Ad verba per numeros

Prophylaxis for Twitter

Monday, January 25, 2021, 06:00 PM
In another instance of "water is wet" kind of advice I'm collecting some tips to use Twitter in a healthy way and not in the much more common "hell site" mode.

Please note that these tips have allowed *me* to use Twitter in a healthy-for-me way, it may or may not be useful, or healthy, or meaningful for you.

There we go:

  • Avoid toxic people as the plague. Remember that it is you who define what is toxic for you. What for some people can be a mild intolerance may be extremely harmful for you. By avoiding toxic people I mean not following them in first place, unfollowing when detecting toxicity in some of your followees, silencing when finding a toxic account by pure chance, blocking and reporting when finding harmful behaviour.
  • Decide which level of stupid you are able to tolerate. Paraphrasing R.E.M., everybody is stupid sometimes. Endpoints in the stupid spectrum are obviously easy to detect and decide about. People who never ever are stupid are extremely valuable to follow. People who are always stupid are pointless to follow. It is up to you to decide when enough is enough regarding stupidity. When you decide that someone has crossed the Rubicon of idiocy my advice is just mute them. By doing that you don't hurt any feelings if the moron at hand is personally close to you and, moreover, their tweets can still appear in retweets (albeit muted) and, thus, you can decide if you are going to catch a glance (or not) on that particular tweet spotted by one of the other more sensible of your followees.
  • Avoid binge scrolling. You may think that is easier said than done but there is one fine trick that works marvels for me. My main reason for binge scrolling is my fear of missing something really neat from some of my favourite followees. Usually, those are people that seldom tweet but when they do you simply tend to furiously agree with them. The problem is that those pearls of wisdom are usually missed among the marabunta of tweets by the other thousands of accounts you follow (no offense to those other accounts, you also rock). My advice here: turn notifications on for an extremely tiny amount of accounts (in the order or tens, no more). This way you'll never miss a tidbit by your truly favorite followees. What if an account starts tweeting a lot and produces plenty of notifications? Turn notifications off, that account will surely appear regularly on your timeline.
And that's all. By doing this I tend to be nicely informed about what I want to be informed, I've quit binge scrolling and I tend to avoid most of the drama, toxicity and moronness that turns Twitter in a hell site.

Have a nice day!


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