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Comment by AndrewBissell | Hacker News Reader

I've found a well-curated Twitter feed of smart sources from various ideological and media camps helps to find interesting and informative info which would otherwise take a great deal of time to find. You do get misinfo and bad takes sometimes, but if you set it up right it's no worse than mainstream sources. Lists are useful as well to avoid Twitter's feed curation algos.

Just specifically for COVID-19, this led me to:

- Pay closer attention to the pandemic in China and request testing for my daughter when she had flu symptoms in late January while traveling (the CDC had no tests, of course)

- Begin using masks and gloves while going to groceries and other stores long before it was in common use and the value of masks had been acknowledged

- Mentally and materially prepare my family for an extended quarantine period long ahead of when the necessity was broadly acknowledged

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It sometimes feels like there is the perception that twitter is worthless and devoid of meaningful information, but like you I've been increasingly relying on it for news. I'm not sure where else you can collect so many different perspectives on any given piece of news. Overtime, you learn how many grains of salt to take with each person in your timeline, and you get a sense of their personal biases. And if you can brush off the trolls, it's instructive to read the arguments that happen in the replies.

The way I use twitter, it serves the same purpose as hacker news, but with a much broader scope.

> It sometimes feels like there is the perception that twitter is worthless and devoid of meaningful information

My feeling has been there are nuggets of really good and really up-to-date information there, and there are some threads that are extremely informative, but signal-to-noise ratio is in general extremely close to zero and the hostility of the surrounding environment is unbelievably terrible.

A BIG advantage of Twitter is that get to hear from the persons themselves totally without filtering by the media. Maybe you do or don't like what some public figure who posts on Twitter says, but at least DO get just what THEY said.

This. The slanted editorializing and purposefully misconstrued out-of-context quoting by the media long ago turned me off.

My response some years ago was just to turn the mainstream media (MSM) off. On paper they can't compete with Charmin, and on the Internet they are useless for wrapping dead fish heads. Some of their material is worse than just misleading and down to manipulative, deceptive, dangerous, and even destructive. I don't want even to hear the MSM and, then, have to debunk them or risk being influenced. I hope the Internet enables some replacements, many more outlets but focused on smaller audiences.

I've resisted Twitter for a long time, but this would be the only reason I could see myself becoming a user.

In the past I've had a hard time finding people to follow with a high enough signal to noise ratio (or who don't flood my feed with a new tweet about their cat every 5 mins). Do you have any tips for picking sources? Or choosing when to fill them? And how do you stay on top of the flood of information?

For covid-19 I've curated this list:

https://twitter.com/i/lists/1239639611694911489

All the people on it are serious experts. I've also left out some people who are worth listening to, but have a political bias or express a lot of emotion (it's hard not to be angry).

I spend way too much time getting up to speed, but (a) there's a lot of stuff I find interesting (I studied molecular and cell bio a bit during my Masters), and (b) would rather err on the side of over-learning than being misinformed.

If you want secondary sources rather than primary, try STAT news. They've been excellent.

The quality of discussion in other fora (including HN) has been quite disappointing.

Thank you so much for this! I recently got into Twitter and following local news in an effort to stay informed but boy do the comments enrage/scare me. It’s just crazy how tribal things have gotten. Is there any end of this sort of division in sight? Every year I think it will get better but it doesn’t.

Would you mind sharing the twitter handles you recommend following?

Agreed. I’d also add selling stocks when they were hitting highs.

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