Twitter Lists Can Save Your Sanity

In the last few months, I’ve heard many people talking about how they want to quit Twitter or delete their account. Some grumble about the signal to noise, others about the non-chronological timeline. Many have commented that they feel it’s become too toxic of an environment. The only way I’ve been able to use Twitter in the last couple of years has been to with the Twitter lists feature. It keeps me sane and I don’t have to unfollow anyone. Whenever I mention this feature to friends they usually say that they’ve never heard of it. So if you’ve never heard of Twitter lists or maybe just don’t understand why you’d need it, let me introduce you to this powerful feature that could change the way you use Twitter.

Twitter lists allows you to create a curated group of Twitter users based on areas of interest. Once your list is created, you now have a focused view of tweets from the members in the list. Twitter lists also has an option to allow others to subscribe to them, so be sure to think about whether you want the list to be public or private.

Twitter lists has been a game changer for me. If you have a hard time managing the amount of tweets in your timeline, it can be a huge help. It allows me to focus in on groups of people easily instead of scrolling through the timeline to search for them.¹ Lists can be especially helpful if you don’t want to unfollow people to reduce the noise in your timeline.

For example, I have a list called Apple Tech where the members I’ve added are generally focused on Apple or tech related news and conversation. Another list called WebDev is focused on web development. Another one is comprised of professional artists from Japan which makes it easy scroll through all of their artwork posted at once. All of these lists allow me to focus on a specific group easily.

Using lists also has some additional benefits. First, you don’t have to follow a user in order to add them to your list.² There are many situations where you might want to view a users tweets but not follow them. If you need that feature, Twitter lists makes that possible using lists. Next, as far as I know, tweets in lists are shown in chronological order without ads while viewing them via Twitter’s website or mobile app. While this isn’t a true fix for the non-chronological timeline, you can at least see folks you care about in chronological order if you really want to.

There was a one very important hidden benefit to using lists that became apparent in an unexpected way. Many of you know that there was an emergency alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile attack that was mistakenly sent to all Hawaii residents back in January of this year. Moments after the alert was sent, I turned on the TV to check the local news but there was only regularly scheduled programming. None of the local radio stations had any information or updates either.

Thankfully, I had a “Hawaii” Twitter list that I created earlier that included Twitter friends that live here, the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, the Governor of Hawaii and other Hawaii based news outlets and other organizations that could verify information as it came in. In this situation, the news came out on Twitter before it appeared on TV or radio. I don’t think it would have been easy to parse this info in my regular timeline, so having that li st was a huge sanity saver!

One last thing…

On Wednesday, Twitter unveiled new details on its upcoming API Changes that will affect third-party Twitter apps such as Tweetbot and Twitterrific. These API changes will go into affect on August 16, 2018. You can read more about this situation from a coalition of Twitter app developers here.

Since this announcement, many users of those apps have wondered what will happen to those apps once those changes go into affect. While there aren’t any clear answers yet, one thing is certain: the changes will affect how these third-party apps function going forward and may even make it financially unsustainable to keep updating them.

If the thought of being forced to use the web version of Twitter on a desktop computer or the first-party Twitter client on mobile makes you ill, perhaps using Twitter lists might help… just a little.

1. Yes, I realize that this is why Twitter made their current timeline non-chronological. I don’t use Twitter via the web nor the official Twitter app.

2. Please note that if their account is private, you won’t be able to see their tweets unless they give you permission.