Ask HN: How do you use Twitter?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6744832

by ziko • 13 years ago

18 42 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Do you

a) read all of your timeline tweets (i.e. scroll back for tweets you missed overnight)

b) don't care what you missed and start reading from present time on?

frostmatthew• 13 years ago

Typically I'll scroll back to read all tweets since the last time I checked, but I will rarely go back more than 8 or 10 hours.

jackgolding• 13 years ago

b - information saturation is huge when you follow 100+ people in the same topic

helloanand• 13 years ago

I typically scroll back to catch up with overnight tweets unless I have missed a few days worth either due to travel or busy work schedule. I don't follow just to reciprocate and am very ruthless unfollow people who are noisemakers.

joshowens2• 13 years ago

Pretty much sums up what I do.

joshowens2• 13 years ago

I have also been trying to curate lists and I use tweetbot to easily switch between them. I find it is a great way to catch up on one community segment or another.

I wish twitter made list building easier.

Brajeshwar• 13 years ago

Don't care catching up. Rapidly reply to tweets if it makes sense while reading the timeline at that time. Usually tweet via buffer and OS X's Notification. Checks twitter mostly while traveling, waiting before a meeting, etc.

netman214• 13 years ago

I follow 30,000 accounts on Twitter. There is no way that anything relevant/interesting shows up on my "feed". I always use the "@Connect" filter so I do not miss any Tweets directed at me. I search on key words or hashtags to follow interesting discussions and get news. I keep a separate tab open to @glenngreenwald since everything he Tweets is interesting.

mrThe• 13 years ago

I follow 30,000 accounts on Twitter

oh God why?

netman214• 13 years ago

I use Twitter as a broadcast medium. People follow me for news and very short form analysis. 80% of the hits to my blog and column come from Twitter. Of course I have a lot of followers and it is rude not to follow back.

tehwebguy• 13 years ago

That is a lot to follow. Do you run a promotional account?

netman214• 13 years ago

In a sense. I promote me. I actually maintain two Twitter accounts, one to broadcast industry news and my speaking gigs, the other on the topic of my first book. Both accounts have over 30K followers with a lot of overlap.

thibaut_barrere• 13 years ago

+ c) I search for specific keywords when investigating product ideas and pain points

idoescompooters• 13 years ago

Newsfeed.

danso2• 13 years ago

I use it purely to Tweet and to network...either to respond to people or to just tweet what I've read. I almost never read my timeline as I follow just about anyone who follows me, and anyone who is either in New York, a journalist, or a programmer, though I don't follow too many celebrities.

I don't understand people who are put off by the noise. Just don't read your timeline. Also, it's not much work to manage...whenever I read an interesting article, I just tweet the headline and link...Literally a 10 second action that sometimes can catch a lot of attention and help you find other like-minded people,

jlarocco• 13 years ago

If nobody reads it, what's the point?

danso2• 13 years ago

People may not read the Tweet then, but people who look you up later have a good sense of the kind of things you like to read and think about. In a way, it's an even better reflection than if you had kept a blog, because with a blog, your main intent is letting your thoughts be known and read. For me, a Tweet is an effortless snapshot to what I just read.

Neff2• 13 years ago

c) I don't.

The service had a value to me when there was a focus on interaction, but as it transitioned to a news feed/advertisement service it lost any and all use to me.

For news, there are enough sites that all spout off the same reviews and "exclusives". If there is truly breaking news that I need to be made aware of, there are a multitude of channels I can get the information from and all of them will convey the information better than a 140 character tweet could.

pearjuice• 13 years ago

d) Never used Twitter

As soon as I realized that sometimes there is news worthy stuff posted there, there will always be reporters crawling through the noise to find those and put the content on their respective outlets. What's the point of me subscribing to boat loads of literal shit ("at toilet, pls rt") to find a pearl now and then, when I can use traditional media to get to the pearls immediately? Sure, I might not get the pearls instantly, but I think that sacrifice is totally worth it when I occasionally read through some public Twitter feed.

Neff2• 13 years ago

The larger issue is that Twitter has pushed news services to focus on being first over being correct. It seems like reporters are falling over themselves to be the first to break a story, journalistic integrity be damned.

bbayer• 13 years ago

I have Twitter installed on my phone but I check the tweets once a week.I realized I don't really care what people are doing, what they are eating now, what they are watching on TV. Flipboard or similar service is always enough for me to gather important information from rest of the world.

jfb• 13 years ago

Yeah, me neither. The signal-to-noise ratio is just way too low, and I don't need another medium to monitor.

kylec• 13 years ago

I'm surprised this isn't a poll.

