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- How much of your coding is done by AI coding agents these days? Posted on June 21st, 2026 | 33 comments
How do you use Twitter?
Five is a sufficiently close approximation to infinity. -- Robert Firth "One, two, five." -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Unreported news (Score:2)
One of the main reasons I am on Twitter is the unreported news you get there. New stories usually carry a quote or two from the opposition, but on Twitter you get a fuller picture of what they said. You also get to see all the stuff that wasn't deemed worth reporting, the things politicians say that don't make the sound-bites.
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I use 9gag for that.
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This is similar reasoning that many in the media give for being on Twitter. From a journalism side, it can provide direct access to people either for collecting information on events or for disseminating that information to many without filtering by large media outlets. From an entertainment perspective, personalities claim this is the best way to engage with hordes of fans.
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disseminating that information to many without filtering by large media outlets.
Except that Twitter is a "large media outlet" and does plenty of content filtering itself nowadays. So, back to square one.
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New stories usually carry a quote or two from the opposition, but on Twitter you get a fuller picture of what they said.
But aren't tweets supposed to be short? If I want the big picture, I'd just use a search engine using a recent time filter and scan through the links one by one.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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This, 100%. I've done it twice. Each time tried to keep the toxicity away, but it kept creeping into my feed. I'm much more relaxed since quitting. Believe it or not, reddit filled the gap left behind. For all people talk about reddit, it's much easier to avoid the toxic BS there than on Twitter.
Two more missing options (Score:2)
Two more missing options:
"Had an account, used it once, haven't used it since."
"Had an account but got banned."
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Another missing option:
Spasmodic.
Long periods when I don't touch Twitter, but sometimes I feel like I have to get a tweet off my chest. Today's example:
Putin: "The Ukraine war situation is not necessarily developing to Russia's advantage."
@ZelenskyyUa: "Shut up, Vlad. You lost. Now get your stinking war criminals out of our #Ukraine."
Bozo Putin: "Is not war. Is potato. Is joke. Laugh."
But my overall opinion of Twitter may be mutating, possibly as a side effect of The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. Much of the book is about memes and I've starting thinking of Twitter as a mechanism for propagating and even developing new memes. Most of the memes are trash, but most of everything is trash. Yet some of them must be golden, and if
Re: Missing option (Score:2)
Re: Missing option (Score:2)
You can't choose to follow someone who is banned from the platform.
Re:Missing option (Score:4)
Then I try Twitter again and within 0.0004 seconds one or more of these things happens and I have come to realize these issues are by design and are hardwired into Twitter itself. It is impossible to manage a Twitter account and not have these things happen to you. As a result, the only options are 1) pay someone to run your Twitter for you (which is a bit expensive) or 2) stay far, far away.
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I made a Twitter account as a joke back in 2008 so I could @ someone, get an @ reply, send a DM, and receive a DM, then tell my friend that, "I finished Twitter - the last boss wasn't even hard!" (i.e. I'd done everything there is to do on Twitter in a few minutes).
I did use it once since then to contact Dell support for an issue with a PowerEdge server, but that's already years ago now.
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What is it that made you log in to Twitter to obtain tech support, instead of going to Dell's own site and submitting a ticket from there?
I used to do support for a hosting service, and very rarely was there a problem that could be fully and clearly explained in 140 characters. For some reason I could never fathom, they actually entertained support requests on Twitter. The guy monitoring Twitter had to act as a middleman by creating a ticket on the customer's behalf, then handing it over to the customer, in
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Your options for actually talking to someone at Dell are phone and Twitter DM. It was outside business hours, and I hadn't paid for 24-hour phone support, so my options were to log in to Twitter or wait until the next morning.
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I see... where I worked, emails went directly to the admins' ticket queue, which was monitored 24 hours. I guess Dell just sold you the hardware and not any service.
It just gives off a bad Karen vibe, like you're asking for the manager publicly on social media. That, at least, was how it often played out where I worked. If a customer felt his ticket wasn't being addressed fast enough, the thing to do was get on the company's FB/Twitter page and start yelling.
I'm not sure whether that actually caused the iss
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What is it that made you log in to Twitter to obtain tech support, instead of going to Dell's own site and submitting a ticket from there?
I used to do support for a hosting service, and very rarely was there a problem that could be fully and clearly explained in 140 characters. For some reason I could never fathom, they actually entertained support requests on Twitter. The guy monitoring Twitter had to act as a middleman by creating a ticket on the customer's behalf, then handing it over to the customer, instead of the customer just submitting it directly and immediately into the queue. It was always a longer, more complicated process for both parties.
