7
votes
Who do you follow on Twitter?
(Asked mainly because I just made an account there and there are only a handful of twitter profiles which immediately come to my mind as profiles to follow.)
(Asked mainly because I just made an account there and there are only a handful of twitter profiles which immediately come to my mind as profiles to follow.)
A lot of people, but here are some I recommend based on having posted something good recently. A lot of them are US-centric though. (Also, the links are wrong but I don' t know how to disable it.)
Science / Humanities:
@Meaningness - sort-of-philosophy of science and other nebulous things
@literalbanana - anonymous author of funny, skeptical essays about science. Also, absurd humor.
@askhistorians - best of the Reddit group
@USGSVolcanoes - volcano stuff
Business / tech:
@patio11 - works at Stripe, posts interesting stuff about Japan, currently working on vaccinateca.com
@solar_chase - analyst who tracks solar energy
@andy_kelley - Zig language creator
Policy / politics
@NateSilver538 - US election and politics
@sarakliff - US health policy
@asymmetricinfo - Washington Post columnist
Pandemic stuff:
@Dereklowe - A chemist who writes about drug discovery and other things
@trvrb - A scientist who posts projections
@Bob_Watcher - administrator at UCSF who posts regular updates about the situation in San Francisco
@jburnmurdoch - updates about the pandemic graphs for the Financial Times
@edyong209 - science writer for the Atlantic
Weather stuff:
@NSWBayArea - San Francisco bay area forecasts, weather pictures
@Weather_West - Scientist who covers weather and climate, centered on the western US
Joke accounts:
@justsaysinmice - Tweets about science stories that forget to say "in mice."
@cultureshipname - To get this you need to know about Ian M. Bank's Culture series.
@AccordionEmoji - coming soon!
You could follow me but I mostly just retweet stuff.
@trvb doesn’t exist and @andy_kelly is private.
Sorry, that should be @trvrb and @andy_kelley. (Fixed.)
I would suggest as a first following,
And of course me ;-)
I’ve yet to find a compelling reason to use Twitter. There is a lot of the same content in articles, some of them referencing Twitter. Is it worth the aggravation? Do I really need to follow things in short ephemeral bursts?
Well, I use it almost exclusively to follow kinksters and sex workers. I have to say that the resulting content is the most wholesome, genuine and wonderful stuff on social media, all at the low price that I have to scroll through it with my back to a wall. Occasionally you get a good meme in the mix, too. I use a secondary account for other interesting stuff like animals, model painting and a few interesting YT content creators.
So you don't need to use it, but it can be convenient for collating stuff. There are certainly plenty of people on Twitter who can't be found and kept up with on other sites, because those other sites don't have the same functionality or familiar layout.
Twitter is best used to follow your favourite people within a given topic rather than people who tweet about a broad number of things, imo. For me the Twitter spheres I follow are politics, MTG, programming and football/fantasy football with some odds and sods tossed in.
Slightly unrelated, I wish you could sort and filter your follows. There are lots of days where I wish I could just mute the politics side of Twitter for example — or heaven forbid I try and read MTG Twitter while there’s a football game on.
That's the one feature Google+ had that was killer compared to all the others then, and now. You could. Place people into "circles" and see that specialized feed anytime you wanted, and you could filter them enmasse in your main feed.
Twitter has lists, but they are the lowest on the totem poll of focus and integration (perhaps just marginally above the mythical "edit" button). FB introduced their own version when G+ was rapidly growing, but none of them match the power or flexibility circles gave you.
I have a list of local authorities. I follow the city's feed, the regional health authority and the department administration. They're all updated multiple times daily and give all the news about the pandemic, laws related to it, hospital info, etc. It's much easier than looking through news site, and there's no extra politics in your face. I put these in a Twitter list.
I also follow all public transportation as they're prompt to announce outages and other issues.
All of this depends of whether they are using Twitter seriously or if they have a bored student intern posting "social", which is of no interest.
After holding out for this long, what made you create an account now? (I personally [still] do not use Twitter.)
I don't have specific profiles to suggest, however all I can say is that I try to follow people, rather than company-, product- or topic- focused accounts (e.g. @elonmusk vs @SpaceX).
For the latter, I prefer to stick with more suitable means like RSS or mailing lists.
As a side note, I wish I could disable retweets, because they only add noise to the feed.
For disabling retweets: what you want to use is Blindfold! Just login to your Twitter and it'll disable all retweets from all accounts.
I've been using it for years and it's by far the best thing I've done. All it does is tell Twitter to disable retweets for every account, and so you won't see any in the official Twitter clients websites or apps. Open sourced as well.
After you use the service, anyone new you follow you can click on the three dots on their profile and disable retweets. This is just easy to do a mass sweep.
https://blindfold.social/
Thanks for the suggestion. I think I'll try it, despite the fact I don't like connecting my account to a third party.
You can remove access immediately after using, or you can run the server yourself from the source: https://github.com/matthewmorek/blindfold
It's just a simple Node.js server, and you can plug your own API creds in there and it'll work all the same.
I use the realtwitter.com redirect, which goes to a Twitter search that excludes retweets. Then click "Latest".