How to make Twitter fun again

Twitter: the cause and solution to all of life’s problems. People have been talking a lot about Twitter lately.

When my friends complain about how they don’t like using Twitter, I used to be confused. Twitter is what you make it. If you don’t like Twitter, you can simply follow different accounts and get a completely different experience.

It’s important to note that none of my friends have tens of thousands of followers and/or are regularly harassed on Twitter. This can be a very different experience beyond one’s power to control, to put it mildly.

Twitter has changed, and now, the people you follow may have very little influence on what you actually see on Twitter. Here are my tips on how to take back control of your timeline and make Twitter fun.

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How to make Twitter better

Here are my top five Twitter tips:

1. Disable retweets for most people

I follow people I follow because I want to keep up with their lives, their work, or what they have to say. I don’t often care what they see on Twitter, but when people you follow retweet with reckless abandon, it quickly turns into >90% of your timeline being filled with tweets from people you don’t know.

As soon as I follow a new person, I tap on them three points on their profile and tap Disable Retweets.

Now, there are a few people that I definitely leave retweets – a select group of people who don’t retweet a lot of things a day, whose interests align with mine. I encourage you to turn off retweets for most of the people you follow.

2. Use a different Twitter app

Many people don’t know that, for free, you can use another Twitter app that doesn’t have ads, doesn’t fill your timeline with “suggested tweets” and doesn’t prompt you to follow “topics you might like” .”

You can download a third-party Twitter client to get only with tweets from people you follow, in chronological order. Here are three options to get you started, all of which have apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac:

Aviary is my Twitter client of choice. Made by Shihab Mehboob, has a very simple and customizable user interface. I only have tabs for my timeline, mentions and profile. One feature I really like about Aviary is the ability to share a tweet as a nicely formatted photo rather than a screenshot. Aviary is only $4.99 upfront, which, in my opinion, is worth it for an app I use every day.

Neptune is a free Twitter client from an independent developer Ethan Lipnik. It has a visually distinct, modern design in Lipnik’s “blob-morphism” style that is common to his apps. It’s lighter in terms of features, but what was once a paid app is now completely free to use.

Tweetbot is a powerful client for professional users. You can create special mute filters to keep topics out of the timeline, create custom timelines and lists for different topics, set up multi-column split views on iPad, and more. Everything is highly customizable. If you spend a lot of time on Twitter and want to get precise control over your timeline, you should check out Tweetbot. It’s free to try for a month. After that, it costs $5.99 per year or 99 cents per month.

3. Avoid arguing with strangers

I used to be significantly more active on reddit, until I realized something very important.

I will never change anyone’s mind. Case in point: I never had mine mind changed in a heated comment argument, so it would be foolish to assume I can do the same for anyone else. And even if I do, the net difference to the world will be small.

In the best case scenario, I will have changed the minds of a few people who will still have no impact on my life other than to shorten it a bit. Your time is the most valuable thing in the world. You can make Twitter fun by arguing less.

Again, this calculation changes if you’re a target for harassment or abuse, something Twitter has proven either completely unable or unwilling to address. whether it it’s your experience, my advice won’t be strong enough. I recommend the book So you have been publicly shamed by Jon Ronson.

4. Don’t pay attention to trending topics on Twitter

Algorithmically trending topics save Twitter time and money to hire a few human curators, but have a massively poor impact on the platform.

Don’t look at trending topics. If you use the aforementioned Twitter apps Aviary, Neptune, or Tweetbot — or any of dozens of other options — you have the choice to never see them again.

If a current event is really big and culturally important enough, the people you follow will weigh in on it, anyway. I didn’t need to check the trending topics to find out that a war had started, nor did I need to hear about the Emmys.

5. Pay attention to who you pay attention to

Twitter is full of people throwing out ideas with confidence that are dead wrong.

Don’t listen to these people. Follow the best people in the area that interests you.

I don’t mean that in a stuffy, elitist way. If you just want to laugh at silly jokes on Twitter, follow the best comedians. If you just go to Twitter for cute animal videos, follow the biggest and best accounts.

For everything else? Attracting people’s attention online is extremely valuable to marketing organizations, disinformation campaigns, and fraud. Make Twitter fun by making sure your news comes from reputable, reliable and neutral sources.