Twitter is one of those places that people hate and use at the same time. Millions upon millions of users log in every day to share photos and quick thoughts, talk to friends and random folks around the globe, and stream the feed looking for interesting articles, news, images, videos, and more to share. It’s both a brilliant platform and a nightmare zone full of trolls, angry mobs, bot farms, organized harassment campaigns, and plain old assholes. And then there’s the cycle of negativity that Twitter seems to produce, both in its algorithmic structure and in the culture of “all engagement is good engagement” that exists there. If you’ve ever logged into Twitter and thought “my mood has taken a nosedive” or lost hours of your life to doom scrolling, then you know what I’m talking about.
As an avid Twitter user — it being my primary platform — I know exactly what it’s like to face some of these things. I’ve dealt with trolls, bots, a harassment campaign, and far too many assholes to list. By comparison to others — especially women and members of minority groups — I’ve had it easy, but that doesn’t mean the experience on Twitter hasn’t been destructive. Twitter tends to make us into worse people. But it doesn’t have to be that way…totally…
There’s likely no way to make any social network problem free, but there are some things you can do to make Twitter a less sucky place. Here are seven of them:
