My unusual Twitter usage
by Volker Weber
I am not a standard Twitter user. I follow only a few dozen accounts and I don't care at all how many people follow me. I hardly ever used any third party apps. My goto app is the web app that I install as a Chromium app on all my machines. On iOS I use both the Twitter and the twttr app, which is a testbed for Twitter.
Once in a while, Twitter tries something. This week it messed with my feed, showing me "best tweets" first instead of my usual reverse chronological feed. I could not figure out how to revert this behaviour; no - I do not have the star icon. But then I found the solution: do not use it. Let the A/B test fail spectacularly. I stopped using the web app all together and installed the Tweeten app on Windows 10. And just like that, a few days later, my normal feed is back.
Here are a few things I do very differently:
- Old tweets get deleted after seven days, at the latest, unless I like them.
- I delete tweets that bring in too many strangers, like one that got 300k impressions.
- When I subscribe to an account, I always disable their retweets.
- I ignore replies from pseudonymous accounts.
- I never get angry on Twitter. I get even: mute or block.
- I mute reply guys. The list contains a few hundred accounts.
- I block every single account that pushes a "sponsored tweet" into my feed. Currently there are more than 20,000 accounts in that block list.
- I filter "Trump" and "AfD".
- I block Nazis.
Comments
And when you tweet about an interesting web page, I don‘t retweet your tweet, but copy the URL into my own tweet to not have a broken retweet when you delete your tweet. :-)
Nobody reads old tweets, unless he want to mess with you.
I deleted my twitter account. Less work :-)
There is always an investment and a return. In my case, I get more out if it than I put in. Purging old messages is an automated process.
how do you prevent the process to delete the tweets you want to keep?
I like my own tweet.
