (that I value) are the ones in places I don’t subscribe to (either too much noise to signal ratio for me to want to subscribe or just not a place I was aware of due to the scale of online). When Austin Walker has some quick thoughts that don’t make sense to expand out to a full blog/article then it’s going to end up on a micro-blogging broadcast platform (and for lots of people, that is the value - it allows you to unburden yourself of something that might otherwise fester if not expressed but isn’t really worth nurturing into a big piece of writing). For now, that means Twitter.

Twitter is also designed to be “glanceable” rather than demanding you index through it. Some do read it sequentially (and things like TweetDeck with the Lists allow a more refined way of doing that by grouping follows into different feeds) but others just glance at what is happening in their feed in any idle moments. It’s where you go because you’re interested in what someone might be thinking now, not necessarily because you want to read through every thought they’ve had that’s worth turning into an article.

Edit: It’s somewhat depressing to see “unless you’ve got literally many thousands of followers, you don’t matter; so you have to play the game of being evil to make it work” comments here. For a start, lots of people with big follower counts get that way because of internet micro-celebrity rather than any behaviour on Twitter so this “be evil = get followers” thing just isn’t true. Also that’s a huge conversation about the attention economy and micro-celebrity because of course not everyone will have far more attention given to their small thoughts than they give to others and judging your own worth by that is toxicity way beyond the platform of Twitter or any other social media.

The chase to fame as social variant of the wider American Dream lie is some classic capitalist nightmare stuff. Viewing Twitter through that lens isn’t so much a knock against the platform or even social media in general but against our current society and how it says you can’t take fulfilment from enjoying social engagements with friends and having a modest number of people (you maybe don’t know) interested in your smaller thoughts and what you want to share.

2 Likes

Hard agree. Chasing follower counts, unless your income depends on it, is stupid.

Twitter sucks but all my friends stopped using Plurk and Tumblr, the former of which is mostly big in Taiwan, and the latter of which is like Twitter, but worse because the posts can be so much longer. Ppl like to pretend Twitter and Tumblr are two totally different things.

They’re not. Not really.

it’s like throwing a paper plane with a message written on it except that the airline is run by insane libertarians

Have to disagree on that. I don’t check Twitter often throughout the day (maybe like twice now?) and half of the time I do it seems people are referring to something that happened earlier in the day that I missed and is now buried. So if I want to catch up and understand what it is they are actually referencing I need to go back and play catch up.

Not saying there is only one way just that this is something I have observed over the years which I think feeds into a bigger issue which is in regards to feeling like you need followers. I also think that is just part of the social media experience of the platform. I know some might say that’s really kind of just social media in general but Twitter has a different underlying vibe to it compared to something like Facebook or Instagram.

Take Instagram as an example, using it solely as a place to share pictures with friends, family, and maybe the occasional random person online who comes across your cat pictures seems normal. Not many people make a Twitter account with the same thought process as that because you are probably already using a social media platform that is much better suited for sharing your thoughts within your circle. Correct me if you feel differently but isn’t the main purpose of Twitter to share and experience different peoples thoughts on something? If you reach a point where you feel like all you are doing on the platform is reading everyone else’s thoughts but no one is ever reading yours then you have kind of lost half the appeal of the platform have you not?

Which is where the “be rude and mean” approach comes into play on Twitter as it’s the easiest way to get people to respond to your tweets and validate your use of the platform. I could Tweet every day for two months and get no indication that anyone has seen or read my tweets but if I just camp out on a popular Twitter users profile for a few hours I can jump in and make a comment and immediately get reactions from people. It’s extremely narcissistic but then again narcissism is kind of an underlying theme of social media in general.

My Twitter is private and only for sharing my thoughts within my circle; I essentially use it the way I used Livejournal, but it’s more effective because I don’t have anything worth saying in more than a few 140-word chunks, so the pressure of needing to find enough things to say to Write A Post doesn’t exist. I only venture outside my bubble for creators I like, and am very quick to unfollow them if they don’t fit my timeline. But I’m also that person who deleted their Facebook before even finishing high school. I still get mad every time I have to go there and get bombarded by their demands to log in (I made a throwaway but it keeps logging me out lol), so I probably have a slightly different set of desires from social media than the norm.

