Getting the most out of Twitter

I’ve been on Twitter since 2015 and in the years I’ve learned few tips and tricks to keep an interesting and noise-less feed, just using the official client.

A refined feed

What I like the most of Twitter is getting valuable information without noise, where noise is anything that is uninteresting. How is that possible?

Disable Retweets

An account may be interesting to follow for its content but at the same time it could retweet too much, spamming the feed. It is possible to disable tweets for a profile.

Remark. Disable Retweet works only in the “For you” feed, not if the same Followed account is in a list.

Muted words

An account may be interesting to follow for its technical content but it could also tweet a lot about politics, again spamming the feed. For example muting keywords like Trump, Biden, democrats and republicans is quite effective to get rid of the majority of the US political tweets.

This can be done in Profile -> Settings and Privacy -> Privacy and Safety -> Mute and Block -> Muted Words.

Use Lists

Some accounts are interesting to check from time to time but not suitable for the main feed. Lists serve perfectly for this purpose.

For instance I keep a curated public list of security conferences and research blog posts from InfoSec companies.

Remark. Lists can be public or private.

Pin Lists

Tip. Lists can be pinned. Profile -> Lists -> Pin icon.

Before doing an assessment on some niche technology I usually have a quick look for a keyword and restrict the search to the people I follow.

This is useful to find relevant results which would not necessarily show up on the first google hits (provided that you follow accounts active in the broader topic of information security).