Social Media for Learning
It took me almost ten years, but I think I am finally using Twitter “correctly”.
What changed
Ruthlessly trimming the list of people I follow made the biggest impact. All the negativity is gone. Then, change the trends to a location of no interest so that it either gives no suggestions or the suggestions are completely foreign to you.
Changes in who I follow: removing
The majority of people I followed before were software engineers. Myself being one, it just felt natural to see what other devs were thinking and doing. Also, I think subconsciously I thought I will get good tips/tricks, and articles from other devs.
Looking back, the resulting feed was mostly toxic chatter. I know this is a generalization, but it appears that for devs the twitter is an outlet to whine and complain.
Cutting all of that has been fantastic. I barely follow any software devs now.
Changes in who I follow: adding
I have started to venture into financial twitter. And no, not the news, but independent investors. It’s amazing the information that they share and the engagement they provide.
It’s incredible how positive and informative the feed has become. Some of my favorite follows right now, in no particular order:
https://twitter.com/saxena_puru
https://twitter.com/Beth_Kindig
https://twitter.com/OphirGottlieb ← amaze
https://twitter.com/morganhousel ← read everyting and anything this man writes
Consumption of feeds
I am training myself to mentally avoid judging the tweets I read with “agree” or “disagree”.
It’s difficult to do but I believe you can train yourself to do so.
To replace the judging behavior, I instead like to play a game where I try to predict what the responses to the tweet are before looking at them. It’s a fun game but I think it teaches your mind to flexible and to consider the reactions that others will have.
Finally, I do let judgment eventually come into play and retweet or like the posts I find informative. Stuff I disagree with or don’t find useful, I leave it alone and do not engage. Positive activity only.
Search and validate
I now often go to twitter to validate an idea or a topic. Seeing what others are saying about a topic can give you additional data points or thoughts you otherwise would not consider.
It’s important to treat the messages you see as small signals instead of trying to buy into or oppose what others are saying. Judgment can come as a very last step or not at all. The most important is to gather the information and add it to the picture that’s in your head.
This approach has been very successful in getting the usefulness out of the immense knowledge out there. And it’s not limited to Twitter only. I have found Reddit incredible useful, perhaps even more than twitter, but again, only if I use it for positive and information gathering purposes.
Disabling Trends for you
Twitter trends can be a major source of noise and hard to ignore. Also hard to disable. The next best thing is to set your location to a country with language you do not understand or the topics are completely unrelated to you that it won’t suck you in.
Best if you can find a country with low usage where there are no trends. I tried Moldova and so far so good:
Just a lonely ad…
