I tried using it, like most people, but when you work a job that doesn’t involve trolling the internet for news, it’s really hard to use twitter in any meaningful manner.

You’ll post something and a few days later you’ll have time to post a reply. Or you’ll follow a few interest points and miss everything they post because you don’t visit every hour and it’ll drown in the feed if you don’t.

I honestly think all the regular people on twitter are either unemployed or spending so much work time on social media that they ought to be fired.

I like social media by the way, but I don’t think it has a lot of value when it’s done primarily with strangers. I mean, my friends use Facebook groups and events to organize stuff and it’s really, really good at that. We use discord/WhatsApp chats to keep in touch on day to day chitchat - which would be better in person but we live in different cities/have children etc. So that sort of social media is great.

But talking with strangers? I mean, I’m home in bed with the flu right now, and we’re having this conversation, except I can’t be sure you’ll ever read what I post or if you’ll find it interesting or reply, and even if we do get to have a talk, we’ll likely never have another one. So it doesn’t hold a lot of real value aside from wasting time, and that’s kind of what twitter is all of the time.

It's much more interesting for highly specific news. I've got some accounts I follow for local news, some for gamedev news, people doing interesting tech, art, jokes, and a few "commentators" who are excellent enough to be worth reading on their own. It can be great for kibitzing on live TV events too.

Mind you, these days I post very little original stuff too. The internet is just too much of a live-fire zone.

I tried following HN styled things on twitter but it just never worked out for me.

Twitter is completely fine and usable even if you only check it every few days, or only during your morning commute. Some people I know use Twitter maybe one day a month on average. I have no idea why you think you need to see everything on/constantly be on Twitter to use it.

I think this is the superior way to use twitter. Just stay away of all the politics and meme bots.

  Or you’ll follow a few interest points and miss everything they post because you don’t visit every hour and it’ll drown in the feed if you don’t.

  I honestly think all the regular people on twitter are either unemployed or spending so much work time on social media that they ought to be fired.

I follow 60 accounts and maybe 10-15 of them are very active. They tend to be either high profile people in my community meaning they comment or share resources quite often. Or they are developers and share progress on their projects. Both types I find value in.

For me I think the best thing is to simply unsubscribe to someone whenever you start finding that their tweets bring 25% value rather than 75%. I do the same with Youtube, I give them some leeway but once I find myself not really watching their videos I just unsubscribe.

I work with a school and they Tweet out stuff bout what is happening at the school, photos of student activities, etc which parents love. They tweet out thanks to organisations that they are working with or who have come to visit. People working there follow the Twitter accounts of education specialists, regulators, other schools, education department officials etc. All useful stuff.

We do have digital platforms for sharing stuff like that, but they are operated by the schools and the data is encrypted, access locked to the correct parties and the data is t kept forever. That way, you can actually also share meaningful information directly linked to your child.

Parents are asked whether to select whether photos can be used for

1. Inside for school displays 2. For training purposes 3. In school newsletters 4. On the school website 5. For publicity purposes, including Twitter, press releases.

I too am a parent, if the school want to say 'well done to the football team for winnning the London championships', and have a photo of the team with the trophy that's fine by me. Some parents agree, some disagree. Some disagree until their kids tell them that they would like to be in the photo.

Names aren't used on the Twitter account.

I understand it in context of professionals using it as their free sales/promotion channel (Trump, Cardashians or whoever is in vogue these days). There it makes perfect sense, not that I would like to anyhow participate or care about their opinions.

I use BBC Android app to read some news when having few minutes break ie in public transport. Over last years they started to put these tweets of random folks in the articles (so no Trump tweets iframe in the article about his latest tweets, but rather some random folks expressing their opinions about Brexit, olympics or anything else). Those articles really feel much worse because of this - I go to BBC for some serious journalism, not this.

