Recent political events give Twitter a bad rap, but I don’t take its amazing features for granted. I have been a daily active user for some years now, and in this post I share some musings on how to use Twitter in a deliberate, even joyous way.
Yes, the damn thing is more addictive than sugar. By far. But rather than feel like a puppet of Twitter’s algorithms, it is possible to take charge of your feed and feel like your time on the platform is well served.
TLDR - It mostly comes down to who you follow
If you exercise care with this one thing, the magic happens all by itself.
When determining whether I want to follow someone, I look at their last 10 or tweets. Do those Tweets make me happy? Feel awe? Feel more optimistic? Feel the urge to do something? Teach me something strange and wonderful? Reveal a new world? I'll almost certainly follow.
Make your twitter feed your private garden. Twitter done right should feel like being hooked up to an IV drip of insight, serendipity, laughter, and opportunity.
Build an audience, but don’t feel pressured to
If you are new to Twitter, don’t feel like you need to tweet or grow your audience. Some folks are all about the follower count, and sometimes I want to get in on that game too, but mostly I am content to just browse through what I have curated for myself.
If you feel like it, go ahead and share your wit and wisdom, but IMO it is OK to simply use the platform for more modest pleasures - stumbling upon the weird and the wondrous, chuckling at memes, taking a random walk through myriad topics, and feeling the pulse of the world through the unique prism of the people you follow.
But it is also worth building an audience (as far as Twitter is concerned, this is something I changed my mind about only recently).
Among other reasons for it, having an audience can increase your ‘luck surface area’.
But more importantly, growing an audience for your content can be good for your learning. Austin Kleon (“a writer who draws”) makes a nice point about this:
“Best of all, when you share your knowledge and your work with others, you receive an education in return. Author Christopher Hitchens said that the great thing about putting out a book is that “it brings you into contact with people whose opinions you should have canvassed before you ever pressed pen to paper. They write to you. They telephone you. They come to your bookstore events and give you things to read that you should have read already.” He said that having his work out in the world was “a free education that goes on for a lifetime.”
So how does one grow a followership on Twitter? I have seen good advice about this by folks who have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers…and the gist is mainly to put out quality content, and to do it consistently for a few years.
Simple, but not easy.
There are also some paid courses on how to build an audience on Twitter - this one has good reviews.
Keep out the lunatics
Even if you follow only good, thoughtful people, their tweets will sometimes draw responses from idiots, ideologues, haters and demented people. My strategy for dealing with this is the same as in “real life” - if I see a crazy person in my environment, I cross the road, get off the train, exit stage left.
Twitter makes it laughably easy to ignore and avoid the noxious. Use the block and mute features as often as needed.
Your house, your rules.
Other assorted tips
Find your “scenius”
Whatever you care about or are curious about, whether it is palaeontology or Pink Floyd or the physics of “The Expanse”, there are thousands of people who share your interest, and are actively engaging in high quality public conversations on Twitter. And they are sharing insights, links, recommendations, and memes - tons of fun, tons of serendipity.
And maybe being part of a scene will give you a great idea or two - here is Austin Kleon again:
“Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.”
- “Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon
Use lists.
Definition: A List is a curated group of Twitter accounts. You can create your own Lists or follow Lists created by others. Viewing a List timeline will show you a stream of Tweets from only the accounts on that List.
Why use lists? A ‘follow’ may be of marginal interest to you, or perhaps you simply want to keep your follows private. Either way, the list feature is at your service. Other people have already gone to the trouble of curating their follows into lists that are publicly available – e.g. I follow Naval’s “Seekers” list. Look at the many lists that Marc Andreessen has created.
I also found out recently that you can see what Lists other people have put you on. Go to Lists and click the three dots top right.
I think of lists like TV channels – I am not always in the mood for nature programming, but it’s good to know I can go to Discovery if I feel like some sweeping shots of wildebeest crossing the savannah.
Use Readwise for privacy, searchability and posterity
Readwise is one of my favourite apps - it helps you remember what you read. I use it to complement the ‘like’ and ‘bookmark’ features on Twitter. Likes are visible to anyone who visits your Twitter page (or just your followers if you have a protected account). Alternatively, you can bookmark a tweet and these are private. However, neither likes nor bookmarks are searchable - this makes it difficult to retrieve a good tweet at will – or even to remember that you saved a particular tweet.
Readwise fixes this (once you integrate the app with Twitter). When I see a tweet I want to save for posterity, I simply DM it to Readwise (email: add@readwise.io). The app then surfaces these tweets to me, randomly, via daily emails - same as with highlights from books.
Readwise also integrates with several note taking apps, so your saved tweets can automatically be exported to Evernote, Roam, Notion etc. If you care to, you can tag these tweets, e.g. “#investing”, “#bitcoin”, etc., making for a scrapbook of great content that is both structured and searchable.
Consider using Tweetdeck: This tip is for power users – I am trying it out but not sure it will stick. Here is a guide:
In conclusion
I try to use Twitter in a way that invokes the spirit of 17th century English coffee houses:
“In Oxford, locals had begun calling coffee houses “penny universities” because for the cost of a cup of coffee, you could gain access to intellectual discussions and, critically, sober debate. At a time when beer was often a safer drinking option than water, this was no small thing.”
“In his diaries, Samuel Pepys recorded the stimulating conversations he overheard at the coffee houses he frequented. Most coffee houses catered to a specific clientele; the Grecian Coffee House near Fleet Street was a meeting place for Whigs as well as members of the Royal Society like Isaac Newton, who once dissected a dolphin on one of its tables. Meanwhile, poets John Dryden, Alexander Pope and writer Jonathan Swift held court at Will’s Coffee House.”
— Jessica Rotondi, history.com
Let me end with a link to this ‘tweetstorm’ from 2018, which strongly resonated for me, and which inspired this post (and Michael Nielsen is definitely worth a follow).
