
Ask HN: How do you browse Twitter? - ponyous
I never fully understood how to use Twitter, but I have been trying to use it a bit more lately... But the whole experience is confusing.<p>How I do it:<p>I search for hashtag, then I am presented with top tweets, which are mostly tweets by established companies&#x2F;pages. But I don&#x27;t really want to see those so I head to Live section, because I want to see tweets by actual People. In Live section I usually have to mute some bots to get to actual content. (And Mute doesn&#x27;t really work as it should unfortunately)<p>I do not use twitter to keep in touch with real-life acquaintances, because I cannot filter my feed easily. Yeah I know I can use lists, but I don&#x27;t really want to go over all the people I follow and put them into a designated list... (I learned about lists way too late to use it effectively in my opinion.) Maybe Twitter needs some AI to curate lists for you?<p>I want to understand how you people use Twitter and how you benefit from it.
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enginnr
_If you don 't like lists, then put in the necessary hard work to curate them,
and you only need to do this once to enjoy Twitter_

There are so many ways to do it, and there is no 'one way' to browse Twitter,
apart from deliberately being serendipitous.

Here's some lists I made:

[https://twitter.com/enginnr/lists/true-
hackers](https://twitter.com/enginnr/lists/true-hackers)

[https://twitter.com/enginnr/lists/twitter-
dna](https://twitter.com/enginnr/lists/twitter-dna)

[https://twitter.com/enginnr/lists/diamonds-in-the-
rough](https://twitter.com/enginnr/lists/diamonds-in-the-rough)

[https://twitter.com/enginnr/lists/availability](https://twitter.com/enginnr/lists/availability)

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akg_67
Twitter baffles me too, it primarily appears to me as a marketing channel. I
prefer FB (personal) and LNKD (professional) over TWTR and G+.

Majority of tweeters I follow seem to share links only. I figure 140 character
limit is not conducive to having meaningful conversations. Twitter app and
site is not suitable for reviewing links.

Recently, I discovered shared links in Safari browser that seem to work better
in tweet reading as it shows the pages linked in tweets too. I just quickly
browse through the tweets in Safari shared links sidebar and read the linked
articles that seem interesting.

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s9w
The Twitter site itself can be somewhat non-ideal for heavy use. The big
fonts, lots of whitespace and non-chronological ordering make reading
everything a chore.

You can use TweetDeck, which uses the Twitter login so you don't need another
account. It's slightly better, but I still miss things like filtering.

Ideally I would like to use the API for a self-made solution, but the API
troubles of the past make that tricky. You can use RSS feeds though and pipe
that in some RSS reader or something else if you like that.

~~~
ponyous
I didn't know about TweetDeck at all. It looks a lot more useful than original
Twitter. Thanks!

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DrNuke
Just follow professional players from your domain and interact with them
professionally, retwitting / endorsing their most relevant tweets for your own
narrative. Sometimes, tweet something yourself in the same mood. Don't follow
more than 50-60 profiles and act only at the busiest time of your network's
Twitter day, say 4-5pm. Use it once or twice a day more to scroll the tweets
from your network, say late in the morning and before shutting your connection
down.

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sjs382
I follow about 200 people, across a few different interests (mostly real
friends, developers, basketball/football/hockey writers and music/tv/culture
critics).

A few times per day (using an Android client), I skim through my feed rather
quickly, stopping to read a few interesting tweets/conversations. Sometimes I
reply to messages directed at me. Sometimes I reply to others. Often, I
retweet things I find interesting and/or add a link to Pocket to read later.

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eecks
I don't. Twitter is crap

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monroepe
I pretty much follow news sites and comedians. I ignore the news links mostly
and laugh at some (but not all) of the comedians' jokes. I am generally on for
less than 45 seconds.

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ducuboy
I'm using [http://svven.com](http://svven.com)

It discovers the people that tweet same links as I do, and gives me what else
they tweet.

Disclaimer: I built it.

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tmaly
my problem is slightly different. I would like to connect with potential users
of my food site. I constantly have people following me, but when I try to
private message them, they never respond. It makes me think they are bots of
some sort.

