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isn't that what retweets are for though?

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I used to tell myself they were for bookmarking or some kind of records but realistically I have never actually gone and looked at my own favorites or anyone else's. I now use them purely as a way to express a positive reaction to someone else's post. It's just a shorthand for saying "I liked this" or "thanks" or whatever is clearly contextually appropriate to the tweet, without needing to write a pointless reply with very little real information.

Yep, this is pretty much what I've been using the favorite function for. It's an easily expressed kudos or congratulation.

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isn't that what retweets are for though?

Retweets communicate to your followers more than they do your followees.

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I more or less figured that the largest use for it was to say "I like this thing you tweeted".  I guess I just needed to be told directly because I'm an old man apparently and I don't understand how to internet. 

 

I will say though that using favorites as a shorthand for liking something does work.  I admit to getting a thrill when someone favorites one of my tweets; if nothing else it at least tells me they saw it.

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isn't that what retweets are for though?

 

No, retweets are like regular tweets, they broadcast information. "I like something" shouldn't also necessarily mean "I will show this to everyone who follows me." I really dislike when people use retweeting as merely a way to show appreciation. I will just turn retweets off from those people. I don't like having my feed spammed with stuff like that.

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No, retweets are like regular tweets, they broadcast information. "I like something" shouldn't also necessarily mean "I will show this to everyone who follows me." I really dislike when people use retweeting as merely a way to show appreciation. I will just turn retweets off from those people. I don't like having my feed spammed with stuff like that.

 

Another example is when people like Danielle retweet some of the bullshit sexist stuff that gets tweeted at them.  They certainly don't like it and aren't retweeting to show any kind of appreciation.  It's more to raise awareness of a topic to the public than a specific comment to the original tweeter.

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Funnily enough, one of the few times I've got a gross response on twitter happened because Danielle retweeted something I said about not assigning numerical scores to women's looks.

I'm generally in favor of using the retweet to raise awareness about online harassment, but sometimes it can veer into this weird place when a woman with 20k followers is retweeting a gross dude who only has 20 (and most of those are bots). It can sometimes lead to this pile on that I never feel is productive.

(Disclaimer: I recognize that I can say this because I thankfully rarely ever deal with harassment online. If it were a more constant occurrence I'm sure my view on this would be different.)

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 retweeting a gross dude who only has 20 (and most of those are bots).

 

People make harassment bots?:(

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Oh sorry, I meant that the followers are bots. I do know that people make a ton of fake accounts for the sole purpose of sending harrassig tweets. For all the good that Twitter does it has a terribly inefficient way of protecting its users from that stuff.

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Yeah a weird fact about Twitter is that a massive percentage of followers are bots. Not because the person being followed is deliberately attracting bots to appear to have more followers, but because bot spam is a massive phenomenon. Twitter has full-time employees dedicated to figuring out ways to detect when a new user is a bot and to quickly ban them, but it's a tough battle. It's even harder because some bots don't actually spam you via replies, they just follow you in the hope that you'll click on their profile and follow whatever link is there—that's a hard thing to detect for.

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I've actually been using Twitter lately which is odd for me. I may make a habit of this. I've linked me before but here I am again. @theoneguy.

 

I mostly just retweet smarter people saying smart stuff and make inane comments on the latest anime I watched or game I played, though. So probably don't bother following me. DON'T DO IT.

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Yeah a weird fact about Twitter is that a massive percentage of followers are bots. Not because the person being followed is deliberately attracting bots to appear to have more followers, but because bot spam is a massive phenomenon. Twitter has full-time employees dedicated to figuring out ways to detect when a new user is a bot and to quickly ban them, but it's a tough battle. It's even harder because some bots don't actually spam you via replies, they just follow you in the hope that you'll click on their profile and follow whatever link is there—that's a hard thing to detect for.

 

I can't wait for the horrible future where everyone has at least one real-life friend that is secretly a petman trying to sell them things.

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I can't wait for the horrible future where everyone has at least one real-life friend that is secretly a petman trying to sell them things.

 

⭐️ Favorite.

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on tomorrow's episode of Idle Thumbs:

 

Jake Rodkin: "Today's episode brought to you by Hulu Plus!" *skin gel melts off of face to reveal Terminator skull*

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I've decided to return to twitter, after sort of falling off the internet for a while, on there I am also SuperBiasedMan.

I mostly like tweeting dumb jokes, retweeting cool game/animation things and talking to people.

 

I think my very first tweet does an adequate job of demonstrating this:

 

"Since I decided to try out twitter properly, I should come up with a good first tweet. No idea what to put though and I dont wanna mess it u"

-SuperBiasedMan - 11 Nov 2011

 

 

I've followed a bunch of people here but no doubt missed some people, so sorry if you were accidentally shunned!

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I use an app called Unfollowers, the website is https://unfollowers.com

 

It notifies me of follows and unfollows daily, and the website gives some interesting following/follower stuff that helps me manage my feed. The most useful thing it does it tell me who on my friends list hasn't been active for a while, which seems the best way to trim it down if not the most efficient in terms of the volume of my feed. The site also lets you sort followers/following by various statistics, I like sorting following by tweets per day so I can see who's tweeting the most and unfollow people who are filling up my feed with stuff that's relatively low value.

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That's the thing that got Chris Grant in some trouble. Don't see the harm of autoblocking < 7 day accounts that tweet you, though.

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I'm building a fuckwit detection tool for uni, will let people know how it's coming along (and how accurate it ends up being). It may only be useful for blocking 4chan fuckwits, but that's probably enough.

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