How I use Twitter

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If you’re reading this, I may not be writing this for you. If you’re on Twitter already, follow more than a handful of people, and check Twitter at least once a day, I’m probably not writing this for you.

Twitter just launched this feature called Moments, which is its latest attempt to figure out how to make itself appealing to the billions of people who don’t use it. There are something like 300 million people who *do* use it, but the logic of late Capitalism requires endless growth or the risk of being accused of Not Doing It Right, so . . . they’ve added a thing that’s basically the same as the “Trending Stories” thing on Facebook, the one that always wants to tell you about some celebrity’s selfie with a bucket of chicken or whatever.

Nevertheless, it is a fairly well recognized problem that Twitter only really makes sense to most people after they’ve been using it for a while, and have accumulated a list of people to follow that in some way provides some intrinsic value. And Twitter has struggled for years to figure out how to help bootstrap new users to this point more quickly.

I myself have quite a few Facebook friends who have joined Twitter, announcing on Facebook “well, I have joined Twitter, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do next, but I guess you can follow me at __________.” This guide is for those people, as well as the rest of y’all who haven’t even gotten that far.

So this may or may not be how I use Twitter, but it may be useful notes on how one might get started using Twitter, in the form of an unordered list of assertions.

  • Following people is cheap (i.e. free), so follow as many people as you want. See something retweeted by someone else that looks interesting? Follow the person who tweeted it. See someone’s twitter handle on the side of a bus or something? Sure, why not. I’m assuming Twitter has tools for finding some initial set of people to follow. Use them. If not, just follow me & on most days I’ll probably tweet (and retweet) more than you really want to read. @rossgrady. I’m easy to find.
  • Unfollowing people is also cheap. You get notified when someone follows you, but you don’t get notified when someone unfollows you. I tend to follow liberally and also unfollow liberally, particularly if someone tweets a lot & a significant percentage of their tweets are not interesting to me. Feel free to unfollow me after a day or two.
  • Follow your friends. If they’re like my friends, they’ve largely abandoned Facebook, so you’ll find them on Twitter or you’ll have to actually talk to them in person.
  • Follow random strangers. On Facebook that dynamic is weird — I rarely accept friend requests from people I haven’t met in person — but on Twitter that’s the norm; it’s expected. Nobody will think twice if you follow them without knowing them in any way. Some sage at some point said “Facebook is for people you know; Twitter is for people you want to get to know” or something like that, and that’s at least part of it.
  • There is absolutely no requirement that you follow people who follow you, or vice versa. None. Courtesy exists in many forms on the internet, but the mutual followback isn’t one of them. I currently have 1831 followers, and I follow 710 people, which is probably about 2x as many people as I should be following. Following any more than around 500 people can become kind of a chore, depending on how often they tweet.
  • Check it once a day, or check it 100 times a day. Your call. Some people (myself included) have this probably unhealthy need to see every tweet that crosses their timelines, so my morning ritual includes scrolling back to the last tweet that I remember from bedtime the night before, and then reading forward until I’m caught up. There is absolutely no reason to feel compelled to do this, so if you don’t, all the better.
  • Depending on the mix of people you follow, Twitter might be some or all of the following things: Joke city; reliable news before the major networks have it; minutiae about the daily lives of friends & strangers; strange micro-fiction (which may or may not be labeled as such); inside jokes from various subcultures; press releases about new music/art/film; shop talk; endless political opinion; glimpses into the lives/worlds of people very different from yourself; sports scores; random dictionary words; pictures of cute animals.
  • Always follow at least one cute animal account.

Getting started is hard; there’s no question about that. If I were starting over, I would begin to build my list of people to follow with some from each of the following categories:

  • Local journalists (several)
  • National journalists (not many)
  • Favorite musicians (a handful)
  • Friends (all of them you can find, to begin with; delete later, guiltlessly, as needed)
  • Experts in your professional field of endeavor
  • People who write about, or otherwise share, your avocation(s)
  • Your three favorite restaurants
  • The local movie theater & concert venues
  • Cute animal accounts (seriously, SO worth it)

The crucial next step is to read regularly, and make mental note if you find yourself enjoying the tweets of someone you don’t follow, being retweeted into your timeline by people you do follow. You can set your own mental threshold (mine is probably around a half-dozen (or more); for starters yours should probably be like three); if you see more than that many tweets of interest from someone you don’t follow, then click their name & follow them. Simple as that.

