I broke down and joined Twitter after all these years. Sorry if I am being dense, but I assumed Twitter would work like Facebook. Yet, before I have “followed” anyone or connected with friends, I am already receiving various Tweets from strangers. How are people just blasting off Tweets to random people? Again, my apologies if this is second-hand to those who Tweet frequently, but it is not so obvious to me. I’m waaay behind here.
THE CROWD GOES WILD! They were just waiting for you to join the whole time.
Seriously, yes, that is how it works. Some people use various methods to troll for followers. You can just ignore them. Facebook isn’t immune to that either unless I know way more hispanic and Russian escorts than I can recall.
A lot of the “people” who contact you on twitter aren’t people. They’re bots. You can visit their profile and see if they’re mostly posting ads for things, reposting webpages, or have actual original content. If there’s real content, it’s often someone who got a message from twitter saying that someone from their email address book has joined twitter.
Plus, there’s a security setting that allows you to choose if anyone can contact you via Direct Messages, or just people you follow, and turning it to the latter will keep you from hearing from bots you’re not following.
Even if you haven’t followed anyone yet, Twitter will show you some assortment of posts from other users. As you begin to follow accounts, Twitter will begin to narrow down what it is showing you based on your tendencies. Follow a user closely linked to marine animal research? You’ll start seeing posts from other similar users. Eventually when you’ve followed enough users to keep your twitter feed full, you’ll see less and less of the “suggested” Twitterers.
Twitter does not want you to see an empty feed. YOU MUST BE ENTERTAINED.:rolleyes:
I’m an author, and when I joined Twitter my first few tweets were about my books. Almost immediately I started being followed by freelance editors and other authors, especially ones who write in the same fields as I do.
So a different question.
When Herr Twitler sends out one of his hourly rants about whatever just crossed his awareness, why can’t other people respond? Why can’t people counter the twit in chief right at the source?
I don’t understand this question. You can type a response to his tweets. Most of his tweets have thousands of replies, which are listed right below the tweet.
It’s probably that I don’t understand twitter.
Oversimplified:
So someone like trump (or whoever) sends out one of his tweets, say, “The lying media isn’t reporting terrorist attacks. Sad!”
I take it that then all his loyal followers get these tweet in their feed, and say, hell yeah! You tell 'em Donnie!
But can’t someone immediately reply with “that’s not true at all”? And shouldn’t the followers see that?
Do they just ignore it? Hide it? Block it? Dismiss it? And why?
I am old. Please use small words. 
Yes. I started tweeting about the progress of my novel and got a lot of tweets and likes by “promoters” and “editorial services.” Not to mention tweets saying “buy my self-published books” - all of whom are best selling authors (most likely because they were number 37 on Amazon’s list of Edwardian semi-paranormal gay romance novels one day.).
Then there are all the new agey encouragements.
Generally speaking, you only see a tweet if you follow the person who tweeted it. So, if Donald Trump, who has millions of followers and therefore ranks very highly on Twitter’s algorithms as someone who should be heard tweets something incorrect and I, with my few 10s of followers, tweet a rebuttal, Twitter doesn’t give a shit. My few followers will see the tweet and anyone who sees Trump’s tweet and want to dig down through potentially 10s of thousands of replies could see my tweet but that’s incredibly rare. In addition, you can curate your followings and your feed to limit it showing you retweets and so on so in those cases, if they have their feed set to just display Trump’s tweets, they may never even see the replies to care to investigate.
You won’t see any responses automatically (unless you follow one of the respondees) but if you click on (for example) trump’s tweet you then see the responses.
It’s not really a Facebook replacement but I like it because it’s quick and timely. I follow news sources and some personalities. When we had an ice storm that knocked out power for days, it was a lifesaver.
Thanks for the explanation. Now it makes more sense.
If you don’t mind some more questions from a cranky old f@rt…
Can Trump see the replies to his tweets? If he can, is there any evidence that he reads them?
When Trump tweets from the official White House account, do the replies all get read by the Secret Service, looking for threats? Would someone writing, “you’re a lying sack of poo” be under scrutiny, or just tweets saying, “you’re on my SDMB Death List?”
The Obama administration had a whole staff dedicated to reading snail mail as well as e-mails to the president. Does that still exist today? Would a tweet be considered mail to the president?
Thanks!
Trump typically gets thousands of replies to every tweet. Most are from bots or other automated tweet machines. But some are from real people, both supporters and detectors.
Does trump read them? I expect he reads some. But I don’t think there is anyway to prove that one way or the other.
As for the Secret Service getting involved in responding to a threat, I guess the same rules apply to Twitter responses that apply to other communications means. So you can call trump a dumbass, a shit stain, or whatever clever insult you want to lob. But what you can’t do is say I’m going to kill you, you shit stain dumbass. It’s not the shit stain dumbass part that gets you in trouble, see?
Huh, I never knew that.
Does anyone know if he’s still using an unsecured phone to tweet his personal messages? Legitimate question, why isn’t that being investigated by Jason Chaffetz?