I absolutely hate this sort of thing. You've participated in dozens & dozens of conversations, had all sorts of interactions. And now when people go back to reflect, on their lives, on what happened, on conversations they had... they'll find a big black hole. A vanishing point where ulucs once was there but has deleted himself.
It feels anti-civil to me, to put yourself in public, to participate in public activity, then to mask & cloak & hide all your activity after the fact. While platforms allow this, I think the civic world has an obligation to prevent you from doing this.
If you want to be non-interactable on the medium after time, I'd be ok with that. We can make affordances. But burning all the books is a bad thing. You are too important, too interesting, your contact with the world too notable to let you continually incinerate your online self.
"Lately I’ve been using more and more threads to connect tweets over time — this has been proven to be really great, as it immediately gives people context, they can read more"
I really dislike that this (aka a tweetstorm) is becoming more and more popular. If you have something to say that has to span 2 or 3 tweets, or if you have a follow-up to your original tweet that's fine... But if you're writing 5+ tweets in a thread for anything other than live commentary, I really wish you'd just tweet a link to a blog post instead.
The tweetstorm UX is terrible for readers, and leaves authors open to a single tweet being quoted / embedded out of context.
People don't read blogs but they read tweetstorms. Tweetstorms remain on the platform and can be linked separately. As soon as you have an external link, most people aren't gonna click on it.
That you're using the term "tweetstorm" indicates to me you haven't been using Twitter for some time (5+ years) so if that's the case you should know that the UI for threads has improved dramatically, both in the authoring and reading contexts.
I was unaware that the term had been retired, as I still see it used in mainstream media pretty frequently - I've read it as recently as this morning [0]. Perhaps I stumble upon these threads sometimes when they're still being authored, but my experience has been:
-> See a tweet in my primary twitter feed
-> Click "Show this thread"
-> Now I'm in the middle of a thread, probably at the most liked tweet
-> Scroll up to the top
-> Read through each tweet scrolling down, with the author's profile picture, display name and twitter handle repeated every 100-280 characters.
-> At the bottom, if there are new tweets I usually resort to clicking on the tweet itself to load new replies, even if they're a continuation of the thread by the same author.
Not a great UX for me. Given that most of these threads end with a commenter invoking a bot like threadreader to "unroll" the thread and post it to another website, I'm certainly not alone in this.
I personally would way rather people share in a place where others can pop in & comment, start their own mini-threads amid the existing conversation. I'd rather have pieces of the thread be re-shareable (retweetable). I'd rather see the work evolve over time than come off as one giant artifact.
I also like this pattern of threads running over time because it resurfaces ideas. This makes these threads a great implementation of Gwern's Spaced Repetition[1], whereas I may skim your blog post once but I will not see it again, in all probability.
This complaint that "you should blog" is widely loudly echoed again and again, and frankly I don't understand it. I do think it is good to recollect, to recap, after the threads have been long tread, as I think it's good for findability long term and I think it helps us as authors & to generate prestige. But blog posts are tragically woefully un-interactive, are an ancient, unevolving medium alike carving things into stone. It's not effective, it's not interesting, & it lacks so many neat & powerful capabilities that we could do so much better on. I for one thing the blogs (have a niche but) are highly overrated. Rarely do the blog-post desiring people go into why they want blog posts, why they dislike twitter. In this case, the only specific thing mentioned is a tweet being quoted/embedded out of context, as a strike against threaded conversations, which, I for one, think is radically massively outstripped by how powerful & capable it is that we can quote/embed pieces of the convo.
This appears to be tips for engaging in "influencing"
For the rest of us there are ways to get the best from twitter.
The "home" screen is where they insist on showing you random shit, trends and vitriol. There are setting you can flip to turn these off, however I can't remember them.
This is where lists come in
They only work[1] if you unfollow everyone but a handful of close contacts, or people who don't "like", "had got a reply" or retweets stuff that annoys you.
once you have a small "clean" set of contacts, you feel like you're missing out, this is where lists come in.
You can now setup a bunch of lists for various interests that you have. List timelines don't have any bells and whistles, they are almost linear time, and have none of the "x has received a reply" shit on the home timeline. It also allows you to partition your timeline by your mood. So if you're not in the mood for politics, don't look at the politics tab.
If you set twitter feed to "the latest tweets as they happen" (as opposed to "show top tweets first"), you don't get the "so-and-so liked this tweet" etc in the main feed. Combine that with turning off retweets for people if they're retweeting annoying garbage and you don't have to mess around with lists.