You are always welcome to give up anytime. But I would probably suggest that it’s worthwhile to hang in there until you’re following at least 100 people, and have spent a few weeks reading and getting used to the zeitgeist of the whole thing.

I was going to make a list of people who would be good starter follows, but as I scroll through my timeline I’m not convinced that I could wholeheartedly recommend anyone I follow in that capacity. Yet I love them all. Thus is the nature of Twitter.

How I use Twitter

September 25 – October 1, 2015

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Saw Yo La Tengo from one of the fancy “Legacy Boxes” at the Carolina on Saturday night. We were in the middle box, which meant that a big chunk of one side of the stage was blocked from view by the box closest to the stage. I could only see Ira’s head, intermittently, unless I basically hung over the edge of the box and leaned out over the crowd below.

Still, it was an amusing experience. We had our own waitress, which mostly meant being distracted repeatedly during favorite songs by someone asking us if we wanted anything. I bought a couple of beers, in part so I could tip the young woman for walking up & down the stairs repeatedly, but then it was revealed that the Carolina’s credit card system is (logically enough) just set up for the counter sales they do downstairs, so there wasn’t a tip line on the credit card receipt. And she brought it up while I was in the bathroom, so even if I’d had a couple of singles on me, I didn’t actually see her to thank her.

The only reason we were in the box at all was because I flaked on buying tickets until all the good up-close floor seats were already sold. Memo to self: be quicker on the draw next time.

The show itself was good, of course — Ira was on acoustic guitar the whole time, so long-ago fourth member Dave Schramm, re-added for the recording of the new album & this tour, held down all of the electric guitar duties. He was phenomenal, full of expertly placed fills & the occasional amazing solo when such a thing was called for. Watching him was what kept me fully tuned-in through two sets that were otherwise a little more samey than I would normally prefer in a Yo La Tengo show — this was billed as an acoustic tour, in honor of the 25th anniversary of Fakebook & the release of Stuff Like That There, which is itself basically a tribute to Fakebook. So it was basically two hours of music that sounded like those two albums.

Highlight for me was a lovely mesmerizing version of “Deeper Into Movies,” which is usually a barn-burner live but which here packed all of that intensity into a hushed package, the only percussion Georgia’s fingertips on her cymbals.

Sunday night we started Todd Haynes’s 6-hour miniseries adaptation of Mildred Pierce, which took most of the rest of the week to finish, us being Working People and all. Unlike the 1945 Joan Crawford noir from the same source material, the Haynes is actually an almost completely faithful adaptation of the James M Cain novel, down to big stretches of the dialogue. Which is a good thing, because the book is one of the great noir melodramas, and six hours is just about the right length of time to do it justice.

My only quibble is that Haynes & his lead actress Kate Winslet didn’t (or couldn’t) go as far as the book in portraying Mildred’s pathological devotion to daughter Veda, which in the book takes on a decidedly carnal tone, particularly in the second half. Not that she wanted to sleep with her; that she somehow wanted to consume her, to become her, to reunite with her flesh. It’s remarkably weird in the novel, and you get some of that vibe in the movie, but not enough of it.

This week I had a bit of an about-face in my thinking about ads & ad-blocking. There has been a lot written on the topic recently due to the inclusion of ad-blocking APIs in iOS9. I read a lot of news on the web, and I have a fairly large number of friends who are professional journalists (plus a bunch more in the part-time/amateur category). Such writing has been ad-supported for, what, 200 years? More? But the migration of everything to the web has been hugely destructive to professional journalism, and blocking ads would seem to be just one more nail in its coffin.

So I have resisted installing ad-blocking software on my computers because I want journalism to still exist as a profession.

But the other day I read this essay by Maciej Ceglowski, the guy behind the awesome bookmarking site Pinboard. He is possibly better known for his acerbic tweets about the tech industry, but he also makes a living by charging a large number of people a small amount of money for a single-purpose service that Just Works (and has no ads).