Anyway, my answer is "a", I use a client, Tweetbot, that syncs my read position across all my devices. When I wake up in the morning it shows me the last tweets I read the previous night. I then read them chronologically until I'm caught up.

I detailed that process because I feel that there's an important distinction between what I do and scrolling back for tweets I missed. For me, the process to catch up is the same process I use to read Twitter throughout the day, meaning that I don't have to do anything special when I wake up.

Of course, if I'm away or otherwise have been unable to check Twitter for two or three days, catching up can be a bit difficult and I might just give up and scroll to the top, then scroll down a bit just to see the most recent tweets, but I try to avoid doing that most of the time.

gmays• 13 years ago

Whenever I start a new project I snag the Twitter name for it and link it up to automatically tweet when stuff is posted to the website so I can at least show up. Same with Facebook. I don't think I'd ever use is it as a communication tool, though I might consider it for news if RSS completely died or something.

socialmediaisbs• 13 years ago

B, I'll take one hour a day to go through the timeline on my phone and then the discovery tab.

Kiro• 13 years ago

What are you building?

fumar• 13 years ago

b) I will check it twice or so per day. This is on my personal account. I will retweet or post to it a few times per day.

I like twitter, but I don't love it. I would use twitter often when third party clients were popping up.

I was using app.net for a while, but my friends never took to it. (this is within the first months of its launch) I paid for it, and liked it, but it lacked the network effect.

1337biz• 13 years ago

Twitter is for me pretty much unusable without active list management.

I only check my followers tweets in moments of complete boredom. But there are lists with people whom I want to keep up with (personal friends, key targets who's attention I would like to get).

Of those lists I ready every tweet and by checking it at least twice a day and try actively to engage with the people (responding, re-tweeting, asking, answering, etc). Otherwise the noise ratio is just to large and it feels pretty much just as social as shouting "hello" at random strangers.

antjanus• 13 years ago

I use a ton of twitter lists! I'm probably the only one that does this. If I get REALLY bored, I go through the actual feed. When I check the list, I check the entire timeline. If I check the feed itself, i don't care.

QuasiAlon• 13 years ago

Huh! Cool question. I do both. If I have time to kill (say, a train ride), I go back and read from where I left off. If I know I just need to pass a few minutes (say, waiting in line at the store), I'll just pop in and see the latest. Sometimes I go back and read what specific friends wrote throughout the day.

rickmatt• 13 years ago

I don't think I browse twitter well. I alternate between your two choices, depending on how long since I last checked twitter.

I would like something like 'circles for twitter' so that I could check close friends and family tweets quickly, then kill time with lower priority/higher volume users if I want to.

Leynos2• 13 years ago

Isn't that what lists are for? That's certainly my primary usecase for them.

Leynos2• 13 years ago

I originally did a), but it became impractical one I was following around 300 people. Now I just read the last 10 or 15 minute's worth. I also, however, have a list of people I am reasonably close to whose tweets I try to read to a reasonable level of completeness.

digitalvortex• 13 years ago

connect it to my wordpress blog and it auto updates.

mkhpalm• 13 years ago

I used to do A before I lost interest in twitter.

brownbat• 13 years ago

I barely use Twitter, but have a similar dilemma with RSS.

I use Feedly, which allows me to mark some sources as "must read," so I can read every single item. I then also add a few hundred sites where I just glance at the most recent.

It balances my "keep up on everything from x source" and the "have a steady stream of interesting to fill time" needs pretty well.

madsushi• 13 years ago

I only read Twitter in real time. It's like a pseudo-IRC chatroom for me. When I'm watching sports, I can fire it up and see real-time reactions (from the various sports people and writers that I follow) and have everyone go "WOW LOOK AT THAT SHOT" at the same time. Makes it almost as nice as having a living room full of friends.

nhebb• 13 years ago

But about six months ago, I stopped posting and now I rarely visit. It wasn't a conscious decision. I just got bored with it and started tapering off usage.

mdisraeli• 13 years ago

I'm trying to use twitter more, but I find keeping up to date with it very difficult! This isn't helped by following several distinct groups of people, and only having mobile client access most of the time. What do people recommend using to keep on top of twitter?

radley• 13 years ago

I use desktop Twitter and follow a handful each of professional designers, UX/UI devs, artists, DJs/producers, Android blogs, tech blogs, kaomoji artists, and @HNTweets.

Most don't flood, spam or waste my time. Too much signal to noise, no matter how popular you are, I have to unfollow.

I keep the feed open and look over every few minutes. I catch up on mornings if I'm bored.

Ask HN: How do you use Twitter?

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