On the desktop home screen (https://twitter.com/home), look immediately to the upper right of where you'd compose a new tweet. There's a small icon with three twinkling stars. Click it. You'll see two options: "Latest tweets" (pre-2019 behavior) and "Top tweets" (2019+ default).
Change it to "Latest tweets."
The change will last as long as your session does. For whatever reason, it will revert to "Top tweets" every time your browser's session expires. I assume Twitter does that to nudge people to experience the new feed ordering, but I think silently reverting it probably just baffles and/or frustrates them.
Thanks! You'd think that would be in preferences somewhere instead of hidden right in front of me. Hopefully, this will allow me to start using Twitter again.
Pay close attention to some of the provisos here. He recommends using a photo of your face as your avatar. In the next section, he talks about keeping DMs open and adds "if you are a cis white male" you are probably fine.
He seems to think this detail is irrelevant for choosing an avatar. It's not even mentioned in the section on avatars.
I'm a woman. A few months back I decided to not use my face for my avatar anywhere on the internet.
So if you aren't a cis white male, let me suggest you take all of his advice with a grain of salt. It may be of zero use to you.
At this point I wouldn't recommend anyone expose their face or true identity to the internet. There was a time idealistic people thought that removing anonymity from the internet would somehow make it more civilized, but bad actors (e.g. most people using the internet regularly, it seems) have proven the lack of anonymity just makes it easy for people to find new and inventive ways to harass and insult you. For all the non-cis non-white non-males out there, people don't even need an excuse to attack you anymore beyond your non-cis, non-white, non-maleness.
The blog author seems to grasp tentatively toward recognizing their own privilege, but fails to mention that they have 31,000 twitter followers and, having started their own business, significant adoration from the Twitter tech crowd. I can imagine Twitter seems like a great place to be when you've been elevated by the community. Everyone looks up to you, everyone thinks what you have to say is important. Life is a lot different on the internet for people who don't have that same following. I don't think trying to curate an online persona and manage a Twitter account where you reply to everyone is a valuable use of your time when you're still trying to find a way to consistently feed yourself.
At this point I wouldn't recommend anyone expose their face or true identity to the internet.
I don't agree with that. I can't get paid if I don't use my real name and real identity online. I don't make enough money, but the money I do make helps me survive.
Women and other marginalized people are routinely told things like "On the internet, no one knows you are a dog if you don't tell them" as a way of saying "If it is a problem to admit you are a woman, don't admit it" and they fail to see how huge a problem that is.
For many marginalized people, the internet is a godsend. People who are LGBTQ are often vocal in certain online spaces precisely because they can't be so vocal in person.
But we do need to make clear that what works online if you aren't one of the privileged few may be very different from what works online if you are one of the privileged few and it's a bit frustrating that this post -- written by someone who is gay -- does such a poor job of highlighting that fact.
I know this sounds flippant in a world where “SWATing” exists, but as a non-several-categories person my reflex reaction to “people don’t even need an excuse to attack you any more” is increasingly “so what?”.
The overlap between “people who insult women online for fun” and “people whose opinions I value” is pretty small, after all. It’s their loss, not mine :)
I'm sort of a fool who tries to be genuine and tries to assume good faith and so forth and I pretty frequently feel burned. Being "interesting" on the internet seems to be kind of like that Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.
> people don't even need an excuse to attack you anymore beyond your non-cis, non-white, non-maleness.
I'm a privileged cis white male, but I've also been doxxed and harassed online (got cancelled basically). Can we not make this conversation even more divisive by suggesting it has anything to do with these immutable characteristics, please? The internet can be a shitty place for anyone.
'teen' isn't a preposition (er, are they prepositions.. I mean 'prefixes' like 'pre', 'post', 'super', 'intra', 'inter', 'ultra', 'non', 'un', 'trans', 'cis', ... - modifier perhaps? I mean that 'teen' isn't altering 'ager' that otherwise stands alone.) - and it's not a term I'd use personally anyway, but it doesn't annoy me for that reason.
The better example would be 'trans' of course, but yes it bugs me too. It's just in more common usage I suppose.
The only ones of those that mean anything to me alone are 'bike', 'homo', and 'telly'. The latter two are abhorrent; I wouldn't use them either. 'Bike' I might rarely say, but isn't an example of this anyway. ('bi' is, and I'm aware that's used - with different meaning to 'bike' of course' - but I'd make the same comment as for 'trans'.)
fyi, "cis" generally means "your gender identity = the gender you were assigned at birth", as opposed to being trans. it's possible to be gay + trans, or gay + cis, etc, but being gay doesn't describe anything about cis vs trans in-and-of-itself.
(thank you for the post, by the way! i thought there were some genuinely neat little tips in there.)
