If you, like me, find the non-political part of Twitter valuable, I have discovered that Twitter has built in filtering tools.
It's pretty simple. Each time I see a tweet I dislike, I pick one word from it and add it to my "mute word" list. It's now filled with words like "trump", "liberal", "minister", etc, and now I see interesting technical discussions instead of political trash.
Yes! I am on Twitter and talk to people interested in music performance, computer programming, and math. With judicious following, blocking, and filters, I rarely see anything else.
I've done this by following a small amount of people and being extremely judicious in adding new ones (and quick to remove them: there are a couple writers I enjoy that do nothing but shitpost about politics on Twitter). I will say that my approach has the downside of being very low-volume though
Up until 2015 I had a wonderfully curated comedy Twitter created in this manner. It was selected from the set of my favorite comedians, actors, writers, and internet people with particular focus towards those who posted humorous or insightful things on a regular basis.
Then 2016 happened and the greater half decided they were really closet political pundits all along. Now I don't read Twitter at all.
Comedy writes itself these days. That's why comedians had to find something else to do. You just can't compete with reality when whole continents are run by clowns.
That's exactly why the "mute words" feature is great. Everybody you want to follow on Twitter is going to retweet some political trash sometimes. Curating the people you follow can't fix this, but "mute words" can.
Mine is actually fairly political (lots of economists). I can see how my comment was misleading, but it's the shitposting I mind, not the politics. People like Noah Smith write decent columns but consistently embarrass themselves on Twitter with low-effort dishonest nonsense.
I've done the same thing. And I agree it is low-volume, but I have come to the conclusion that it isn't so bad to be a little "bored" and not get lost in twitter rabbit holes.
Marketing, It's great for brands or anybody that has something to sell (a book, a product, an idea,...).
It kind of replaced RSS for many people, expect it's a centralised tool.
Unfortunately "journalists" use it way too often to make up news out of nothing, gather random photos/videos without fact checking and spread rumors and falsehoods as truth. Something like the Covington Catholic school fiasco heavily relayed by the media, based on a footage where people saw what they wanted to see, would have never happened without the viral aspect of Twitter. The irony is that Twitter ended up banning the person that spread it, but none of the Twitter verified people that called for the murder of school students.
Eh. I dated a nationally recognized journalist / writer. They use it to network and follow trends. Or, if they're working on a story someone else has covered, to see if there is anything that that person could share that didn't make it into the article (background conversations, etc).
When it comes to the actual work though she spend 99% of her time at the library, archives, prison, or on the phone with sources.
Similar to Hacker News for me: interesting tech articles and discussions, but with a different feel. I follow a bunch of graphics programmers and machine learning researchers. There's a lively community with a bunch of famous people participating as well as lesser known people who are really good in certain niches.
Particularly in machine learning it seems like thousands of papers are published every week, impossible to sort through. I find that the few I see people talking about on Twitter are the most interesting and worthy of attention.
I've made more friends and acquaintances on Twitter than any other social network. It's also easily the most intellectual social network. If you care deeply about something, you will find your people on Twitter.
For me and many others it is a place where we can share what we consider beautiful and sacred, what we find compelling and carefully thought. It is an agora shimmering with such things.
Even though much of the good web has retreated to private spaces like email lists and secret slacks, I am in some of those things because someone was able to find me on Twitter.
(And yeah we all need to vent, and have our human bouts of melancholy. But if you use twitter solely to participate in the negative, you are really missing out!)
At a minimum, for me it's been a very high-quality personal RSS. If I were so inclined, the fact that I can engage in the fascinating conversations I'm seeing is a bonus. This does rely on keeping a tightly curated following list
It's pretty simple. Each time I see a tweet I dislike, I pick one word from it and add it to my "mute word" list. It's now filled with words like "trump", "liberal", "minister", etc, and now I see interesting technical discussions instead of political trash.