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How I Use Twitter Lists

I’ve been talking a bit more recently in private conversations and a few tweets about Twitter lists, and I was surprised that people would ask me “How do you use them?:” or more interestingly, “What are they?: Ugh, Twitter UI regression. There’s a long history around “Lists” that isn’t worth going into, but essentially, Lists are user-generated lists of accounts — either public or private — that provides a different feed to the user, separate from their main feed. For instance, someone can create a list that includes @justinbieber without having to explicitly “follow” @justinbieber.

What?

It’s a bit confusing. Twitter Lists are a power user product, and I’m sure many people who use them do so in different ways, so I’ll share mine briefly:

  1. I keep about 4 public and 4 private lists: https://twitter.com/semil/lists
  2. One of the private lists is max of about 100 accounts of friends, colleagues, or feeds I don’t want to miss — for me, it’s the max number of accounts I can really pay attention to without feeling overwhelmed. Most of the time, I’m in my main feed just seeing what’s most recent in the last hour.
  3. I will scan the other lists if I have time, but it’s really a scan. Could be a few seconds. I don’t visit the web directly much more — I see the web through Twitter. And, as that increases, creating lists (like I recently did around cyber attacks) helps me quickly get up to speed on what’s happening. Think of it like the print WSJ front page that has those two columns of headlines on the left — lists are those, but entirely customizable.

Ultimately, Twitter lists are a great feature, but they’re hard to access and use (it’s even hard to build a list, to be honest — it takes time), and just like DMs before it, or the newsfeed in general, the overall decline in information density on Twitter web is why I don’t use Twitter native products anymore. On mobile, I use TweetBot (great list views) and TweetDeck in the Chrome Browser for my laptop, which also has great list views. I’d probably be blind without lists.