> The mental effect of 'its different from mainstream, thus better and look at me how clever I am for finding it out 5 minutes before most of group'.

It's not because of lag time, and it's not because it's different from mainstream, it's due to growing frustration with older media that I slowly developed before I even knew about Twitter and my experience following interesting people on there. It's gotten worse since Musk, some have moved to bsky or mastodon, but it's still the best source for me.

I understand your point of view but I don't find your assumption very charitable, there are real reasons for this that have been touched on.