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Comment by reitanqild | Hacker News Reader

Also isn't twitter much more about celebrity and brand worship than about internet culture?

Or am I showing off my lack of understanding of Twitter and/or Internet culture?

No offense, but you're showing off your lack of understanding. Some people do use Twitter to tweet at their fave celebrities, but that seems to be more of a minority use case. It is useful to tweet directly at brands, especially when you need product support, but again, it's a minority of uses.

In my circles, there's Weird Twitter for creativity. Political Twitter, which is now a dominant form of medium-length blogging where the punditry is broken up into 140 character paragraphs. Art Twitter sending out all sorts of photos and paintings. Cute Twitter for DogRates and other forms of reporting on fuzzy things. Twitter is still good for breaking news, and for on-the-spot reporting. Even great for weather. I live in a stormy part of the country, and hitting #kswx can be good on bad nights for getting reports from the people around me.

And, of course, it's the premier way for the leader of the free world to spit his thoughts directly at the public.

They may not have found any way to make money, but Twitter is a core part of internet culture. It's like Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, etc., that it's so big, it can't be pinned down to just one aspect or another.

No offense, but you're showing off your lack of understanding.

No worries, I kind of expected that ;-)

That said I'll go even further and state that I have even tried to use it for 5 year plus but I still fail to enjoy it.

Guess it proves I'm hopeless at 2017 internet culture.

I used to enjoy reading web rings, make stupid web sites, use irc and run a blog though. :-/

Twitter's one of my favorite mediums. Basically everything in my second paragraph shows up in my timeline. Feels like mainlining all the good parts of the internet in a concentrated form. I'm also old enough to remember web rings and all those different funky aggregators like Memepool. Twitter at its best is like that.

I don't mean to push you into something you don't like, but if you want to give it a go again, search for weird twitter and follow anyone who looks interesting. Or follow your favorite authors or reporters. Over time, they'll retweet other interesting posts and you can follow those new people. Eventually, you'll organically build up something which follows your interests very closely.

That's how I did it. I started because I wanted to follow the Arab Spring and Tahrir Square events closely, and many Egyptians were posting their accounts on Twitter in English.

What client should I use then?

I recommend Echofon for mobile (I think it's $4 USD, but there's a free/ad version). First class list support that lets you essentially have multiple timelines. Easy to log into and switch between multiple accounts. less buggy than any client I've used and made me throw away Tweetdeck and others.

No, not at all. Though I think that's what most of HN believes, strangely.

Everyone fucking hates this term, but Google "Weird Twitter" for one of Twitter's many significant organic communities.

Though I think that's what most of HN believes, strangely.

Weird how different we perceive things: For me I always thought HN adored twitter and only I and a few others cried out loud against what I perceived as the naked emperor.

I try to be open to see where I'm wrong though and I might be about to change my rating to same rating as Mac OS: "probably great but doesn't work for me."

That's the impression you get from Twitter if you read newspaper articles about it, but once you start using it you find these other communities.

Here are two, but there are many others:

#OTalk - occupational therapists (mostly in the UK) have a discussion every Tuesday evening.

#TwitterDisco - people share music they love.

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