I do this cause these days you're much more likely to get a response from a business if you tweet at em versus putting update #10 in a ticket that no one's looked at for two weeks.
I've always assumed this is because of the visibility of mentions -- potential customers can look at the mentions tab and see if there's a bunch of unanswered complaints, whereas no one but you knows about a weeks-old untouched ticket.
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It's definitely about maintaining a social media presence. I can see a point in that, since it could increase business. But if the only way to get support from a company is to jump on social media and essentially vandalize their page, they obviously prioritize branding over their core business. At that point you should probably forget about the ticket, go straight to cancellation, and find someone competent to do business with.
I guess it's natural for people now to immediately jump on social media and start
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I never had a desire for a twitter account since its inception. The important posts from twitter are soon reposted to 4chan's /pol/ board and the stuff that doesn't make it there gets covered on Scott Adams' podcast which I listen to once in a while to get 'twitter's take' when I sense I may have missed something.
I don't like the idea of using my real name for anything. About five years ago I got a burner phone and used it to create some ids on mainstream platforms. Twitter will let you sign up over tor
Sorry I was too busy tweeting to respond to poll (Score:3)
I suspect there's some built in bias on who responds to this poll
Band And Game Shop Owner (Score:3)
I have a band and soon will own a game specific store. Both have some requirements for being on social media. As a gamer, I do follow a couple of game personalities (table top, not video) but only barely and have never tweeted.
[John]
The same goes for all so called (Score:1)
social media platforms.
You would have to pay me $100,000 just to even look at Twitter or FB or any of the others.
Why would I want to view posts made by brain dead numpties?
Yes, I include Elon Musk in this.
If they were to all cease to exist tomorrow, the mental health of tens of millions would improve almost overnight.
FB, TW etc are all blocked at my home firewall and have been for years.
Yes, but for how much longer ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately it also suffers from abuse, and from a ridiculous amount of deliberate misinformation spread by pro-putin / pro-trump / pro-brexit / pro-cryptocurrency / anti-mask / anti-vax / anti-globalwarming / anti-science trolls and bots. As Twitter seems to be unable to control this problem it's important to have a long and growing block list so that the idiocy doesn't overwhelm everything else. One of the main offenders is unfortunately the man-child Elon Musk, who has already used Twitter in a possibly illegal way to pump and dump for his own benefit. He and his band of stans have had a toxic effect on Twitter so far and the closer that that fool gets to being able to control, the further that sensible people will run away from it.
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I guess sunlight IS toxic to vampires. I guess free debate IS toxic to lies, and if you believe lies you *would* call truth disinformation, especially if your moral preconceptions and ego might be hurt by cognitive dissonance, and if you didn't debate you would never know your perspective was a delusion especially if it were shared among a similarly deluded insular group of vampires.
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When your objection to twitter involving rallying off a dozen viewpoints in contemporary discourse you don't want to see... maybe you would be better off joining a subreddit that caters to your politics, instead of expecting that everyone on an open platform will homogeneously support your ideals?
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You said
There are reputable journalists and scientists using the service and their tweets are worth reading.
Then you said
Unfortunately it also suffers from abuse, and from a ridiculous amount of deliberate misinformation spread
Hey guess what - same people!
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Twitter is currently quite a good place to keep up with news. There are reputable journalists and scientists using the service and their tweets are worth reading. Unfortunately it also suffers from abuse, and from a ridiculous amount of deliberate misinformation spread by pro-putin / pro-trump / pro-brexit / pro-cryptocurrency / anti-mask / anti-vax / anti-globalwarming / anti-science trolls and bots.
it's hilarious to me that you, and millions of you, are so myopic on this. "My guys are reputable scientists and journalists, and all their guys are trolls and bots."
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Whenever I see those guys, I wonder if these are really from troll farms (I saw an older pic of many, many cell phones being wired to one PC). But then I remember to "Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice".
That being said, I just keep a list of interesting sources (mostly political/military analysts and journalists), tend to chat a bit within my (automatically generated) echo chamber, and ignore everyone else. I always knew people with exactly my own world view were the only bearable chat partners
Re: Yes, but for how much longer ? (Score:2)
Shallow (Score:5, Insightful)
Twitter is the perfect app for our culture today. We worked hard to reduce all of the political discourse in the US down to meaningless soundbites, then twitter came along and reduced it to less than a complete sentence! Complex issue with many factors to consider where a single ideologically based solution will never work? Not anymore! Just tweet out a couple of words for the tribe to rally around and use to generate hate for the other tribe.
