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How to use Twitter.

At this point, the simplest answer is “don’t”.

Since the takeover, the service has just been getting consistently worse, both technically and socially, and the trajectory is for it to keep heading in that direction. If you’re able, it’s probably best to move elsewhere and work to migrate whatever communities you’re part of. The Fediverse, especially Mastodon, is a good replacement for most uses.

I have deleted my personal Twitter account after about 15 years, and most of my alternate, work, or project-specific accounts (my campaign account has been dormant since November 2022, but I’ve not deleted it yet).

The previous version of this howto is below. It’s no longer helpful, since the most important technical point was “use a third-party client”, and Twitter has kicked them all off.

How to use Twitter

(If you really want to.)

Some notes on how I use Twitter, what I find good/bad about accounts I follow, and some suggestions on how you might want to use it. YMMV.

Should you?

First of all, decide if you really want to. It’s a big cultural force at this point, and FOMO is certainly a thing, but don’t let that make your decision for you. Twitter is very much a mixed bag. Personally, my experience has been overall quite positive, but other people — especially those in groups more commonly targeted for harrasment — have had very different experiences. Twitter (the company) does a very bad job of dealing with harrasment, hate speech, and other similar issues. They also don’t really understand their own product, and often make design decisions that don’t seem to line up with where people actually get value from the service. There are also legitimate concerns over the fact that a single company has control over something that’s so central to the modern web.

I like using Twitter, although that’s less solidly of a win than, say, two years ago. I think there’s a lot of value here, but don’t feel obligated. There’s a good chance your time is better spent elsewhere.

Get set up

Get a good client

First of all, if you’re going to use it, you really owe it to yourself to get a good 3rd-party client. For many other services, using the stock method to decide if you like it, then getting a “pro” client if you get really into it, is fine. But in recent years Twitter has tweaked their “official” experience to be quite different than the “classic” model of “see tweets and retweets from peopl you follow”, to the extent that it really feels like an entirely different service. For example, at the time of writing, here’s the first 10 things on my timeline…

Via Twitteriffic:

All content I signed up for, either directly or indirectly. In contrast, here’s what I get from the official app, at the same moment:

4/10 of those are the content I actually signed up for — less than half! 2/10 ads; 2/10 our shouty criminal president; 4/10 algorithmically chosen shouting. Like I said, it feels like a totally different service when you have control over what you see.

The specific client to use is largely a matter of taste (and platform); there are several good ones. I’ve used a bunch, and Twitterrific is by far my favorite. I really like their “muffle” function, the fact that you can do pattern-matching mute/muffle rules, the unified timeline, and the overall aesthetic. If you’re on iOS, Tweetbot is another very good option that a lot of people prefer. If you’re on Android, Tweetings and Talon are both good choices.

Several (possibly all; I haven’t checked in a while) offer free options. Start with one of those, and if you get a week or so on and think you’re going to keep using Twitter for a while, pay for the app (if you’re able). You’ll get a better experience, and you’ll support the development of good software.

I should point out that Twitter, the company, has a love/hate relationship with 3rd-party clients. For a long time, there have been some things you can only do through the official clients, and about a year ago, Twitter made a lot of existing functionality unavailable to them. You won’t be albe to do polls, get notifications, or participate in group direct messages using any 3rd-party clients (as well as a few less significant things). I don’t consider any of those central to the best way to use Twitter, so it’s worth it, and you can always keep the official client around as well for when you need it.

Just don’t look at your timeline there.

Profile

Get yourself a profile pic right off the bat. There is a (well deserved) bias against people who post with the default pic. The rest of your profile is pretty optional; provide as much or as little as you like. A line or two in a bio can be helpful when people are deciding if you’re an interesting follow. For style points, try to avoid the “string of nouns” pattern (e.g. “father. husband. photographer. traveler.”). Banner images are nice but unimportant. Twitter, thankfully, doesn’t have a “real names” policy like some dumber social networks, but if you intend to use it with people you know in real life, you should pick something recognizable.

Avoid sticking emoji or most “funny” unicode characters in your name. They can be really problematic for people who use screen readers, and are mostly just distracting regardless.

Twitter’s privacy model is generally much more straight-forward than Facebook’s (it might be too simplistic, in places), but there are two privacy settings in particular you should think about.