It really feels like they try not only persuade me by stating facts in the article, but appeal to my potential 'sheepish' personality trait of accepting popular opinions of others, rather than making opinions from the facts on my own. My main issue - whatever narrative you want to push as a journalist (and they often do), you just look for tweets that you like in the sea of all possible opinions. Just give me the facts, and let me do the thinking and opinion making, please

If we’re talking personality types I think it has more to do with people who are motivated by acceptance. I get that part of it, and I understand why the social media gurus and journalists are there, it’s basically their linked-in. (Which is basically management porn).

What I don’t get is why regular people join. I mean, I’m a manager, I play the “look-at-me” game on linked-in, in fact it’s part of my damn job to sell our stories to other managers - but I wouldn’t expect my neighbor to want to read about our approach to behavioral design and I’ve frankly never used it in any manner that wasn’t job-related either.

Her job was basically to screenshot outrage reaction from random people on tweeter and sending that to government officials in a newsletter. The idea was for them to feel how the populace was reacting to current events..

The ultimate echo room!

Boom. Instant manufactured outrage.

Sounds like hell

it is said that you should never meet your heroes (or I suppose your favorite celebs). Hell is a place where you are exposed to your heroes' casual thoughts.

maybe it would just be hell for me; but a personality change so extreme that I ended up with favorite companies afterwards does sound like the plot to a dystopian novel.

I find Twitter useful by following accounts which tailor to my taste in information consumption. They typically broadcast very useful information, and stay clear of politics and especially stay clear of politicizing for brownie points.

Now, I can see Twitter being a very annoying place if all you are following are accounts which are looking to "engage" their audience and get retweets and mentions, etc., and try to be cool, set tone, influence, and throw signals --all of these mostly add noise.

Yet you are on hacker news. After some reflection I've realized that hacker news and reddit are just as bad for me as facebook is to others. I am reading unfiltered opinions from all people and I don't think that is particularly valuable or healthy.

What is it about tweets that would mean they're not legitimate expressions of opinion? People write them, and publish them, and it'd be a bit unreasonable to assume they have some motive other that stating their opinion, so I don't really understand why you think tweets are something else.

It's not about the legitimacy of the tweet or even factualness.

When journalists want to create a fake narrative, what they do is say "people are saying this" and then show a few tweets to support them. Even though almost nobody really may be thinking in those term.

For example, there's a lot of social justice clamour over things like award shows lately. The thing is, people don't care that-that much. They may a little, they might have some nuanced ideas one way or another, but the 'journalist' reporting will say: "People are really upset about so-and-so's comments" - and then show a few tweets of either random people or celebs.

Individual tweets are not remotely representative of anything, and yet they are used as 'representative' data points all the time.

Not only do journos do this in purpose (i.e. willfully misrepresenting) but I think they are actually influenced by the Twitterverse. I really do think that many in the press think that Twitter is real or representative.

If you're reading things that say "Three people tweeted about this therefore it's fact" then sure, you're reading something that's nonsense. Articles need more than that to demonstrate there's a groundswell of opinion around something. But Twitter is no different to any vox populi source in that regard - in the things I read I don't think tweets are added to articles to prove anything; they're there for color and emotional connection. Without referencing the real world in their work reporters would write very bland and inhuman articles that would be horrible to read for most of their audience.

I think I'd rather read a properly researched article with those tweets than one without them. If the article isn't properly researched then no amount of tweets is going to rescue it.

2. A person can have at most one spot on a sidewalk, but multiple Twitter accounts.

3. People can organize an outpouring of opinion I Twitter. "Let's all tweet this at the same time" you can't organize happening to be on a sidewalk when the journo comes looking.

4. There is a certain personality type that joins Twitter. This is not the case to the same extent for sidewalks.

5. Tweet speed among Twitter users is more different (less than one to hundreds per day) than time spent walking sidewalks.

6. People on sidewalks are ASKED their opinion. People on Twitter speak without being asked. The people who aren't talking about a subject will have less strong views.