It's helping significantly to drive the factionalization of the political process to allow the political class to screw the average person harder than ever.
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If you understand IRC and UseNET and liked them for their "unwebbiness", then you understand twitter.
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more than a platform like facebook for example? and there was a point were facebook was a prerequisite for some jobs..
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Obvious missing option.. (Score:3)
"Banned"
Maybe this isn't an issue for Slashdotters these days, it looks like most everyone left here is on board with the MSM/Big Tech/Gov narrative.
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Same here; I was publishing and linking to RAW COVID numbers coming out of various states and got the ban-hammer...
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FREE-SPEECH!
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Or rejected. I have tried making a twitter account three times, but they always quickly find it "suspicious" (despite not writting anything) and ask me to give them more private information, and shuts it down when I do not.
I miss an option from the poll (Score:2)
Get on the Fediverse (Score:1)
The fediverse is better. Thousands of independently run servers, using various open source software (Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, Friendica PeerTube for videos) all communicating using the ActivityPub standard. I'm @djsumdog@djsumdog.com on the Fedi. It's really the best place.
Twitter? What's Twitter? (Score:1)
Twitter was a login aggregator... (Score:2)
Back in the days of the early internet when nearly every site which provided some kind of message board required a brand new account, the problem was so many of these accounts were just being created so you could post a response or a start a new topic on something you needed help with. It's not like the account was storing anything "useful", and keeping track of all the logins and passwords was annoying.
A few years later many sites started using Twitter as a "single sign on" aggregator, now instead of mult
If you're into sports (Score:2)
Twitter is generally where sports news is reported first.
Use it for a complaint channel. (Score:1)
Certain brands are quite responsive to complaints on Twitter. I find it effective in that regard. Though cultivates an opinion of me that I'm related to Victor Meldrew.
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Care to give some examples? Or protecting your influence? You're worried if everyone did it?
Not sure if this poll is the trigger, but I thought of a trivial feature that would make Twitter much more valuable. Or at least it seems trivial, and it might be assuming too much to think that Twitter can ever have much value, but...
How about a "Likes" parameter for the search? If selected, then only tweets with more than the specified number of Likes would be visible. If you actually use Twitter search, it's easy
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*sigh*
s/one or two tweets/one or two Likes/
Re: (Score:1)
4291
Alternative use of Twitter (Score:1)
I only used my Twitter account to flag Trump's posts that violated the Terms of Service. There were quite a few. As soon as Twitter permanently banned him, I no longer had a need for my account, and haven't used it since.
But at least Twitter supports Unicode (Score:3)
I didn't care enough until I say xkcd.com/2606
His explanations are not accurate, but the glyphs are and I am sorely tempted. I even looked at the neighborhood.
Use private lists and ignore the trolls. (Score:2)
I have several private lists of interesting accounts, organized by topic: news, programming, hardware, and so on which I check once in a while like RSS feeds.
Ignore the trolls.
I use Twitter to post Unix commands (Score:2)
I have an account where I post command line tricks and bad jokes. It's called climagic [twitter.com].
The only reason why (Score:1)
Why I don't have an account (Score:1)
I tried to make an account once, but when they insisted on getting my mobile phone number, I stopped.
Recently a post on Hackaday pointed me to Nitter. It makes reading posts on Twitter enjoyable again.
Missing option: Have account, never use it (Score:2)
Created account years ago but almost immediately realized it was a waste of time. Rarely, I will follow a link to a twitter conversation. Even more rarely, I will end up logging in. After a minute or two, my earlier assessment is revealed to be correct and I close the window for another few more months.
It can be interesting/fun. (Score:2)
I originally got Twitter as a replacement for an RSS feed so I am probably giving my age away.
It has been useful to see what certain interesting people/companies say. I am not convinced much of it is news though. On occasion, there can be someone tweeting a news item and that is when it can be "interesting".
It is impressive how strident and uninformed some people are. Many people from the USA, for example, have no idea how horrendously right-wing they are. They complain about "left-wing" oppression in t
No "No - I've been banned multiple times option" ? (Score:2)
I had an account but got banned... (Score:1)
Oh man Slashdot has declined... (Score:2)
Slashdot is asking me how to use Twitter now...
Kicked off of Twitter (Score:1)
A service for Twits? (Score:1)
Indeed (Score:1)
The audience are twits, and the speakers are twats.
I grief Elon Musk with group video calls (Score:2)
What?
You never did?
Hmm.
It's fun, you just set up the AI to do it