"cis white male" is a phrase quoted directly from your piece. I double-checked before posting to make sure I got it right. And double-checked again before replying here.
Seems like the author thinks that protecting yourself is exclusive to non-cis, non-white, non-male folks. I guess they've had a relatively rosy experience on Twitter thus far, which is a tad mind boggling!
Some of this is backed by studies I've read, and some of it is my own anecdotal experiences, so take it for what you will:
Sharing your identity on the internet is dangerous. Deliberate bad actors aside, there is a whole world of people out there with varying life experiences and tribal knowledge that they use to perceive the exact same world you perceive when you consume online content in a potentially different light than you do. Though you're looking at the same thing, because of the lens of your life experiences, two things that are exactly the same can be perceived two different ways by two different observers. Sometimes this does something innocuous like making someone engage in healthy debate with someone they otherwise wouldn't. In other cases it results in a lot of assumptions that the observer may make both directly and indirectly about you and what you said.
When you're out and about in the real world what stops an observer from making the very same assumptions that lead them to an outcome online is the lack of notion that they know you. An online profile, and things like pictures, establish in peoples minds the notion that they know you somehow (whether they'd like to admit it or not, their actions are influenced by this phenomenon). The author kind of touches on this phenomenon when they mention that profile picture changes can result in decreased engagement, but some studies have pointed out that it can indicate that your followers already have an unhealthy relationship with you and feel some autonomy over your life choices or at the very least your digital presence.
From here you're one tweet away from being someones virtual punching bag, subject of a mob, etc... all of these things are abusive but doubly so if someone can determine real world information about you and carry that poor outcome from the digital landscape to the real world landscape. My point is that all people, on any given day, are capable of abusive behavior and unfortunately it is still on you to protect yourself from them, whether they have a history with abuse or if they just had a bad day and you were the thousandth bee sting they've felt that day.
While insulating yourself from abuse online is doubly important for marginalized groups that suffer from a larger pool of deliberate bad actors than cisgender, white men we shouldn't ignore the fact that anonymity, and the concept of protecting yourself, is useful to everyone.
The solution to this is really simple: Use multiple accounts. You can even have multiple "real self" accounts to help bucket different aspects of yourself that you want separate. And of course, you'll need at least one anon account that is strictly separate from all the other accounts.
I can see that. I use PGP in a very similar manner, which I think is actually a principle of PGP. That said, these days I stay ten feet away from Twitter and other social media. I'm even a bit cautious about what I share with people who heavily use social media.
Another related topic (which I thought this post was going to talk about): weeding who you follow.
You can form strange attachments to people you follow, similar to people you may listen to on the radio/podcasts or watch on TV. Not that they're really "friends" per se, but you feel like you know them even though you've never talked to them.
Sometimes those people change, and the tone and content of what they tweet becomes less enjoyable. The thought of unfollowing them can be strange, but the day after you do you'll realize you don't miss them at all.
Muting key words is a fantastic way to weed your Twitter garden. I mute many politician names and organizations (and variations like possessives and plurals) and annoying memes of the week. Even then, a surprising amount of related tweets get through (because the muted word is in a linked news article or attached image, not the Tweet text).
Unfortunately, the mute list has a hard coded limit of only 200 words. I'm always hitting that max and needing to retire old words, which is a hassle.
Also, Twitter's own ads are not affected by the mute list. I mute words related to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, yet I still get ads that contain those exact words.
I created twitter about a month ago with the intention of using it like a multi-purpose RSS feed and reader. I decided to only tweet about updates and new content from my side. And then to find others that work in areas I care about and follow them. Trouble is - nobody else seems to use twitter like that. They post memes, retweet things, share their political opinions, ask questions, get into discussions, and I see all of that when I follow them. It's just too noisy, currently haven't deleted it but heavily considering the option.
I created a twitter account, put on a nice profile picture and linked to my portfolio in my bio, set the tweets to protected, and then never logged in again. Now my name is reserved and people can find the stuff that actually matters if they come across it. Twitter is toxic and gives me depression. I'm much happier off not using it.
Either you're a celeb, or have an old account so you already have a lot of curated connections.
If you join now, you fall into a pit of dispair. No one or very few follow you, so why bother writing anything there. The timeline will also either be empty or full of garbage until you've fine tuned it.
While we're talking about Twitter, here's the slightly unconventional way I use it: A few months ago I wrote a little tool to query and delete tweets and likes older than a specified amount of days from my account[1]. I deleted my account with ~14k tweets (because the tool couldn't handle that) and now I trim my new account every few weeks. I barely use the timeline anymore but I do have some mutual followers that I check in on every once in a while which is kinda relaxing.
