Working in a blog post, but I don't know if it's good enough to post on my regular tech blog
Posted by
Beryllium (aka grayman)
Jun 13 '15, 15:07
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Working title: Social Tenor and Flux
Better title: Is Your Twitter Out Of Tune?
I often hear people complain that Twitter seems useless to them, but I've found a great deal of value in the platform. One thing I've noticed is that the Twitter experience is 100% defined by the people you follow. It's social media in the purest sense: your experience is completely at the whim of your follower list's sociability.
When you sign up, you're encouraged to follow a bunch of different types of accounts. Image feeds, celebrities, news agencies - a lot of the suggestions are decent. But, if you get too click-happy when choosing celebrities to follow (for example), your ongoing twitter experience is going to be comprised mostly of vapid meaningless PR fluff. Similarly, if you try to follow every news agency on the planet, your feed is going to be chock full of horrific stuff from all over the world.
This will greatly colour your Twitter experience.
The overall abstract feeling you get from your Twitter feed could be described as its "social tenor". The ebb and flow of certain types of content are intangible but perceptible.
If you leave your follower list the same all the time, your social tenor becomes stagnant. You need to introduce an element of flux in order to "tune" your Twitter experience to your preferences and your benefit.
I use three strategies to keep things fresh and enjoyable:
1. I pay attention to repeat RTs and mentions to find interesting Twitter personalities & follow them. Over time, this helps my Twitter feed feel more engaging and comfortable.
2. I periodically scan my following list to purge "faceless" accounts. These can be automated news accounts, corporate accounts, the sort of accounts that are bland regurgitators. (Some of these accounts can have pretty amusing personas, though, so those might be keepers)
3. I weed out inappropriate behaviour. If I notice that accounts on my list are acting like agitators, I put them on a kind of double secret probation - if they continue to offend, I seriously consider unfollowing.
A fourth strategy that I don't do as often as I should is searching for one of my interests - programming, photography, etc - and following interesting accounts that show up in the results, usually giving more consideration to ones that are geographically close to me.
Every account you follow will change the composition of your day-to-day Twitter experience. The only other social network I've seen where this flux is so integral to the experience is 500px, the photography site.
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