Twitter can be fine, it can be priceless. The problem with Twitter:
Their client is bad and they mostly killed off good third party clients. I build my own client to solve this, most people can't or wont.
I want a client that prioritizes the things I follow and read the most (i.e. everyday), @newsyc50 or @newycombinator, @zerohedge, @arstechnica, @techmeme, @pkedrosky. @kdnuggets, @reuters, @variety, @politico. @zerohedge is the controversial one of the bunch. My client shows counters on unread messages for each so I know when new tweets are available and they are one click away.
Next I surface trends from the larger body of follows I'm interested in but don't have time to read. I process everything through spaCy and use its increasingly very good entity recognition to find the trending topics in my feed, much better than Twitter's BS trending. When something is tweeted from 5 or 6 places its a trend I may be interested in. I can adjust this threshold up and down.
I lookup each entity in a local Wikipedia database so if its someone or something famous its one click to read about them in depth. If there is no match its probably someone or something new to the Internet which is also interesting to know.
You need a critical mass of follows for this to work, like several thousand. It is a chore to find several thousand interesting people and organizations to follow. Most people aren't going to do this work which is why most people hate Twitter. Following that many is also noisy so you need a client that prioritizes for signal.
Don't read replies to a tweet unless its really interesting, there are a few interesting replies but they are usually pointless, noisy and/or toxic.
Filter out replies by people you follow most of the time. Most of the time. though not always, these replies are noisy and uninteresting.
I have a smooth scrolling feed I just look at to see what everyone is talking about. It was a bit of of a pain to implement when they killed off the stream API, though I replaced it by polling the feed just below rate limit.
I poll everyone I follow if the client has been off for a while to fill the holes in my timeline.
There's Mastodon, but last time I was there it was only really big with a slightly creepy Japanese anime crowd. There just wasn't that much interesting English content to read.
Mastodon's API's are mostly open source standards which means they tend to be messy and inconsistent.
As far as user monetization the main strategy was predictable pleas for Patreon donations and some people constantly begging for money with a new crisis/excuse each day or various forms of victim hood.
I still like Twitter because it has high signal to noise ratio news feeds and power users, once you find them. Not sure how usable its going to be once they gut their Stream API in a month though.
To be honest, all social networks look like they are in various stages of epic FAIL and the perennial search for the new one that is going make it all better is probably in vain.
There are a slew of inherent structural problems in social networks many of which arise out of the fact that crowds, tribes, herds tend to bring out and amplify the worst in human nature. Its recommended you read up on mimetic theory before you play:
Either you allow largely unconstrained free speech and your network turns in to an abusive cess pool, or you constantly police and suppress it and it turns in to China. There isn't really an easily identified middle road.
Their client is bad and they mostly killed off good third party clients. I build my own client to solve this, most people can't or wont.
I want a client that prioritizes the things I follow and read the most (i.e. everyday), @newsyc50 or @newycombinator, @zerohedge, @arstechnica, @techmeme, @pkedrosky. @kdnuggets, @reuters, @variety, @politico. @zerohedge is the controversial one of the bunch. My client shows counters on unread messages for each so I know when new tweets are available and they are one click away.
Next I surface trends from the larger body of follows I'm interested in but don't have time to read. I process everything through spaCy and use its increasingly very good entity recognition to find the trending topics in my feed, much better than Twitter's BS trending. When something is tweeted from 5 or 6 places its a trend I may be interested in. I can adjust this threshold up and down.
I lookup each entity in a local Wikipedia database so if its someone or something famous its one click to read about them in depth. If there is no match its probably someone or something new to the Internet which is also interesting to know.
You need a critical mass of follows for this to work, like several thousand. It is a chore to find several thousand interesting people and organizations to follow. Most people aren't going to do this work which is why most people hate Twitter. Following that many is also noisy so you need a client that prioritizes for signal.
Don't read replies to a tweet unless its really interesting, there are a few interesting replies but they are usually pointless, noisy and/or toxic.
Filter out replies by people you follow most of the time. Most of the time. though not always, these replies are noisy and uninteresting.
I have a smooth scrolling feed I just look at to see what everyone is talking about. It was a bit of of a pain to implement when they killed off the stream API, though I replaced it by polling the feed just below rate limit.
I poll everyone I follow if the client has been off for a while to fill the holes in my timeline.