1 Like

I use twitter to skim some news and short thoughts from various personalities I follow. It also lets me find out about current grievances in various communities (apparently there’s a ComicsGate? :frowning:), which is sometimes helpful. Also, the “trending” bar gives me notice if I should check my national news sites to see if someone died.

Tumblr, on the other hand, is for gifs from TV shows and anime, fan art, a good fashion post now and then, as well as posting my own gifs.

1 Like

I only use it to follow public figures (ranging from athletes, celebrities, and Waypoint staff) or interact with fandom-related friends. I mainly only use a private/protected account, so I don’t interact with strangers. So yes, I use it as a 140-characters-at-a-time livejournal. shrug I also don’t use the official twitter app because of the garbage they’ve added to the timeline. Talon on android, tweetdeck on pc.

Probably a minority way of using twitter, but it’s where my fandom’s at, and it’s fine.

Nope. Most social media is predicated on IRL identity. Twitter is pretty sharply divided between the parts of twitter that are IRL-based and not – for the latter, twitter and tumblr are the largest platforms with tumblr beating out twitter in the-this-is-fucking-unusable category. :wink:

No they are. Granted, they both have a nazi problem, but where Twitter is usually a defensive war against racist assholes, Tumblr has become such a lawless wasteland that they actually managed to troll Alex Jones off the site by flooding him with mountains of furry porn.

I’m not making that up.

Anywho, Twitter is the only social media platform that normal people can actually understand and use (MASTADON IS THE LINUX OF SOCIAL MEDIA) that let’s them easily create their own space. Where sites like Facebook bombard you with all sorts of crap from people and parties you don’t even know, Twitter let’s you easily sift through this and create a timeline mainly of friends and interesting follows. I’ve stuck around for so long because it’s where I’ve met a ton of queer friends I wouldn’t have met otherwise.

HOWEVER

Like all social media websites (except Discord from what I’ve seen so far), Twitter is run by libertarian idiots who don’t know anything about the world or the people that share this Earth with them, leading to such mindboggling soundbites like the founder of twitter saying he won’t ban Alex Jones from his platform, despite breaking all of his rules, because of the “conversation.” Twitter will eventually die and a lot of us are trying to figure out a plan B because these blithering morons in charge have managed to destroy any long term growth of their platform by reusing to ban literal actual nazis unless roughly a billion people scream at them all at once.

That’s going to be a really bad day for content creators because have you ever tried to plug something you’ve made on any other website in the history of anything? Reddit is the only place I’ve found where I can find some sort of audience for my work, but even then I have to stick to very specific subreddits. When Twitter goes, it’s going to hurt a lot of people who need it to get eyes on their work because lord knows Facebook won’t fucking let you with it’s “timeline is now blorbles, here’s an article written by a nazi we called news” set up.

3 Likes

Um, I do use Twitter, and I’m aware of all this. I should have clarified that my experience re: Twitter being the same as Tumblr is mostly based in certain attitudes and how, due to the public nature of the site, you can get into arguments with total strangers over shit because someone who knows someone who knows someone liked your post and they saw it. Both breed interactions between strangers without regard toward anyone’s safety. And like, while Twitter is used by content creators, so is Tumblr. That’s what it was built for before it all went to shit.

I am by no means suggesting that they are the same website, but as microblogging platforms, they’re used for a lot of the same stuff. They just have the same issues tweaked enough to make the atmosphere feel differently for some people, but to me, it doesn’t feel too different. I use Twitter and Tumblr as a casual user, and while I do produce some content for fandoms, I pretty much actively avoid linking it literally anywhere else. It’s gonna suck when Twitter goes down for the people who do use it to share their work. A lot of people have developed a following for content there, and it sucks that they’ll lose it. In this, we agree.

1 Like