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Ask HN: How do you browse Twitter?

9 points by ponyous ↗ HN
I never fully understood how to use Twitter, but I have been trying to use it a bit more lately... But the whole experience is confusing.

How I do it:

I search for hashtag, then I am presented with top tweets, which are mostly tweets by established companies/pages. But I don't really want to see those so I head to Live section, because I want to see tweets by actual People. In Live section I usually have to mute some bots to get to actual content. (And Mute doesn't really work as it should unfortunately)

I do not use twitter to keep in touch with real-life acquaintances, because I cannot filter my feed easily. Yeah I know I can use lists, but I don't really want to go over all the people I follow and put them into a designated list... (I learned about lists way too late to use it effectively in my opinion.) Maybe Twitter needs some AI to curate lists for you?

I want to understand how you people use Twitter and how you benefit from it.

10 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 35.3 ms ] thread
DrNuke
Just follow professional players from your domain and interact with them professionally, retwitting / endorsing their most relevant tweets for your own narrative. Sometimes, tweet something yourself in the same mood. Don't follow more than 50-60 profiles and act only at the busiest time of your network's Twitter day, say 4-5pm. Use it once or twice a day more to scroll the tweets from your network, say late in the morning and before shutting your connection down.
sjs382
I follow about 200 people, across a few different interests (mostly real friends, developers, basketball/football/hockey writers and music/tv/culture critics).

A few times per day (using an Android client), I skim through my feed rather quickly, stopping to read a few interesting tweets/conversations. Sometimes I reply to messages directed at me. Sometimes I reply to others. Often, I retweet things I find interesting and/or add a link to Pocket to read later.

akg_67
Twitter baffles me too, it primarily appears to me as a marketing channel. I prefer FB (personal) and LNKD (professional) over TWTR and G+.

Majority of tweeters I follow seem to share links only. I figure 140 character limit is not conducive to having meaningful conversations. Twitter app and site is not suitable for reviewing links.

Recently, I discovered shared links in Safari browser that seem to work better in tweet reading as it shows the pages linked in tweets too. I just quickly browse through the tweets in Safari shared links sidebar and read the linked articles that seem interesting.

eecks
I don't. Twitter is crap
tmaly
my problem is slightly different. I would like to connect with potential users of my food site. I constantly have people following me, but when I try to private message them, they never respond. It makes me think they are bots of some sort.
monroepe
I pretty much follow news sites and comedians. I ignore the news links mostly and laugh at some (but not all) of the comedians' jokes. I am generally on for less than 45 seconds.
s9w
The Twitter site itself can be somewhat non-ideal for heavy use. The big fonts, lots of whitespace and non-chronological ordering make reading everything a chore.

You can use TweetDeck, which uses the Twitter login so you don't need another account. It's slightly better, but I still miss things like filtering.

Ideally I would like to use the API for a self-made solution, but the API troubles of the past make that tricky. You can use RSS feeds though and pipe that in some RSS reader or something else if you like that.

ponyous
I didn't know about TweetDeck at all. It looks a lot more useful than original Twitter. Thanks!
ducuboy
I'm using http://svven.com

It discovers the people that tweet same links as I do, and gives me what else they tweet.

Disclaimer: I built it.