Visited someone’s Twitter profile page and found it’s full of retweets? Pain in the posterior, isn’t it? You visit someone’s page because you want to know about them – not a load of random accounts either they, or worse, their auto-bot, have chosen to momentarily highlight…
It wouldn’t be so bad if all Twitter users retweeted for the right reasons. But many simply don’t. Some people retweet to ingratiate themselves to others or gain attention. Some retweet for self-promotion (when someone compliments them, for instance). Some retweet for reasons of social compliance, etiquette or friendship. Some retweet to keep their accounts active when they can’t be bothered to tweet anything themselves. Some retweet for money.
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And even when people do retweet because they genuinely feel something is worth passing on to a wider audience, you can have too much of a good thing. If a Twitter user is very handy with the RT button, it can swamp their own output, and make it difficult to discern who they actually are as a character.
Indeed, some Twitter users go heavy on the Retweets for that exact reason. They deliberately seek to bury their own tweets and make it near-impossible for profile visitors to observe their behaviour. Some badly-behaved Twitter users delete their tweets, but others simply use a retweet bot to keep hiding their unpleasant interactions under a deluge of ‘filler’.
How do you make a decision on whether you’re comfortable following someone if all you can see is retweets? If you can’t see past those retweets, you could give a badly-behaved user the benefit of the doubt.
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METHOD
Well, here’s how you can make that decision, by eliminating all the retweets from a Twitter user’s feed… It’s easy: just type this into the Twitter Search box…
from:@username
Change the username to that of the person whose tweets you want to view, obviously.
Twitter will now show you the user’s own tweets, WITHOUT the retweets. For my examples, as captured below, I entered from:@Twirpz into the Search box. It works the same on desktop…
Or mobile…
You should, however, be aware that after a username change, Twitter may not return tweets posted under the previous username(s). Account protections can interfere with this type of search too – even after a protected account reverts to public status. But in most cases it’s a great way to cut through the nightmare of heavy retweeting and find out what sort of person a Twitter user really is.
