This is absolutely a good idea. As a gung-ho advocate for Twitter for several years, the service has become a cesspit of mud slinging, public shaming, and rapidly bringing together people for crusades rather than somewhere opinions can be discussed sensibly and processed over time (140 characters + real time == ripe for gut reactions and basal instincts, unlike blogging or video).
A 'lite' alternative I've adopted in the past week is to only read and post but to totally ignore the "Notifications" tab (so you see no @replies). That way you get the best bits but without exposure to most of the toxicity.
Twitter can be great, but you have to be careful how you use it. I severely limit who I follow (I have friends who I don't follow because their Twitter habits just don't match what I want to see in my feed) and I'm not afraid to block anyone who gets abusive.
However, it is an inherently tough environment. If you were deliberately designing a service to be as anti-intellectual as possible, you'd be hard pressed to do better than Twitter's extreme length limit, realtime operation, and obscured context. You can work around it but it's still there.
I follow mostly academics, researchers, and people who tend to ascribe to the "talk is cheap, show me the code" mentality. My Twitter experience is very positive (and when someone gets a little too happy with inflammatory tweets, the "mute"/"unfollow"/"disable retweets" buttons are very easy to find).
This is very true. Unfortunately a lot of the more prolific open source/Web people I need to follow due to my work like jumping onto bandwagons or raise pitchforks on social matters. The people I'd follow if I were just using Twitter for fun would be very different (and indeed, having realized that, I started a new account last night that's entirely for my own gratification :-)).
This is absolutely a good idea. As a gung-ho advocate for Twitter for several years, the service has become a cesspit of mud slinging, public shaming, and rapidly bringing together people for crusades rather than somewhere opinions can be discussed sensibly and processed over time (140 characters + real time == ripe for gut reactions and basal instincts, unlike blogging or video).
A 'lite' alternative I've adopted in the past week is to only read and post but to totally ignore the "Notifications" tab (so you see no @replies). That way you get the best bits but without exposure to most of the toxicity.