John Scalzi said that he was culling his follow list by removing the people who rarely tweeted<\/a>.<\/p>\nI don’t get it. I check my Twitter feed about once a day, and though I only follow 36 people my screen is always full<\/em>. Those accounts are carefully curated so that I usually want to read to the end of a day’s updates — but the general signal-to-noise on Twitter is atrocious<\/em>. What finally got me to write this rant was friend of the blog @barrychoi tweeting about a new post on his blog eleven times<\/strong> in a single day! When people have really active Twitter accounts, especially with high levels of noise (like live-tweeting just about anything in depth, or just seeing half a conversation) it really turns me off. Following a couple dozen accounts like that and unless I just camped on the Twitter app I would start missing content — even at a miserly 140 characters the tweets add up. <\/p>\nAnd maybe that’s the problem: so many people are so swamped by the uproarious nature that they just sample <\/em>their Twitstream at random intervals, which forces people to re-post their tweets again and again hoping to catch the eyeballs of their so-called subscribers, which exacerbates the high noise level. Ugh, that’s just not a game I can play. <\/p>\nMaybe it’s because I use the default web-based interface rather than a 3rd-party app with more capabilities (i.e., doing it wrong). I believe the way people use<\/em> Twitter is to politely follow anyone who follows them first, then mute them with the list functions of the 3rd-party apps. Or else there’s something I’m just not understanding about the whole thing — which is likely given how incredibly difficult I find expressing anything in 140 characters. Seriously, my whole stream is basically poor-man’s-RSS announcement of new posts, and tweets full of [1\/3] multipart markers.<\/p>\nAs long as I’m ranting: hashtags are really annoying. When used sparingly they can be used to tag tweets, particularly when trying to tag that tweet to something in particular that might not show up in a general search (such as #becausemoney for questions and commentary directed at the podcast). But just adding the symbol in the middle of a sentence makes it harder to read and doesn’t help at all with the intended function — no one is out there searching for highly generic terms like #money or #Canada… and if those words were in the tweet anyway<\/em> a search would pull them out without wasting a character and reducing readability. Without careful, conscious application, hashtags just become more noise. Oh, and “via” means “by way of; by means of” and is usually used to indicate who sent you a link you’re passing along to your followers — putting via [yourself] is like talking about yourself in the third person, it’s weird and off-putting. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A little while ago a social media guru in our pubic affairs team said that you had to maintain a “presence” on Twitter by posting at least three times a day. We just wanted a place for people to get updates on a new project, which with lecture announcements might mean one quantum of content […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}