Thoughts On Twitter
I hate stream-of-consciousness tweets - that’s what journals are for! at the same time, I don’t hate when people share their thoughts, half-baked though they may be. it’s just that twitters structure promotes the banalest tweets. people use it as an insta stories substitute.
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So much of discourse on twitter feels asinine.
- it’s unfiltered, and that’s the point — Facebook / instagram are extremely filtered, people post instagram stories only when they want to show something off — twitter is for simple conversation and connection, and conversations can be about very asinine topics
- a lot of the comments on reddit are also very asinine, but they are organized around the concept of posts. Posts have two purposes — they ground the conversation on a specific topic, and they make it so you can just scroll past the post if you think the post is kinda stupid.
- For twitter it’s not like that — the posts themselves are the only things that you care about, so if you keep on getting irrelevant posts, you feel like you’re just wasting your time. There’s also no great way to only see tweets about a certain topic (as far as I can tell), and there’s also no way to filter out asinine, dumb tweets (rather than relying on their algorithm, which I’m not sure what I want to do). On reddit, posts are moderated, which filters out low-quality content. There’s no such way of doing so on twitter, rather than just relying on the algorithm to filter out stuff for you.
As a counterpoint, that sort of feels like the point of Twitter?
can't believe I managed to significantly elevate my material conditions, find a fantastic group of close friends, lose weight, meet my husband, and overall position myself better than my parents did at my age...mainly by incessantly posting online about my internal state
— 🐇🌷bosco🌷🐇 (@selentelechia) April 13, 2021can’t believe I managed to significantly elevate my material conditions, find a fantastic group of close friends, lose weight, meet my husband, and overall position myself better than my parents did at my age…mainly by incessantly posting online about my internal state
It feels weird for me to throw random undigested thoughts out there. I like sitting on thoughts, digesting them, and making sure that they’re well thought out before posting them. A lot of people on Twitter don’t do that.
- Counterpoint — a lot of people on Twitter do. You can just ignore the people who don’t.
If you think of twitter as a place to interact with friends, and you’re getting a bunch of information from interesting friends, then your timeline will never be boring! This is what 202208262111 is saying.
what Pranav ranjit uses Facebook as is basically the point of Twitter. the only difference is that he has Facebook friends that are willing to engage with him in that way, and I don’t. this raises a couple of points:
- are none of my Facebook friends interesting?
- I think it’s more that i haven’t talked with any of them in the kind of casual way online that Twitter dictates.
- people use different social media platforms for different things. you see a totally different side in people depending on the format they they’re communicating in (to an extent).
- are none of my Facebook friends interesting?
uid: 202207101701 tags: #blog-ideas #thoughts