My weird Twitter usage
by Volker Weber
I am a very atypical Twitter user. Let me explain my patterns:
- There are only about 30 to 100 tweets in my history. Tweets die pretty quickly. Some within a few minutes, hours or days. I am only keeping a few tweets that you liked very much. Who needs old tweets anyway? I make new ones all the time.
- If you tweet @vowe and you are too important to have your name and photo on your profile (that is a German thing), I will ignore you most of the time. If you do it often enough, I mute your account. You won't know that you are muted because you can still follow me. I just don't get your messages at all. I don't even know you sent them. There are a few dozen accounts on that list.
- If you force yourself into my timeline with a Promoted Tweet, I will block you. Without fail. Every single fscking time. It is basically an instant death penalty for your Twitter account. You can no longer read my tweets, you can't retweet me. If somebody else retweets you, I won't see it. There are tens of thousands of accounts on that list.
- I follow just a few accounts but I read all their tweets. Twitter is set to not show me "important" tweets first. As soon as that option disappears, I may not be looking any longer. Since Twitter copies many of the bad Facebook patterns, that may one day be the case. We will see.
- If you retweet very often and I follow you, I am going to filter the retweets but continue to follow you. I am interested in your posts, not those that others post. Unless you quote tweet, i.e. you are adding your own perspective.
- If I could I would disable personal tweets completely. Since I can't, I will try to sway you to iMessage or Twitter as fast as possible. I do want to exchange information not meant to be read by the public in an unprotected form. It's like email. There is no secret information in my emails. Everything that needs to be secured is encrypted end-to-end.
- I like it when you like a tweet. But I won't get notified. Not when you like something, not when you tweet at me or mention me. I will see it in notifications later, but nothing buzzes.
If you keep a short tail, nobody is going to step on it.
Comments
How do you deal with likes from people you follow, since Twitter is increasing the visibility of those tweets in the timeline?
Not sure I understand your question.
I use quite similar patterns. The only differences are: I don't use a photo of mine in a profile, but an iconized version of a photo I had done 10 years ago (So like the Queen I always look the same). I gave up on blocking promoted tweets. No matter how many I blocked, still every 5th to 10th tweet is a promoted one. I use a different client now.
I quite enjoy blocking those accounts. ;-)
Well, to each his own fun. ;-)
*cough* blocked *cough* :)
I still don't get your "ahistorical" approach, but that's fine. But let me ask you one question: Would you be willing to pay for an ad-free Twitter, and what premium features could you imagine for such a service (sorry, that was actually two questions)?
Yes, I would pay a small fee for an ad-free Twitter. I would want the ability to edit tweets after posting.
A concise list of reasons why I don't follow your Twitter account. ;)
