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Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

> While the unwashed masses flock to non-textual media like TikTok, we Very Online cognoscenti know that Twitter is where all the history-making, universe-denting social media action really is. It is as close to a pure ideas-commons/digital public as we’ll ever get.

/cue dry-heaving

Twitter's good for simple pieces of news, witty quips, and putdowns. That's about it. You can't actually communicate complex, novel ideas in 280 characters, and you still can't in 2800. The only redeeming feature of Twitter that draws these commentators to it is that all journalists are addicted to it, so your one-liners might get you some fame. People have made careers out of that.

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Twitter can communicate novel ideas in the space of threads. I have seen it cleverly crafted by scientists, entrepreneurs, and those in various areas of technology. As much as it frequently descends into the inane quip, Twitter can illuminate areas of inquiry and serve as a gateway to further immersion in the topic.

Yes, I think it's incredibly useful for communication among informed people. For example, @BullshitQuantum, which just replies to news releases with 'bullshit' or 'not bullshit', is great.

The problem is that with such a small amount of space, you can't tell what's credible and what's not unless you already know who's right... I trust @BullshitQuantum only because I can check a fair number of its calls. How is anybody not trained in quantum mechanics supposed to tell @BullshitQuantum's takes from the hundreds more that actually are bullshit?

Agreed. One thing that has helped me avoid the dumpsterfire is to never see the comments, only the tweets. Its a medium that is very easy to join + use and the diversity of the sorts of people on twitter is amazing.

This so very much. The way media is using twitter to do their work is giving me no confidence in the media being able to do their jobs

It is there jobs now. It's standard to have to post a certain number of times a day.

"Twitter's good for ... putdowns. That's about it. "

Fixed it for you man! Really, the only purpose twitter serves is as the comments section people removed because everyone in the comments section was slinging poo at OP. And they're removing this, the one truly useful thing twatter does, because journalist types are head cases who think larping and carping on twitter is real life.

You don't need more space then that. That's for the summary of what the article / media is that follows - which all books/news articles, etc should have, and which few nowadays have, that is well written.

Twitter's strength is it appears peer to peer, twitters weakness is it isn't at all.

If you really believe Twitter is that useless, you're definitely doing it wrong. And your "critique" seems to ignore the presence of links.

blog posts are mostly shared via twitter, I don’t think the part you quote is inaccurate.

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