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Comment by david422 | Hacker News Reader

I never got on the twitter boat. After reading articles like this, I'm glad I never did.

However, why doesn't everybody else get off? People must like it enough? Then the cycle will never end.

Twitter is addicting, that's why. People who use Twitter the most both love and hate Twitter. It's like a video game -- actually, I'd go further and say it is one. Sometimes you hate the game you're playing at a particular moment, but you still play.

IMHO Twitter is great, I think I find more interesting things there then HN. I't more how you curate your own feed, don't follow people that are "political" or have some "agenda". My feed is mostly about math, art, physics and EU policy level discussions. Same thing with youtube, you just have to train the AI so it knows the sort of things you like. And don't comment, no one cares.

Same here. I like using twitter, it connects me with a lot of amazing people in my various hobby communities. Retro computers, cars, ham radio... It's fun to be able to talk to folks I hear / hear about in podcasts, blogs, and youtube videos.

But... that's definitely a "bubble." People aren't wrong about how awful twitter is for debate. It works for me because I talk to people with shared interests and values. Arguments rarely work, the short message length and fast pace make it difficult to do anything other than play for points.

But why? Something I never understand about Twitter is, for your claim, people who have interesting things to say and you want to read about. Why would people be interested in reading a huge essay broken down to 50 tweets instead of just reading a blog posts where you can post comments and discussions in a fashion that makes sense and doesn’t lose the context of the original topic?

You don't read a huge essay broken down into 50 tweets - that's not how it works. In that case they'd just post a link to the essay. The point is twitter helped you discover the essay in the first place. If you've carefully curated your timeline then twitter acts as a content filter for the content you're actually interested in. Over time I've simply lost interest in such content curation, but others may still find it valuable.

> However, why doesn't everybody else get off?

People get a kick out of that stuff, literally. Likes, Retweets, these stimuli are like a drug. So is being part of a harassment brigade born out of nothing apparently...

Personally I never "got" Twitter. How Am I supposed to understanding anything to these chaotic and fractured conversations? They make no sense, who is responding to whom exactly? there is something very wrong with the format to begin with. It's like everything is engineered to generate strife and arguments in order to drive up "engagement".

Here is something I recently found on Twitter which I think is spot on: https://twitter.com/elivalley/status/1382089578484531201

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