How To Know Things: Twitter Edition
It pains me to say this, but I just celebrated my 11-year “Twitterversary” (their word). Twitter is a beast. Some of you joined it years ago and left, rightly so. Some of you are just now joining for the first time. Welcome! It’s terrible!
What I wish someone had told me in the beginning:
Twitter is like a half marathon, one that has been going on for 14 years. You can’t just jump in and start running. I mean, you can, but you’ll get hurt and you’ll piss off everyone who spent months training. No, you need to warm up first, stretch, read a couple articles, maybe start with these:
I’ve left Twitter. It is unusable for anyone but trolls, robots and dictators by Lindy West
How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat everyone at Twitter in nine tweets by Max Benwell
Why is…Twitter?
I teach people how to use social media, so I get it. Twitter is overwhelming and unruly. But it’s also where a lot of information and takes originate. Odds are, by the time something makes it to Instagram, it’s a week old on Twitter.
Here’s the rub, it’s a grievances app. It’s where a lot of people posts thoughts and opinions that would (and do) get them fired. It’s a lot of anger and it’s a lot of misogyny. To help ingest a little less poison, I’ve developed a work-around.
Lists!
You can sort everyone you follow into neat, little emotionally compartmentalized lists. Can’t handle 7 major media corporations, 13 journalists, and roughly 27 podcasters yelling at each other on your timeline (TL)? Put them in a list and mute them. Ta-da!
Here are my lists:
You’ll notice that all of my lists are private. You will also want to do this. If you don’t, everyone you’re assigning to a list will get a notification that you’ve done so. Don’t do that to people, especially people you don’t know.
Step 1: Follow Some People
Think about what kind of info you’d like to get and start there. Maybe you want info on local and state government, local community and resistance leaders, your school district, thoughts and opinions from the people whose media you consume.
Follow the people who write books, essays, and articles you like. Follow the people who make podcasts you like. Follow the guests on those podcasts if you learned something from them. Follow some independent bookstores. Follow your friends with good Insta stories. You get the picture.
Step 2: Sort Them Into Lists
I wrote a step-by-step guide to creating Twitter lists back in 2012, though it is assuredly out-dated, you’re welcome to read it. Since then, Twitter has made it a lot easier to sort people into lists.
When you click on someone to follow, it takes you to their profile. From there, click follow and then click on the circle with 3 dots. A drop-down menu will appear and you’ll click “Add/remove from Lists”. That’s it! It’s a lot of work on the front-end, but it’s worth it.
Step 3: Mute It Baby, Mute It Real Good
Scroll through your TL and “mute” anyone who you want to follow, but don’t want to see 300 posts from in an hour. You will be surprised by how many people this is. It will be the majority of your friend group. It’s fine. They won’t know.
When you mute someone, their posts don’t show up in your TL, but do show up in the list you assigned them to. I have zero news orgs in my TL. If I want news, I go to one of my news lists.
Other quick tips:
If you’re going to start following people you don’t know, take the time to write an actual bio that lets people know you’re not going to be a potential problem. Allies, let your virtue signaling shine! (I’m kidding - kind of.)
This is buried in the settings, but you can mute words and phrases. For instance, I have “gym”, “weight”, and “ob*sity” muted.
Be discerning with who you follow, respond to, and what posts you “like”. Operate under the assumption that every action you take on Twitter is public (because it is).
You can totally do this. My shit is extremely tight because I’ve been on this hell app for 11 years. You will not build this in a day, but you will, and can, build this.
Digital literacy is a real thing and a lot of us need to sharpen our tools. If you haven’t already, I suggest reading what Ijeoma Oluo said about those black boxes on Instagram last week.
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Are you a new Twitter user? Does this help? If not, feel free to reach out, but do a Google first and then ask me if what you learned doesn’t make sense. Longtime Twitter users, what have I left off? Any tips or tricks that you’ve learned? What do you wish you had known in the beginning?
P.S. If you live in Nashville and want to get more info on how to find and follow your local and state government officials online, I wrote this back in 2016 and it holds up. ✌🏼
P.P.S. Many of my friends are involved in local politics, and one of them was on my podcast last year. If you haven’t listened to Melanie Bull’s episode, you can do so here.
