2026年Twitter使用指南：算法、列表与变现

I previously have written back in March 2022 about how I use Twitter, and back in April 2023 about Twitter and its then-new algorithms, which have changed again. This post will update how I use Twitter now in 2026, and provide updates on the current state of the new algorithm, the situation with links, with the API, and some thoughts about using Twitter to make money which you almost never should try to do. Previously I said you need four things to use Twitter well: Tweetdeck or another similar alternative application. Knowing who to follow and read. Lists. Unfollows, filters, mutes and blocks. That hasn’t changed. Lists have become even more important. This post is coming out now, however, because the For You feed is perhaps making a comeback. Except where stated here, the advice in my 2022 post still applies. Table of Contents Defend Your Feed Via At Least One List. Block Early, Block Often, Know Your Triggers. Lists Change What Following Means. It (Wasn’t) For You. It’s For You. Twitter Still Hates Links And That’s Terrible. Twitter Turns Its API Back On. The Previous Time Twitter Transformed Its Algorithm Again. Many Of The Bots Are Human. The Rise of Slop. Block Or Do Not Block. How To Make Money On Twitter. In Brief. Defend Your Feed Via At Least One List Twitter now has three feeds other than lists. You can have the horrid ‘For You’ experience, or you can have the Following ‘Sort by Popular’ experience, or you can have an actual chronological Following ‘Sort by Recent’ but you now need to click on that second part manually. That is rather hostile for those who want chronological feeds. So I’ve been forced to migrate to entirely using lists. I do see the appeal of the middle path of ‘algorithmic feed but only people I explicitly follow,’ if you are following more people than the number of Tweets you can consume and aren’t monitoring situations in real time. That seems reasonable for those who are not Twitter completionists, and want to drink from a curated but oversized firehose. Previously I would use multiple lists for different topics. I had my followers, I had two lists for Rationalists and AI that I would check consistently, then lists for Economics, Politics, Sports and so on that I would check when there was a Situation to Monitor. This shielded me from context shifting. I would think about AI in a block. As AI has become ubiquitous throughout everything, keeping distinct lists mostly stopped being worth the trouble. So now I have an ‘All’ list, which I created via my Chrome extension porting everything over. The All list combines the previous AI, Rationalist and following lists, and is everyone I want to always see. I am committed to reliably seeing all of it. I do still have a few other lists, but they are not well maintained, and if the situation came up I would need to curate them again. I’m sure I will have to do that in 2028 for the politics list. Block Early, Block Often, Know Your Triggers Blocking used to be a big step, since the person would be unable to see your posts. Now that blocking does not do that, I block at the drop of a variety of specific hats, including being an asshole, if someone has not previously demonstrated value. One of those rules is AI slop. If you are going to give me AI text, or what might as well be AI text, it needs to be interesting, or you’re gone. What I do my best to avoid is blocking mainly for having opposing viewpoints on topics I care about, even if done relatively obnoxiously. I need to avoid getting a distorted view of the landscape. Lists Change What Following Means I no longer look at the list of Tweets from my followers, at all. If I follow someone new, and I want to actually see their Tweets, I will also add them to the ‘All’ list. For that purpose, I still use the old rule: Look at the history of their posts and assess the average quality or net value provided, per Twitter thread. The list of things to watch out for also aged well: Lots of stuff you don’t care about. Self-promotion. Spam. Spoilers. Not safe for work. Misinformation. Politics, especially political advocacy. Just not that great. Getting old fast. Cancel bait. You can overcome some amount of those, but you need to provide a lot of value. For focused lists, you also want to ensure the person is focused mostly on the topic of the list, or would be when you have a Situation to Monitor. This frees me to use following for all its other purposes. Again, following is a package of six things: People can see that you follow them. They can DM you even if your DMs are closed, and perhaps you can DM them. The posts you want from them appear in your feed. The posts you don’t want from them also appear in your feed. You see interactions between people if and only if you follow all of them. If they’re locked it’s the only way to see anything at all. We can add a 7th thing, which is that you can use your following list as a reference, to find those accounts. If there is no feed, that knocks out #3 and #4, and my DMs are open so mostly that knocks out #2. So if I follow an unlocked account, it means some combination of: I want to see you within interactions, and I want to communicate that I am following you within the social game of Twitter. That lets me in theory be a lot more liberal with who I follow, but for now I’ve instead chosen to be only modestly less selective, with only ~300 follows. I think I want to ideally be in the ~500 range. It (Wasn’t) For You Back in February, Stray noted a big shift in how much the For You page includes people you follow. Twitter used to claim in 2023 that this number was ~50%. Jonathan Stray: I found a simple prompt for Claude Cowork that used my browser to figure out the percentage of posts in my For You feed that come from people I follow. This turned out to be 16%. I convinced two other people to try it, and they got 5% and 11%. (Try it yourself and leave a comment below!) I got 27% in April despite having under 300 follows, based on an experiment at the time, but I am very precise with my engagements. For me 27% is not that high, and the algorithm had already been adjusted in between by the release of ‘Phoenix’ around April 1. The old systems looked at the engagements of people you follow, along with grouping people into communities by interest areas. That’s the kind of perverse hidden system you need to be optimizing for. You’d want to primarily choose followers who engage in good ways. Whereas the new code looks directly at which users engage with a post to predict probability of your engagement. I notice that all these systems are trying to predict whether you will engage, rather than whether you will find value. This is a terrible proxy target, and forces you (if you want to use any algorithmic feeds) to choose interactions on the basis of them being training data. Don’t like anything you don’t want to approve for what is essentially RLHF. It’s For You There is an exciting development in Twitter’s For You page recently. Did they fix it? Can all of your friends come back now? I (and by ‘I’ I mean Sol) reran the experiment on my For You page today. People I follow were now 37% of the first 300 items in the feed, up from 27%. That’s starting to be in a good place, given there are a bunch of people in the feed that I should be following under the new regime, but wasn’t yet. Overall, the feed looks like a vast improvement, and the acclaim seems universal. There is also improvement in the sorting of reply threads. Nikita Bier (Twitter Head of Product): We’re rolling out a small tweak to boost visibility of your posts to your mutuals (people who you follow back). We noticed this data was missing from the algo and it made your friends appear less in your replies. This resulted in the reply section feeling more like a battleground with people you don’t recognize. This should also help clusters form around interests more easily, which many people have asked for. QC: did he actually do it? did he restore

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