Fun fact: deleting and re-creating your account is the recommended way to bulk-delete all of your tweets in the Twitter manual[2].
54 comments
[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadIt feels anti-civil to me, to put yourself in public, to participate in public activity, then to mask & cloak & hide all your activity after the fact. While platforms allow this, I think the civic world has an obligation to prevent you from doing this.
If you want to be non-interactable on the medium after time, I'd be ok with that. We can make affordances. But burning all the books is a bad thing. You are too important, too interesting, your contact with the world too notable to let you continually incinerate your online self.
I really dislike that this (aka a tweetstorm) is becoming more and more popular. If you have something to say that has to span 2 or 3 tweets, or if you have a follow-up to your original tweet that's fine... But if you're writing 5+ tweets in a thread for anything other than live commentary, I really wish you'd just tweet a link to a blog post instead.
The tweetstorm UX is terrible for readers, and leaves authors open to a single tweet being quoted / embedded out of context.
-> See a tweet in my primary twitter feed
-> Click "Show this thread"
-> Now I'm in the middle of a thread, probably at the most liked tweet
-> Scroll up to the top
-> Read through each tweet scrolling down, with the author's profile picture, display name and twitter handle repeated every 100-280 characters.
-> At the bottom, if there are new tweets I usually resort to clicking on the tweet itself to load new replies, even if they're a continuation of the thread by the same author.
Not a great UX for me. Given that most of these threads end with a commenter invoking a bot like threadreader to "unroll" the thread and post it to another website, I'm certainly not alone in this.
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/21/daily-202...
I personally would way rather people share in a place where others can pop in & comment, start their own mini-threads amid the existing conversation. I'd rather have pieces of the thread be re-shareable (retweetable). I'd rather see the work evolve over time than come off as one giant artifact.
I also like this pattern of threads running over time because it resurfaces ideas. This makes these threads a great implementation of Gwern's Spaced Repetition[1], whereas I may skim your blog post once but I will not see it again, in all probability.
This complaint that "you should blog" is widely loudly echoed again and again, and frankly I don't understand it. I do think it is good to recollect, to recap, after the threads have been long tread, as I think it's good for findability long term and I think it helps us as authors & to generate prestige. But blog posts are tragically woefully un-interactive, are an ancient, unevolving medium alike carving things into stone. It's not effective, it's not interesting, & it lacks so many neat & powerful capabilities that we could do so much better on. I for one thing the blogs (have a niche but) are highly overrated. Rarely do the blog-post desiring people go into why they want blog posts, why they dislike twitter. In this case, the only specific thing mentioned is a tweet being quoted/embedded out of context, as a strike against threaded conversations, which, I for one, think is radically massively outstripped by how powerful & capable it is that we can quote/embed pieces of the convo.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24857437
For the rest of us there are ways to get the best from twitter.
The "home" screen is where they insist on showing you random shit, trends and vitriol. There are setting you can flip to turn these off, however I can't remember them.
This is where lists come in
They only work[1] if you unfollow everyone but a handful of close contacts, or people who don't "like", "had got a reply" or retweets stuff that annoys you.
once you have a small "clean" set of contacts, you feel like you're missing out, this is where lists come in.
You can now setup a bunch of lists for various interests that you have. List timelines don't have any bells and whistles, they are almost linear time, and have none of the "x has received a reply" shit on the home timeline. It also allows you to partition your timeline by your mood. So if you're not in the mood for politics, don't look at the politics tab.
[1] it works for me
Change it to "Latest tweets."
The change will last as long as your session does. For whatever reason, it will revert to "Top tweets" every time your browser's session expires. I assume Twitter does that to nudge people to experience the new feed ordering, but I think silently reverting it probably just baffles and/or frustrates them.
He seems to think this detail is irrelevant for choosing an avatar. It's not even mentioned in the section on avatars.
I'm a woman. A few months back I decided to not use my face for my avatar anywhere on the internet.
So if you aren't a cis white male, let me suggest you take all of his advice with a grain of salt. It may be of zero use to you.
The blog author seems to grasp tentatively toward recognizing their own privilege, but fails to mention that they have 31,000 twitter followers and, having started their own business, significant adoration from the Twitter tech crowd. I can imagine Twitter seems like a great place to be when you've been elevated by the community. Everyone looks up to you, everyone thinks what you have to say is important. Life is a lot different on the internet for people who don't have that same following. I don't think trying to curate an online persona and manage a Twitter account where you reply to everyone is a valuable use of your time when you're still trying to find a way to consistently feed yourself.
I don't agree with that. I can't get paid if I don't use my real name and real identity online. I don't make enough money, but the money I do make helps me survive.
