I struggle to tame Twitter to make it actually usable and get to the information and entertainment that I want without digging through heaps of fluff for hours at end.
Don’t get me wrong, I like to the occasional fluff. I enjoy jokes cracked by the people I follow, but 80% of the tweets are just irrelevant.
My current approach is as follows:
I don’t use the timeline at all
I have created 3 private lists:
Filtered Timeline (people)
Apps & Products (updates about those
News (news outlets and podcast accounts)
I’m using Tweetbot to block certain clients, such as wordpress or other marketing tools
I’m blocking a lot of words and phrases (example: fortnite, cryptokitties, pokemon)
I’m blocking hashtags, such as #worldcup
I’m using regex filters to
The problem still is the fluff. The tweets that don’t use explicit wording that could be blocked. Those that quote an image-tweet about a topic that I don’t care about and crack jokes about it.
Or the big redundance of information in my “inboxes” (mail, Feedly, Twitter, YouTube, Overcast). Examples:
I follow MKBHD on YouTube, I can’t block his tweets announcing new videos. Or I would have to block all links to YouTube
I follow podcastses like Myke Hurley and can’t block their retweets of podcast announcements, if I have already listened to the episode on Overcast.
What is your strategy for this?
I’ve tried Nuzzle and Refind, but they mostly focus on news-links, which is just a small subset of the tweets I enjoy.
Yep. It’s just a huge time suck.
Scientists I follow whose work I’m interested in also tweet political statements, retweet, etc.
I think the best filter for me is logging out.
If you follow them elsewhere (a separate e-mail newsletter), there’s no need to have an extra feed. I’d cancel it. I don’t follow my favorite podcasts on Twitter. I’ll see the new episode in my podcast feed. I also avoid replying on Twitter if I can. In the same fashion, I got off reddit and Quora. I don’t miss them now that they’re out of my life. I’m sure those are valuable to others but i couldn’t handle the noise and fluff.
I do love my Twitter lists to separate different Twitter follows into subject areas. But i don’t need to subscribe to my favorite sports teams on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. I’ll just stick with one social feed for my teams and be done with it.
it’s time to just move the follows to one platform instead of following them on every imaginable social media platform.
Yes, I do that… I don’t often follow them on multiple platforms.
I usually follow people on twitter for their opinion. However with some podcast’s feeds I follow they also post helpful information that are not mentioned in the episodes, besides just announcing new episodes. It would be nice to just exclude the announcement’s though, but no twitter tool allows for such filter options.
I tend not to follow them. Most of what I wanted to hear is on the podcast episode. The extra things on Twitter is gravy and may expand on them but not enough for me to follow.
Do you find it worthwhile enough times to keep following?
Maybe there is a way to see the keywords in each show announcement tweet that you can mute messages if tweet contains “new episode” or something to that effect?