“Protect your Tweets”

By default, your tweets are publicly visible to everyone, and anyone can follow you to have your tweets show up in their timeline. There’s no approval process on your end, and the relationship isn’t mutual (unlike, for example, being “friends” with someone on Facebook). You’re welcome to follow them back, but there’s no expectation of doing so. If you check this box, that changes: your tweets will only be visible to people who follow you, and you’ll get an approval request when a new person wants to follow you. If you turn this on after you’ve been using Twitter for a bit, your existing followers will not be affected, and while your past tweets should now be “protected”, that’s a bit “leaky” (and they obviously can’t do anything about screenshots or the like). The default is to leave this unchecked, and the experience of using Twitter sort of depends on most people leaving it that way. I have this unchecked.

“Receive Direct Messages from anyone”

“Direct Message” are person-to-person (or person-to-group, but see above) messages which aren’t part of your timeline. They’re a totally separate messaging space. They are “private”, at least in the sense that nobody outside the participants and Twitter (the company) can see them, but there’s no end-to-end encryption or the like. If you leave this checked, anyone on Twitter can send you one of these messages; if you have it unchecked, only accounts you follow will be able to DM you. I leave this checked, but if you’re getting harrassing messages (or don’t want to take the chance), turn it off here. DMs aren’t really central to the way most people use Twitter these days, anyway.

Follows

The hardest part about getting started with Twitter is knowing who to follow. If you’ve got real-life friends you know who’ve been using it for a while, that’s often a good start. You can usually look through other users' follow lists to see who they follow, too. Think of topics you’re interested in, then follow people who’re doing that.

Twitter (the company) seems to think of Twitter (the service) mostly as a place where regular people will follow celebreties. I find this a really bad usage pattern. Most of the time, the bigger a celebrety the worse of a follow they are (there are exceptions). Creative niche/indie artists can be great follows. Follow people, not brands, and escpecially not people who think they’re brands.

Once you have a few follows you like, pay attention to who they retweet. Don’t follow those accounts blindly, but they’re often good ones to consider.

If you’re a “completionist” (you feel like you want to read everything in your timeline), you’re going to have to put in some work to curating your follow list once it grows to a certain size. That size is difficult to say, since it depends on the frequency people post with. You’ll probably want to avoid following people who tweet 1,000 times a day (sorry, Glenn). This is a bunch more work and isn’t really how Twitter intendes the service to be used, instead modeling things around users dropping in, reading for a bit, then leaving. The “completionist” model is the more old-school model. It’s what I prefer, but I’m undecided as to whether I can recommend it for others.

Twitter used to (I don’t think they still do) have an option to automatically follow anyone who follows you. Don’t do this. It’s not clear it was ever a good idea, but certainly now that it’s as big as it is, and has as many bots or just jerks on it, it’s a terrible plan.

Etiquite

There are a few things some accounts do — or, mostly, avoid doing — that can make for a much more pleasant and interesting experience.

Most importantly: as with any social network or online activity, keep in mind that you’re (mostly) talking to actual human beings. Don’t be a jerk to people. Don’t @ people to tell them they’re awful. And keep in mind that there are likely real humans reading what you write generally. When you see something you think is great, consider telling the person. When you see something you think is trash, it’s usually best to just move on.

Don’t feed trolls

Twitter has a lot of funny, intelligent, insightful stuff on here. Also a lot of random people just sort of going about their business. And also a lot of jackasses. It’s almost never worthwhile to engage with people in the last category, especially since many are explicitly looking for a reaction from you. You should especially avoid putting them into your followers' timelines (see below). If you spend much of your time on Twitter arguing with people, you’re not going to have a good time, and you’re going to miss out on the better stuff. You should absolutely not go around looking for people saying dumb/awful things, e.g. trolling (in the other sense) other people’s mentions.

(I still occasionally struggle with this section.)

Careful with quote-tweets

You can “retweet” something you see on Twitter, which is to share it with your own followers. It’s sort of like forwarding email. You also have the option to “quote tweet” it: retweet it, but with your own commentary. This can be great; when someone I follow find something valuable/funny/whatever, a few words about why can be very helpful. Especially if what’s being retweet isn’t particularly descriptive.

But this is often used just to mock or dunk on someone. That’s almost never a good plan. First of all, see the thing about trolls above. A lot of accounts are only in it for the circulation, and you’d just be helping that. If you see something that upsets you, your quote-tweet is just going to put it in my timeline, too. There are cases when that can be useful/important, but they’re pretty few and far between. It’s usually better to either move past it, or make your own point independently. For example: is Steve King being a Nazi again? Don’t put him in my timeline. But if you want to say how we shouldn’t be electing Nazis, just say that. For many people (like me), this is mostly just a question of making things more pleasant, but for some people the gross, hateful stuff can be deeply upsetting. Be considerate in what you’re posting.

