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Comment by ZenoArrow | Hacker News Reader

> "Twitter is the world’s most important social network."

> "Not it's not." ... "I don't like Twitter"

What does you liking it or disliking it have anything to do with Twitter being the 'world's most important social network'? You only have to look at it's traffic and influence to know its position on the web. Whilst Facebook and Instagram are larger than Twitter terms of users, it could be argued that Twitter fills a more important niche in terms of the diversity of its content and its role as a fast moving news source.

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   fast moving news source.

There is a hard trade-off in news between speed and accuracy.

Twitter helped moved news away from accuracy. This is a negative development as truth is more important than speed in most cases for most people most of the time. For all its flaws, the old media had professional journalist that at least occasionally engaged in fact-checking, however perfunctory. This has completely gone out of the window, for many reasons, the most important of which is probably the collapse of ad-revenue and print sales, which isn't Twitter's fault. But Twitter has made things worse.

Twitter is a peer-to-peer tabloid.

Rant mode on:

If the last few years of really paying attention has taught me one thing, it's that honest-to-god journalism, as in checking facts, vetting sources, and reporting stories as objectively as possible is dead. Completely and totally dead. Most people taking up that title flatly do not deserve it.

Finding out what actual people are doing and what's happening in situations like Ferguson and the Arab Spring is a lot more important than some self-important agenda pusher's view on it. Journalism has failed the people it's supposed to serve, so now it's on the people to sort the information and come to their own conclusions.

It's not like the vox populi could do much worse than the mainstream media...

Twitter may be "the most important social network for X" where X is "for reporters getting quotes" or "for fast moving news sources" or some other niche, but calling it "the most important social network" without any sort of qualification is downright silly.

He's actually pretty much spot on. It's not a coincidence that Twitter has 5x less users than Facebook after so many years.

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