Twitter Has Made Lists Great Again

In the olden days — 2006 or so — Twitter was a great little social network for telling others and getting notified if there was an earthquake in San Francisco. Then some fires broke out in Southern California and it became legitimately useful. Then the Arab Spring. Then countless other things, from sports transactions to Donald Trump,¹ made the network a vital information pipeline. Not in a joke way. In a very real and often terrifying and maddening way. But from there to here it also got so fucking noisy. There’s just a lot going on. And so when, say, Russia invades Ukraine, it’s hard to sort that important news from the bullshit. But aha! Twitter has a way to do this!

I’ve long been a fan of Twitter lists. For a long time they were a second or even third-class citizen within the product. But then slowly and surely, Twitter has more fully baked the features and stuffed them into Twitter itself. So much so that my main timeline now allows me to jump from “pinned” list to pinned list, quickly and seamlessly. And the Ukraine crisis is proving the worth of such functionality a thousand times over.

Again, when the fighting broke out, most of us wanted information non-stop about the situation. Our normal Twitter feeds were a mess. But carefully curated lists were and remain fantastic. And important. Here’s one. And another. And another still. Share more!

Now, is all the information going to be fully accurate? Of course not. But that’s true basically anywhere. “CNN is getting unconfirmed reports of…” But the trade-off is speed for information flow which needs to be handled with open eyes here. And as long as you’re good with that trade, it’s hard to think of a better product to keep up to date on what his happening in a crisis. OSINT alone makes these feeds worth it.

Currently, I have a “Ukraine-Russia” list pinned to the top of my timeline. It sits alongside ‘Home’ (my main timeline), ‘News’ (news publications I follow), ‘Sports’ (sports news/athletes/scores), ‘Local’ (local San Francisco news/accounts), and ‘Portfolio’ (GV portfolio companies). I have other lists I follow in the ‘Lists’ area,² but these are the ones I can get to with a single tap.

When the conflict first erupted, it seemed like it would be Twitter Space’s moment to shine (a throwback to Periscope, in a way). It was interesting, but largely in the form of what could be. In practice, the product was too noisy, weird, or tangential to the topic at hand. It needed moderators. Dare I say the professional kind. Otherwise it was just mainly literal noise. Novel for a bit in the collective experience. Provocative in potential power. Close, yet far.

Twitter lists, when curated well, tap into this power, cutting through most of the noise. Again, it’s not the sexy new product. It’s a decidedly old one. But it works wonders in times like these, unfortunately.

¹ Bye.

² Another fun list: ‘Muted’, which is accounts that I have muted — there are a lot — but still want to check in on from time-to-time for whatever reason. Mainly to remind myself why I muted them. I love mute. Great fun.