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Comment by gravitate | Hacker News Reader

I’m not certain about the meme that Twitter is some hellsite we should ignore. It depends on how you use it. I use their Lists feature quite heavily and avoid all their algorithmic ‘You may like’ nonsense.

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Why do we have to tolerate Twitter? It's a poor concept of a website that only encourages short opinions that can't be elaborated on. If I want to know what other people are up to I can always check their LinkedIn or the website of a company. I just don't understand what I will gain from "learning how to use" a feed of people tweeting into the void for attention. Sorry if I seem shortsighted.

I've actually thought for a long time that Twitter is a terrible platform. It is quite dangerous too, let me explain. So, Twitter is a microblogging platform. Limiting character count might have been okay in the age when microblogging was trendy. But nowadays Twitter is important. It is used by diplomats, politicians, official agencies, corporations etc. as their most observed communications channel. But not only does the character limit make it hard to provide complete and plentiful information, it encourages users to break their information up into pieced together threads. Now, threads are perfect for propaganda. Want to take a piece of information out of context and retweet it on your page to your followers? Sure, that's a core feature. Want to add your own commentary by quote tweeting it while you're at it? Sure, go right ahead. Observing threads, one can see that the tweet engagement always decreases as the thread goes on. The first tweet is the most interacted with, then it linearly decreases. To see how this can be useful, look at some official tweets from e.g. the POTUS. There is often some statement or highlighted phrase/headline in the first tweet of a thread and then a link to the official full statement on another website in the second tweet of the thread. But since engagement with the first part is three times higher than with the second, it is retweeted a lot more. So people miss the actual context. That's just one example, but i do think Twitter is a pretty perfect platform for spreading misinformation or at least not a good platform for spreading good and complete information.. and it has nothing to do with algorithms (that's a completely different concern).

I think Twitter is a great concept for a website if you reduce it to "basically a place to people announce something and link to it", i.e. basically an RSS feed type of thing.

It's just most people don't use it that way which ruins it

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