Heck, an individual's Twitter experience can be radically changed just by making some changes. A few years ago, I had pretty much abandoned Twitter. Like the GP says, it was a cesspool of negativity. And then I heard someone talk about the "cocktail party" strategy: "If you were at a cocktail party and ended up next to this person, would you hang out and chat? Or would you excuse yourself and go somewhere else?"
I spent about a week making decisions like that as I saw tweets scroll by. Every time I saw one where I'd answer "ugh, no", I just unfollowed that person. Soon, my feed was much nicer, and I started to get recommendations for more people to follow that added to my experience!
Huh. While I was using Twitter I was mostly exclusively following people I agreed with. I was still angry all the time, because those people were posting stuff like "another cop kills another civilian" or "the US military defended freedumbz by bombing more brown people, yay!".
Following only people you want to chat with doesn't necessarily mean talking about nice things.
People you agree with politically are not always the people you would want to talk to at a party. I know many people who I would agree with ideologically but bring it up so often that it is difficult to actually have a conversation with them about anything else. I know people I don’t agree with in some topics but agree with in others, and I know some people I talk to specifically because I disagree with them but would like to hear what they have to say. This isn’t to say that you should immediately go out and surround yourself with people who don’t agree with you, but I’ve found that exclusively selecting for people you agree with is pretty bland. Try to mix it up a little and you’ll probably appreciate it.
Maybe, although I'm quite curious to see how people who mostly talk about old computers and crazy debugging stories are going to do that.
Funny enough, as a Canadian, I do end up getting exposed to both some of the American left and right politics, as well as having a good idea of when crazy stuff goes down, but I don't get much exposure to crazy stuff happening in Canada via Twitter, and I'm generally ok with that! Facebook, however, is the complete opposite; that's a wild mix of folks widely distributed in the "masks are killing our children" to "the government should lock every person in their homes" Canadian politics, and it's exhausting.
I spent about a week making decisions like that as I saw tweets scroll by. Every time I saw one where I'd answer "ugh, no", I just unfollowed that person. Soon, my feed was much nicer, and I started to get recommendations for more people to follow that added to my experience!