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Comment by wintermutestwin | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: Can someone who actually uses and gets value from Twit please explain the use case and value? I totally grok interest-based social, but I do not at all understand why I would want to put effort into figuring out personality-based social (beyond family/friends/blogs/etc) - particularly when posts are limited to bumper sticker lengths (unless they are just URLS to rich posts hosted elsewhere, but that's just link aggregation, which Reddit does better). Bumper stickers back and forth are not real conversations either - why wouldn't I just go to reddit or forums or even IRC (which I guess is now Discord)?

View on HN

Think of it as a socially driven RSS feed. On the one hand I enjoy following e.g. Science magazine directly. But the social part is that I follow people who post things they find interesting and often I find those things interesting as well. It's not really a platform for discussion as much as sharing links to content.

So it is really a link aggregator with a focus on personalities more than specific topics. Did I interpret you correctly?

If so, I think I'd much rather get the content from a topical aggregator (reddit/forums/blogs). I am interested in such a wide variety of topics that it is much easier to organize my browsing time by topic.

The same you find using HN, by your preferences and algorithm Twitter puts you in contacts with other people with the same interest and have conversation, Reddit have most of the communities but it has its downsides as pro-leftist and censored. Musk want to make it neither too left or right.

The people I know that use Twitter a lot are doing it mostly for conversation with a semi-known group of people around a niche topic (usually politics). Reddit is too anonymous and it doesn't allow you to hold grudges and be rude and mean to people with a known set of beliefs.

So I translate that as "Twitter is a toxic cesspool" :~)

Yes

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