Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)A few days ago, I unfollowed everyone on Twitter, added them all to a list, and I now read that list instead. It’s shockingly better. Only their own tweets and retweets, in order. No ads, no "liked by," no "people you may know," no engagement hacking crap. It’s glorious.
Even better, when I inevitably end up in the home timeline anyway, it only has my own tweets and ads, nothing interesting. No dopamine outrage bullshit cycle to get caught up in.
Shh, don’t tell, I’m afraid some low level product manager at Twitter will discover this and "fix" lists like they "fixed" the home timeline a while back.
There are a couple drawbacks. I lost a few people I followed whose accounts are protected; I need to find and re-follow them. Also this evidently makes it harder for people to DM me, somehow. Not sure how, I don’t use Twitter DM much.
Still. Glorious.
A few days ago, I unfollowed everyone on Twitter, added them all to a list, and I now read that list instead. It’s shockingly better. Only their own tweets and retweets, in order. No ads, no “liked by,” no “people you may know,” no engagement hacking crap. It’s glorious.
Even better, when I inevitably end up in the home timeline anyway, it only has my own tweets and ads, nothing interesting. No dopamine outrage bullshit cycle to get caught up in.
Shh, don’t tell, I’m afraid some low level product manager at Twitter will discover this and “fix” lists like they “fixed” the home timeline a while back.
There are a couple drawbacks. I lost a few people I followed whose accounts are protected; I need to find and re-follow them. Also this evidently makes it harder for people to DM me, somehow. Not sure how, I don’t use Twitter DM much.
Still. Glorious.
Syndicated copies:
I’ve been moving towards the same setup for my Twitter use for the last several months, but with different topic-based lists. It really does make things a lot better, by allowing proper curation of what I see.
While moving over I discovered that Tweetbot (my client of choice) will let me set a list as my “home” view, so I don’t have to jump between multiple lists in one tab, or load into an empty timeline. I have my hobby feed as the default, and use the lists view primarly for my news and current events list.