It's pretty simple. Each time I see a tweet I dislike, I pick one word from it and add it to my "mute word" list. It's now filled with words like "trump", "liberal", "minister", etc, and now I see interesting technical discussions instead of political trash.
Then 2016 happened and the greater half decided they were really closet political pundits all along. Now I don't read Twitter at all.
Spend some time each month pruning follower bots and unfollow the accounts that were once interesting but monetise themselves.
It's a bit of effort but for niche science/engineering/software stuff it's actually quite useful to see. Especially science/astronomy.
I look at it as a ”legal” drug. Take too much and you are fucked. In moderation and taken with care it's actually quite cathartic.
It kind of replaced RSS for many people, expect it's a centralised tool.
Unfortunately "journalists" use it way too often to make up news out of nothing, gather random photos/videos without fact checking and spread rumors and falsehoods as truth. Something like the Covington Catholic school fiasco heavily relayed by the media, based on a footage where people saw what they wanted to see, would have never happened without the viral aspect of Twitter. The irony is that Twitter ended up banning the person that spread it, but none of the Twitter verified people that called for the murder of school students.
Particularly in machine learning it seems like thousands of papers are published every week, impossible to sort through. I find that the few I see people talking about on Twitter are the most interesting and worthy of attention.
Here's a list I made a while ago of the machine learning people I follow: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/b6dwrd/d_b...
For me and many others it is a place where we can share what we consider beautiful and sacred, what we find compelling and carefully thought. It is an agora shimmering with such things.
Even though much of the good web has retreated to private spaces like email lists and secret slacks, I am in some of those things because someone was able to find me on Twitter.
(And yeah we all need to vent, and have our human bouts of melancholy. But if you use twitter solely to participate in the negative, you are really missing out!)
Journalism has reverted back to the journalism mean which was always biased, propagandizing, shoddy, and appealed to the confirmation biases of the target audiences since the 18th century.
That's not to say there are not excellently written and researched articles produced today, but hey, today anyone can be a journalist.
The government took over all media, they are what's left for us, and this year was the first time that they were able to change the result of local elections.
I would agree that ad-founded (engagement-driven) journalism is a dead-end.
Aspiring journalists will need to find other ways to pay the rent.
https://mobile.twitter.com/TS_SCI_MAJIC12/status/11820084279...
(I.e. this is "just" one social media site, used by a minority of Americans.)
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
> the political tweeting habits of the [22% of the American public](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-...) that uses Twitter
I linked to that link, where you can see in the first graphic that in 2019, 22% of U.S. adults use Twitter. (73% YouTube, 69% Facebook, 37% Instagram).
Being very active in politics is either a career choice or a hobby. And very active in this case means talking about it. It's like knowing about celebrity gossip at this point because that's practically what it is for a lot of this stuff.
> Users 50+ were only 26% of the user base and produced only 28% of tweets, but 73% of political tweets.
By these numbers, users 15-17 are <1% of the user base and produce 0% of political tweets. (And even more dramatically, despite being more than 0% of users, they also produce 0% of tweets.) Even after allowing for rounding, this can't possibly be correct.
"Tweets from users who strongly disapprove of Trump are especially prominent: This group generates 80% of all tweets from U.S. adults and 72% of tweets mentioning national politics."
I didn't realise how one-sided Twitter was, but then, maybe that 'makes sense' in hindsight as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
“... only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.”
This is why “social listening” companies (which often amount to “Twitter listening” companies) present a very warped picture of reality when they try to extrapolate general consumer interests from the content and frequency of posts by a tiny minority of Twitter’s users. I also discussed this a little in “Twitter’s growth conundrum”: https://muckhacker.com/the-twitter-growth-conundrum-8339eda1...
Google+'s low regular-engagement rates (0.16% of all profiles) actually starts to look more reasonable given:
1. Google created G+ profiles for EVERY Android, Gmail, and YouTube user from ~2012 - 2016 (may have been 2015), or about 3 billion accounts in all.
2. The 1% rule.
I'd made that measurement in 2015, Eric Enge of (then) Stone Temple Consulting followed up with a much larger sample but the same basic methodology, to confirm and expand on my findings:
https://blogs.perficientdigital.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-...
When G+ was shutting down, I had the opportunity to look at data concerning its 8-million-plus Communities. The vast majority of those had at best one user. Even in the final months of the site communities were being created and removed (or deleted) at a furious rate -- thousands per day. From November 2018 - January 2019, several hundred net new communities were created.
The most hyperactive communities (and posters) were almost entirely spam. There were numerous of what I considered legitimate and healthy communities, most with anywhere from a handful of members to a few thousand. More than 10k tended to peter off into noise territory quickly, and based on overall engagement, the sweet spot seemed to be somewhere in the 2k - 3k range, if some of my analysis bears out.
Given the 90/9/1 rule, that would mean about 200-300 actual active users, and a dominent core group of 20-30, which seems to be where most online discussions find themselves most "real", for want of a better term.
Quantity-based measures of quality can be exceedingly misleading. And based on the headline of this article alone, the impression that it's Twitter itself that is somehow unusual or remarkable in this story is quite misleading. This is a general trait of any social discussion.
Having said that, twitter is a profoundly destructive force that is overwhelmingly people just preaching and clucking at each other's cleverness. I absolutely revile it as a platform, but I get and appreciate that it provides value for others.
I’ve had a number of friends on both sides of the isle fall into the internet trap of politics, existential dread and dilution. A few to the extent of developing serious mental health problems, even college educated people.
It’s scary to watch this happen to people you know and love. Some might label me, but I enjoy not wasting time following the mainstream media / social media noise.
Many people just spectate, whether it’s TV or social.
There is relatively zero amount of friction for a twitter user to post political content to twitter. The fact that people are not posting political content, is not due to insurmountable friction.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/home.htm
Also, they don’t get paid all that well.
But nevertheless, the content finds its way.
Granted, wishful thinking by said parties is sometimes enough to make it matter. For example a corporation that responds to customer complaints on Twitter faster than the ones that arrive in its customer-service inbox, is making Twitter matter more than it does.
I feel like this wording is disingenuous when the methods state:
> The analysis of Twitter users in this report is based on a nationally representative survey conducted from Nov. 21 to Dec. 17, 2018, among a sample of 2,791 U.S. adults ages 18 years and older who have a Twitter account and agreed to allow researchers to follow and report on that account. This study examines only the subset of respondents (N=2,427)
I guess people act the same online as they do at Thanksgiving dinner.
they don’t mention if they attempted to filter out bots or non-americansposing as Americans
