Thread by @flancian

One of the best things about following people freely (I follow 1.7k people, have way fewer followers) is that it allows me to effectively implement ranked follows by hand. Twitter should support this natively, but this is what we have.

I think the approach has some merit.

1/

This is how it works: whenever I see someone that looks interesting, I check their account quickly for obvious red flags (it's important to define those well, but that's likely outside the scope of this thread) and I follow them.

2/

This does mean my TL is in practice only an effectively random sampling of all accounts I follow. This is because Twitter doesn't tell us exactly how ranking works. That's suboptimal, but also OK for my purposes for now.

3/

This also means that I cannot remember everybody I follow, often even if I interacted with them before. That's OK as it allows for the next step: it takes place whenever I see someone interesting, go to their profile to check them out, and find I'm already following them.

4/

When this happens, it makes me happy; it means that this person is doubly-interesting to me (at least). If Twitter let me, I would follow them again, or mark them as having a higher weight in the rankings. It doesn't, so instead I do two things.

5/

First, I interact with them there and then; like their posts, reply some, retweet some if appropriate. If not then, when? My TL might not show them to me for quite long. By interacting with them I also likely increase the likelihood of them being up-ranked.

6/

Then, I add them to my Roam. I keep a sort of "shadow social graph" there, essentially. I deeply believe that Roam should start a social network, or Twitter should focus social note taking, or both (federation?). But @jack and @Conaw of course don't follow me, and so it goes.

7/

This is an example of a node in my Roam social graph.

https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1284113835461419008

8/

I do this, even though it takes lots of manual work, because I strongly believe social knowledge graphs are the future. We may need them to escape the trap of high-addictiveness, low-constructiveness current day social networks; and to work together better.

9/

If you had a social knowledge graph with enough users, what would you do with it?

I know what I'd do: I'd build an Agora.

10/10

flancia.org/agora