Twitter can suck a lot -- dogpiling & drive-by snark become easy when literally anybody can…

Twitter can suck a lot -- dogpiling & drive-by snark become easy when literally anybody can quote-tweet or reply without a greater context and create a notification for a complete stranger on the other end of the line, and the timeline is ranked by recent interactions so the most toxic stuff also becomes the most visible stuff (which attracts even more toxic behavior).

My experience of twitter got a lot better when I set my notifications to "only people I follow or who follow me" & disabled algorithmic timeline sorting in favor of reverse-chronological. It shifted from being inundated by the unthinking cruelty of absolute strangers to mostly seeing interactions I invited with people I chose to associate with or who went out of their way to associate with me. Your mileage may vary, though: hate-followers definitely exist, and 10k followers may be too many to manage. It may be worth doing what other public figures do and disable notifications entirely -- treating twitter as a broadcast-only medium outside of rare situations. This seems to work just fine for promotional purposes. (Also, if you are or become a bluecheck, you get a special knob for turning off all notifications from non-bluechecks, which might be worthwhile.)

Twitter can be made a lot less emotionally draining, though it isn't easy. Some of the tools necessary to do this are provided (which they aren't on, say, Facebook -- I literally can't tell Facebook to only show me notifications from friends), but they're hidden three or four levels deep in settings dialogues and until recently they would reset periodically. Also, none of these tools work at all unless you also do things like turning off push notifications and muting or blocking followers who try to drag you into drama. As a public figure whose race & gender makes some people think of you as an acceptable target, it may not be possible even then to make Twitter a place worth staying in.