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.
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.