(Mastodon, an open, decentralized, twitter-like service prohibits quote-tweets entirely, to avoid this sort of abuse. I think that’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but it does avoid some bad behaviors.)

Also, a common pattern is for someone to quote-tweet something, adding only “This.” or an arrow or finger pointing to the content. Don’t do this. You’re adding nothing, and just making it harder to read and take up more space. If you feel yourself going for this, 99 times ouf of 100 you should just retweet the thing.

(I have absolutely done everything in this section wrong at times.)

Retweets

Retweets are a really good feature. The network is huge, and we don’t (can’t and shouldn’t!) all follow the same people. Retweets let users see the “best of the best” from people I’ve chosen to follow; it’s a built-in curration network. This is a huge part of why Twitter can be a great news discovery system. You should absolutely retweet things you’d like to share with others. But remember that you’re essentially in a curation role when you do this, and that requires a degree of selectivity. You probably should’t be retweeting half your timeline.

Threads

Tweets are limited in length; this is central to the experience of using the service. It keeps things readable, consumable in small chunks, and helps keep things concise. But sometimes you have follow-up, or a thought that really just can’t fit in one tweet. That’s fine. Twitter supports “threads”, which are really just a chain of tweets each replying to the previous one in the thread. If you’ve got something to say that won’t fit in a tweet, it’s much nicer for your followers if you do it this way, as opposed to just tweeting each part independently. Some clients have explicit support for doing this, but in any case you can always just reply to the previous tweet in the thread. This way your followers can see that they’re part of a thread and can (at their discretion) read them in order as such.

Also, while there have been some very good long thread, they’re the exception rather than the rule. If you find yourself doing a lot of threads longer than, say, 2-3 tweets each, probably those belong as a blog post somewhere (you should probably have a blog regardless).

When retweeting or quote-tweeting a thread, usually just the first tweet in the thread is the way to go. If the person did it as a real thread (which is most of the time these days), your followers can view the whole thread easily if they like, or skip it if they’re not interested. A common and useful alternative is to quote-tweet something from the thread with a comment like “here’s a good thread; this is the key point”.

Health and Safety

Block liberally

Twitter allows you to “block” an account, meaning they can’t see you and you can’t see them. It’s imperfect and leaky in places, but still powerful. If someone’s intentionally a jerk to you, don’t hesitate to use the block button. If someone’s simply posting lots of stuff you don’t want to see, go ahead and block. It isn’t even inherently a judgement on them overall; it’s just a statement that you don’t want to see it.

Mute and muffle liberally

This is different per client, but everyone’s got some version of this. You can mute individual accounts (in some senses, a softer version of the block, above). Twitterrific, for example, also gives the option to “muffle” someone, in which case you don’t see their posts directly but there’s still a tiny line indicating they posted something, which you can click on to view.

Pro mode: in Twitterrific, you can also muffle based on rules. So, for example, I muffle everything with a few bots that one of my follows retweets more than I enjoy. I also have some hashtags muffled from when people I follow went to various conferences and posted more live-tweets about events there than I was interested in.

There is no judgement implied in any of this; you’re just curating your feed.

You can turn of retweets

Some people are interesting follows, but retweet way too much, or just a lot of stuff you’re not going to be interested in. On the web site, you can turn off retweets from an account so those won’t show up in your feed any more.

Ignore other people’s “likes”

What gets a “like” varies from person to person. Especially (but not exclusively) among a lot of old-school users, “likes” (which used to be stars, which is part of the problem) are used as sort of a bookmarking system, or generally marking things for future referece. It may genuinely be “I like this”, but “I need to think about this more”, “this is significant”, “I want to read this link later”, and lots of other options are equally valid, and you can’t tell. Don’t assume.

Bizarrely, Twitter has started using “likes” as a signal for what to show people in the official client, supporting both the idea that you should absolutely use a 3rd-party client and that they don’t understand their own product at all.

Report abusive behavior

Twitter isn’t very good about handling abuse and harrasment, but they do sometimes take appropriate action. If you see someone being genuinely abusive or they are harrasing you, report them. You can do this from right in any decent client.

Down the road…

Once you’ve been using it for a while, there are some other things you might want to know about.

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