randomly, a thing I've learned that I think is important for folks to consider on here:

No matter how often you disclaim and set a boundaries on discourse with what you tweet, there is ALWAYS at least 1 person who think what you said doesn't apply to them.

You can be crystal clear about the conversation you want to have and those you don't, you can spend half a thread saying "don't do x please, I hate it"...

but if your thread has any reach, there will always be that person who just walks right through those rules...

YMMV, but the strategy I found works best for me is to teach people to not do that to me by not engaging such posts, even when they are EXTREMELY irritating.

I find that even angry engagement teaches people they get engagement from me by breaking my rules.

Nope!

It saves me energy, it lets me keep my peace, it lets me focus on the people who are getting it and want to have an interesting conversation about whatever I rant about.

and it is BEYOND irritating when people are ignoring what you say just because they are robots and have to say something really obvious or contrary to what you say...

That's why the best tactic IME is to ignore what such folks are saying.

there is that fear that you'll miss important content if you become selective about how you take it, but I am more afraid of missing content from ppl who are actually listening to what I'm saying...they've already proved that they are paying attention!

Anyways, I sometimes see people posting cool threads and getting upset when people are ignoring very clear ground rules...everyone is different, but what I've described is how I go about having better discourse and fruitful convos on this site.

People who want to have interesting and productive conversations take time to respect your ground rules. People who just want to argue or distract...don't.

Good twitter discourse is time management.

Life is fleeting. Where are you going to spend your time?

Some folks are weird and only care about engagement --they don't necessarily care about the quality of the engagement.

Not engaging denies those folks that thing they are looking for. Engaging, even to curse them out, gives them that thing they want.

(I hope I don't need to say this, but NONE of what I am talking about applies to threats of harm and violence, or active harassment. It's just people engaging in ways that are contrary/distracting/non-helpful)