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Nice advice, it's hard to start in twitter, maybe there is so much noise that everything we think to post just never seems right. @cuasiperfecto.

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It's easy to fall into a trap of thinking that everything has to be "perfect", when if you notice what a lot of the more popular twitter people have are loooots of tweets. Tens of thousands. Most of those are probably not very important and lost to memory. That's why I feel it's much more freeing to treat it as a personal tool for conversation instead of a public performance.

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The Twitter data community seems generally fantastic, but it takes so much work to avoid the negative and toxic parts of the platform. I want to spend hours immersed in data and visualization and stats, as told by the smartest, most thoughtful people. But that's a challenge when the politics and the hot takes pop up everywhere, like attentional black holes.

Do you have any automatic-ish ways of addressing that? I wish there was an NLP uBlock Origin that just filtered out controversy!

Thanks for a great article. Recent subscriber, love your blog!

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The complexity of social media, at least with twitter, is that people are people there, and (most of the interesting accounts anyways) aren't mono-topic. So inevitably you're going to come across opinions about all sorts of stuff... I tend to handle it at the level of being somewhat careful who I do follow and put onto my timeline, and let my eyeballs filter the rest. Others are pretty aggressive about utilizing shared blocklists of certain types of users, as well as aggressive use of the keyword mute feature...

There's no automated way that I know of to whitelist certain things, only maintenance of blacklists.

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