It feels like using Twitter or not has been an uninterrupted argument for years, even on HN, as if on one end your rational brain knows Twitter is detrimental to your mental health, but on the other end: it's a great dopamine, and outrage dispenser.
I'm extremely careful not to engage in anything related to identity or politics on Twitter. I've added a big list of muted words and accounts (trump, politics, gender, queer, republican, democrat, sanders, etc.). Many of these are topics I find interesting and discussion worthy, but the twitter format doesn't allow space for anyone to formulate actual cohesive thoughts so the result of discussing anything contentious is just people shouting at each other. Once I avoid these topics and stick to discussing tech, twitter is fine.
Muting is makes using Twitter much easier, when it's working. Sometimes muted words and phrases find their way through the cracks.
For this case to happen, a few things must align:
1) Important and accessible to enough people on that platform such that effective hashtags "coalesce" and the event becomes searchable
2) Recent (or ongoing/changing) enough that new information available in first-hand accounts has not yet made it to news reports.
3) Not flooded or taken over by bots and malicious accounts.
I wish there was a platform (or ideally an open standard linking multiple platforms effectively) where I could have the interaction I just described but on a much smaller scale. An up-to-the-minute first-hand witness of "whats going on". Essentially, the "raw" news. Technologically, Twitter should work just fine for this. But there are significant problems currently with reliability, trust, and misuse that I believe lead to the general problems people have with twitter which then prevent it's use for the type of "first hand accounting" I've described here.
But it's the worst platform to have any type of discussion. IMHO if they would remove the "retweet with comment" feature, and start considering comment threads as comments instead of posts (so make a clear distinction between the two), things would be way nicer to navigate, but that will never happen.
The best way so far is to mute everything annoying.
Many of these artists are also likely on Instagram. But that'll require using a Facebook product, if that's not your thing.
I follow several people in the game development industry, and historically used to see a lot of interesting technical articles being shared on Twitter within this community. That seems to have declined unfortunately, though there is still some.
I follow various people who have a habit of posting dumb funny jokes (usually puns) and memes. Not everyone likes that style of humour, but I do.
I mute or unfollow people if too many of the things they choose to share are things I don't want to see (like outrage bait).
Personally, I follow the rule that I will only tweet stuff I would be still excited to read in 5 years.
Many OSS people aren't on Twitter. They're on IRC, Mastodon and mailing lists.
Much saner, less mobs, less sensationalim, less tribalism, less bullshit.
For example, I probably never would have visited CERN or Chernobyl without it.
Twitter is full of weird people who are the core potential audience of my creative/intellectual stuff. (HN in contrast is not.)
I also use it to keep up with things that will soon become political issues - that has a much smaller amount of noise to signal, but even so.
Ideally, I would love to be able to follow people only for some tags, but that would make twitter nicer to use so that is not going to happen.
I've been exposed to people and thoughts I otherwise wouldn't have. This broaden my perspective.
Can also be pretty handy when you're at a convention/event.
TLDR AI research community is quite active on there so it's a good way to keep up with big news and conversations (and more).
I think the usefulness for most people is equal parts keeping up w news/conversations and funny memes.
* Novel ideas.
* Insight into how VCs think.
* Access to people.
Honestly, I really enjoy John Carmack's feed. He was a childhood hero of mine and it's great to read his stuff.
"Hey here's a quick CSS tip!"
That's about it in terms of positive interaction where I didn't have to eventually prune that account ... but that's about it.
It probably helps that quick tech / CSS tips sort of fit inside the world of a tweet, but nothing else does.