I resigned from Twitter

Re:I resigned from Twitter by renewiltord on Monday November 29, 2021 @11:50AM (#29382018)

Twitter is only like that if one consumes that content. Like, if one only ever follows John Carmack and Gwern, that won't be the experience. Saying Twitter is mean-spirited is essentially the same as saying that no matter where one goes one smells shit. Everyone who feels that way should check the bottom of their shoe.

I suggest Matthew 7:5 for them.

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Re:I resigned from Twitter by duxup on Monday November 29, 2021 @12:05PM (#29382216)

It's just too much work pruning / hoping you find folks who are sort a single topic accounts for me.

Often they fall off the wagon and get into spats and so on. Too much hassle to constantly add / remove folks to keep a feed that isn't "typical social media feed BS".

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Re:I resigned from Twitter by renewiltord on Monday November 29, 2021 @12:12PM (#29382316)

I have been append-only to my list and it's been great. Only ever had to take Matt Yglesias off my list and that's because he tweets all the time.

The downside (maybe upside) is that I run out of Twitter content pretty fast.

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Re:I resigned from Twitter by wutbrodo on Monday November 29, 2021 @12:11PM (#29382288)

Fwiw, this isn't my experience. My following list is remarkably stable, and I've only had to prune people "falling of the wagon" once or twice. It's also not much work: you see their tweet, remember that they've done thus more than once recently, and click unfollow.

The main cost is that this isn't conducive to a very large following list, but perhaps that's a good thing.

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Re:I resigned from Twitter by duxup on Monday November 29, 2021 @01:00PM (#29382917)

I think I reached that point but then the list was like ... 3 stable accounts.

At that point I just didn't find it worth it even visiting. Finding more didn't seem like something I wanted to do.

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Re:I resigned from Twitter by wutbrodo on Monday November 29, 2021 @07:25PM (#29387222)

Yea, that is pretty low. I stabilized at a couple dozen. I run out of tweets on days when I'm being particularly idle, but that doesn't seem like a bad thing.

I also do get a trickle of new accounts. I recognize a name after appreciating their threads a few times, and then click through to their profile and read a bit to increase my sample size. If it turns out I got a skewed sample, I unfollow them using the same process I described above.

This process really feels like almost no work, and I've gotten enormous benefits from it. Most concretely, it's been trivial to frontrun traditional media and public health recommendations by several months during the entirety of the pandemic. I can pretty much credit my Twitter feed with myself and my extended family getting through the pandemic much more safely and healthily (incl mental health) than we likely would otherwise have.

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