SivaLabs

Social media is a double-edged sword. Depending on how you use it can be really be helpful or become a source of pressure and frustration. I don’t use Facebook and Instagram much, but I use Twitter and recently started using LinkedIn too.

Twitter is my primary source of technical information. I follow many good people in Java Community. Twitter is a great platform to connect with those awesome people and I learn a lot from what they share. We also exchange our views on many technical and non-technical aspects and learn from each other.

Considering how things are going with Twitter now, I am rethinking about my social media usage. Many people are thinking of moving to other platforms like https://mastodon.social/ as an alternative to Twitter. I don’t know how the future holds for Twitter, but I think there are few things I should change regarding my social media usage.

1. Prefer writing a blog post over writing Twitter threads

Tweets are a very convenient way to exchange a small piece of information than writing a blog post. But sometimes the piece of information we want to share feels too much for a blog post but can’t fit in a tweet. Then we usually go for writing a thread. But recently Twitter threads become annoying and (mis)used for attracting more engagement. Personally I feel it is easier to read a blog post than a twitter thread. In addition to that, sometimes it is difficult to put our message along with context and people may misunderstand, and you end up adding more context in subsequent threads.

So, I decided to write a blog post whenever it makes sense than tweeting. Of course, I would share the link to my post on Twitter too.

2. Worthiness of Conversations

We, as human beings, express our feelings. Especially during and after this pandemic and WorkFromHome, loneliness became real problem. Sharing your joy or excitement or frustration over Zoom is not the same as doing it face-to-face.

You may learn something new, and you are excited to share it with someone. Or, you are struggling to with some tricky problem for hours and there is no one sitting next to you to share your frustration. Then we may express those feeling, opinions or frustrations in Social media like Twitter. As long as it is not offending anybody or belittling someone it shouldn’t be a problem. But, if people have that much understanding the world would be a better place.

Imagine I am sitting in a restaurant having my dinner and heard someone sitting at the next table telling his friend “This is the best ice cream in the world”.

Then, as a normal person, my reaction would be “Wow, that ice cream must be very delicious, maybe I should try it too”. Or, if I think there is some other flavour of ice cream that I think is even better than what he is eating then I may think “He didn’t know about THAT other ice cream which is much more delicious”. And, if I feel that person is a nice and approachable one then I might even tell him “Sir, I glad you are enjoying your ice cream, if possible try ‘THAT’ ice cream which is available in SO-AND-SO place, it is even more tasty. You will definitely like it”.

But, what I wouldn’t do is telling him “How dare you to say this is the best ice cream in the world. Did you eat all the ice creams in the world to pass such a blanket statement. You are insulting all other ice cream manufacturers. I won’t let you get away with this, I am going to expose your true face to the world by removing your mask”.

If you think no one would behave like that crazy then think again :-)

Life is too short to waste by engaging in conversations with those kind of people. So, I learned that it is very important to know whether someone is worthy of having a conversation or not.

I do have my own opinions which are different from others and at time I disagree with some people that I greatly admire and respect. But what we don’t do is disrespecting each others and doing personal attacks because we are matured enough to respect others opinions.

3. I own my content

One of my primary usage of Twitter is bookmarking references to good resources(articles, code repositories etc) using Like so that I can read it later. If worse comes to worst I may lose all that information. Earlier I started writing What I Learned in Week but stopped for some reason. I am going to restart that so that I don’t have to worry about loosing that data.

Happy learning & sharing :-)