Women and other marginalized people are routinely told things like "On the internet, no one knows you are a dog if you don't tell them" as a way of saying "If it is a problem to admit you are a woman, don't admit it" and they fail to see how huge a problem that is.
For many marginalized people, the internet is a godsend. People who are LGBTQ are often vocal in certain online spaces precisely because they can't be so vocal in person.
But we do need to make clear that what works online if you aren't one of the privileged few may be very different from what works online if you are one of the privileged few and it's a bit frustrating that this post -- written by someone who is gay -- does such a poor job of highlighting that fact.
The overlap between “people who insult women online for fun” and “people whose opinions I value” is pretty small, after all. It’s their loss, not mine :)
As a result, I just don't say much of anything interesting on the internet.
I'm a privileged cis white male, but I've also been doxxed and harassed online (got cancelled basically). Can we not make this conversation even more divisive by suggesting it has anything to do with these immutable characteristics, please? The internet can be a shitty place for anyone.
'cis' is such a weird/annoying term; it's like saying 'pre' instead of 'prepubescent'.
(Sorry, I know that's tangential to your point, but where else will I make grammatical complaints about the discourse of social issues than HN?)
The better example would be 'trans' of course, but yes it bugs me too. It's just in more common usage I suppose.
some which immediately come to mind: 'mono'/'stereo', 'poly', 'bike', 'homo', 'macro', 'telly'
'Stereo' is in very common use. I've seen 'Poly' used by Polynesians and the polyamorous community, for example - when the context is clear.
But: I agree that women have it even harder - I can only share my own experience though, in the hope it’s interesting to some folks.
(thank you for the post, by the way! i thought there were some genuinely neat little tips in there.)
Some of this is backed by studies I've read, and some of it is my own anecdotal experiences, so take it for what you will:
Sharing your identity on the internet is dangerous. Deliberate bad actors aside, there is a whole world of people out there with varying life experiences and tribal knowledge that they use to perceive the exact same world you perceive when you consume online content in a potentially different light than you do. Though you're looking at the same thing, because of the lens of your life experiences, two things that are exactly the same can be perceived two different ways by two different observers. Sometimes this does something innocuous like making someone engage in healthy debate with someone they otherwise wouldn't. In other cases it results in a lot of assumptions that the observer may make both directly and indirectly about you and what you said.
When you're out and about in the real world what stops an observer from making the very same assumptions that lead them to an outcome online is the lack of notion that they know you. An online profile, and things like pictures, establish in peoples minds the notion that they know you somehow (whether they'd like to admit it or not, their actions are influenced by this phenomenon). The author kind of touches on this phenomenon when they mention that profile picture changes can result in decreased engagement, but some studies have pointed out that it can indicate that your followers already have an unhealthy relationship with you and feel some autonomy over your life choices or at the very least your digital presence.
From here you're one tweet away from being someones virtual punching bag, subject of a mob, etc... all of these things are abusive but doubly so if someone can determine real world information about you and carry that poor outcome from the digital landscape to the real world landscape. My point is that all people, on any given day, are capable of abusive behavior and unfortunately it is still on you to protect yourself from them, whether they have a history with abuse or if they just had a bad day and you were the thousandth bee sting they've felt that day.
While insulating yourself from abuse online is doubly important for marginalized groups that suffer from a larger pool of deliberate bad actors than cisgender, white men we shouldn't ignore the fact that anonymity, and the concept of protecting yourself, is useful to everyone.
You can form strange attachments to people you follow, similar to people you may listen to on the radio/podcasts or watch on TV. Not that they're really "friends" per se, but you feel like you know them even though you've never talked to them.
Sometimes those people change, and the tone and content of what they tweet becomes less enjoyable. The thought of unfollowing them can be strange, but the day after you do you'll realize you don't miss them at all.
Unfortunately, the mute list has a hard coded limit of only 200 words. I'm always hitting that max and needing to retire old words, which is a hassle.
Also, Twitter's own ads are not affected by the mute list. I mute words related to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, yet I still get ads that contain those exact words.
Muting instructions:
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-m...
But the toxicity of discourse across Twitter, particularly on anything approaching political, was too much to handle and I deleted my account.
Has anyone else had this sort of experience?
If you join now, you fall into a pit of dispair. No one or very few follow you, so why bother writing anything there. The timeline will also either be empty or full of garbage until you've fine tuned it.
Fun fact: deleting and re-creating your account is the recommended way to bulk-delete all of your tweets in the Twitter manual[2].
[1] https://github.com/T0astBread/untweet [2] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/delete-tweets