The essay (which you should go read) makes the point that the giant iceberg floating under the surface of modern web advertising is this horrible arms race between click-fraud botnets & increasingly complex & heavyweight anti-click-fraud code, which has led to both an increase in unwanted tracking (reliable human-detection almost requires it) and an increase in the size of websites & the complexity of code they run, just to be able to serve ads.

He proposes ad-blocking as both rational protection from this iceberg, and as protest against it & everything it represents.

I still haven’t installed ad-blocking software on my computer, but that’s because I’m in the middle of a one-month experiment with micro-payments. I’ll have more to say about that in a week or two.

In other news, my trip this weekend to Atlanta was canceled because Afropunk ATL was itself canceled due to this endless rain & the threat of more serious weather to come. Hugely bummed about not getting to see all the bands; significantly less bummed about not standing in the rain in 60-degree weather for 20 hours.

Oh, one more thing. This.

Specifically this: “The team plans on naming the restaurant “Hattie Mae Williams Called Me Captain”. Brooks explained, “The name comes from an amazing woman who took care of my sisters and me growing up while my mom was at work; basically working for next to nothing during times when my mom couldn’t afford to pay for her. She used to call me Mr. President, until Robert Kennedy was shot. I was two at the time, and she decided that that wasn’t really a safe aspiration to have for me any longer. So she started calling me ‘Captain’ instead.

“She’s the person who taught me how to hit a baseball; she taught me how to collect things. Mostly I think she just taught me how to make a full and rich life out of next to nothing, lessons that I’ve carried with me, and have definitely put into cooking.”

To which my friend Eric Tullis replied:

Yep.

September 25 – October 1, 2015

September 14-24, 2015

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After Hopscotch came Hopscotch Recovery. But also a quick trip to Atlanta, where I had a decent burger at a neighborhood store/grill in Cabbagetown, saw Mr. Quintron play his Weather Warlock in an art gallery, and oh yeah, talked to students for six hours or so.

Then another 4-6 hours of studententalken at UNC. Friday night, after it was all over, we went to the Carolina and saw Grandma, which I did not enjoy as much as I had hoped I would. The script was kind of over-obvious (an old lady! is a lesbian! who cusses a lot!) and over-determined (her daughter has issues! so does her granddaughter!) and, as M said as we were leaving, it sounded like someone’s first attempt.

(of course as it turns out, the dude who wrote & directed it, generally a purveyor of vaguely screwball comedies & rom-coms, was actually nominated for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for a Hugh Grant/Nick Hornsby thing — but I guess that probably just proves the point)

Plus, and there’s no easy way to say this, Lily Tomlin’s upper lip looked like a piece of bologna that had been glued on to her real upper lip. It was smooth and rarely moved. I don’t think she could have puckered if she had tried — a double tragedy for someone whose early career was made, in part, on puckering. She’s 74 years old. She doesn’t look 74, but she also doesn’t look any other human age.

I know she’s far & away not the only one, but it hits harder with the ones you respect & admire.

Anyway, point being, her face interfered with her ability to act on camera. Her eyes were down in there, working, but she mostly relied on just hamming the shit out of every line she had to deliver. It was depressing.

Saturday we were back at the Carolina for RetroEpics, albeit just one, Once Upon a Time in the West, which I’d already seen multiple times. I was thoroughly diverted by it, although M had read a comparatively negative review of it aloud to me right before we walked over there, so I was a little more acutely aware of its, uh, quirks. It’s kind of all quirks, actually, and is in many ways closer in spirit to a Jodorowsky movie than to “western” movies, even earlier Leone westerns.

Beyond that, I guess I’ve mostly been working & reading. Listening to music. Today I listened to the new Wyrms album, At Wizard Island. It’s pure fuzzed-out garage/psych/pop pleasure, just one hook after another, totally buried in fuzz, but still absurdly catchy. Pretty hard to argue with.

At the opposite end of one spectrum or another, I’ve also had a big chunk of Wes Tirey’s discography on repeat. He’s from Asheville, plays guitar, kinda talk-sings in that old, weird style — but he also unexpectedly busts out ominous organ parts, or goes on long improvisational flights. Cue up that Bandcamp & sample a bunch of it.

Tonight there are two shows in town that I want to go to, which is still kind of a rarity in Durham, despite the number of venues in town. Patois Counselors are going to win this round, though, hands down, no contest.

September 14-24, 2015