7. People on the sidewalk are in the same country as the journalist.

What do you think when you read an article in a newspaper saying "an anonymous source at the state department who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation"? News organizations know how to make something out of nothing in print as well as online - so you're better off focusing on the identity of the speaker than the medium

They are generally giving out specific facts.

Yes, of course those things are generally about manipulations of some kind, but there are protocols involved, and those 'anon facts' generally have to be true. In these situations, the news organizations credibility is on the line. The more credible the entity, the more likely they've done their checking/double checking to corroborate etc..

Many legit stories break this way.

Again, yes, it's all about narrative ... but there's generally more meat to the narrative in those cases.

Tweets by individuals who are authoritative on something are also a different thing. If an actress says 'I faced harassment from several studio execs' - then this has some credibility as a statement.

But this is altogether different from the straw-man 'people are saying' types of stories which are very common. A daily occurrence.

The 'materially useful' tweets are a small thing.

Is it, though?

Does every journalist really "create controversies where there are none?"

Is every news story really an attempt to "divide society to get you hooked on news?"

Do you also believe meteorologists gin up their weather forecasts with storms for better ratings?

Don't confuse cynicism with intellectual rigor, please. The world - even media and social media - are more nuanced than that.

It's like saying all bankers are greedy, all politicians are corrupt, all doctors are stooges for big pharma, all police are psychopaths, etc. Maximal cynicism and minimal insight... it gets tedious after a while.

Yes.

>Is every news story really an attempt to "divide society to get you hooked on news?"

Maybe not every, but yes. Not only to get you hooked on news, also to advance certain political ideas which depend on the journalist/medium.

>Do you also believe meteorologists gin up their weather forecasts with storms for better ratings?

I do. I'm not saying they make up storms, but they could very well make things look more grave than they are so people listen to them.

When a journalist looking to craft a story quotes someone they've encountered personally, they had the pick of at most maybe 1000 people they spoke to that day. Likely far fewer - they have a story to finish and limited time. So while their quote will support the narrative they want to push, there's a limit to how far they can distort reality; if a view is rarer than 1/100, they likely won't find the quote they wanted.

Being able to sift 100 million people for the position they want changes that. We're used to assuming anything quoted by a journalist is, if not perfectly representative, then close to representative - a view that, while maybe not the majority, is held by something like that 1/100 or better. Twitter changes that.

You could go out on the street; but finding and then having someone say something on camera is -very- different to finding and showing a tweet. I feel pretty confident in saying that a lot of people tweet stuff they’d never say live in front of a camera.

Hence the argued bad practice of presenting tweets on news shows as well thought through and relevant opinions.

Why would they be irrelevant? It is opinion that people think. It migh be wrong, but they still vote on that, choose schools on that, make decisions and judgements about real life people around them etc.

"People are clamouring for more of X in Y" and then they show three tweets.

When really maybe nobody cares. Or maybe they care in the other direction entirely.

Secondly, even if they're real, how do you know that they're representative of anything? Twitter is global. US politics, for example, could be followed by Afghan kids. Why would US news care about likes from people half a world away?

Thirdly, there's a lot of dumb people around. There's several reasons old media is tightly curated, and not all of them are related to making money or to censorship. A good chunk of it is to not show (just) garbage.

Huge chunk of "old media" is garbage too, just with little bit better grammar. One thing that curation of old media was bubble too. It made people convinced that "nobody think that" while quite a lot of people actually think that. I don't mean outright censorship here, but the range of arguments and opinions being expressed was much smaller.

To some extend, I understand how ideologies can be dangerous and how their promotion in media threatens us. But you don't seem to object on the "this person is promoting ideology that leads to less freedom" grounds. You seem to object on the "these people should not matter" grounds.

Lastly, it US cared more about what Afghan kids like, US would be less cool about killing them and about destabilizing whole regions of world.

You can still get that while citing twitter, but you can also get those 1:1000 opinions that were impossible to find before, and make them look unreasonably common.

Mother said "if you can't say something nice don't say anything" maybe we need to move to "if you can't say things that are novel and well found then leave it be"?