I have a fairly strict rule when tweeting: no retweets. I just scrolled through the last fifty tweets on my timeline: no unquoted retweets, two quote retweets, and I remember one of the latter because it felt odd when I posted it. And a similarly small number of tweets linking to external web pages, other than my own blog. So, basically, my timeline is just me.

The thing is, though: I follow people who retweet other stuff, who link to other stuff, and I enjoy that. (At least if they’re not basically tweeting out ads for their employers…) And I do share external links, I just do it on Tumblr instead of on Twitter. I even share tweets of cute animal pictures, I just do it on a channel in my work Slack.

 

So maybe that rule is silly? I certainly don’t have any reason to believe that people who follow me on Twitter are any less into cute animal pictures than my coworkers. And the Tumblr account made sense five or ten years ago, but I can’t imagine starting an account like that now.

The flip side, though, is that I kind of like having different accounts for different purposes. And one big side of the current setup is that it helps me try to avoid thinking of conversations on Twitter as being more important than they are: I really don’t have to try to have and broadcast an opinion on everything that shows up on that site.

 

I dunno; I’m still thinking this through. But don’t be shocked if I decide that it’s okay to retweet cute animal pictures, I really don’t have a good reason why those should show up on my work Slack…

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