Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

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I've tried to "get" Twitter since the early days. I've created a couple of Twitter accounts over the years to support various creative endeavours but I've never found myself getting much value out of it as a user.

I heard that it's original use-case was that back 2008 there were no good ways to do group messaging over SMS on a cell phone. That's a problem and solution that I can understand.

But as a broader social network? I don't get it.

Things that bother me to the point that they are deal breakers:

- The character limits (there is nothing worse in life than reading through a x/N self-reply to read something long ... I'd rather file a tax return)

- Showing me posts from pages I don't follow in the feed (in 99% of the cases I'm aware of that page/profile already and have chosen not to follow it because I don't like them)

- Ads in the news feed

Some have said that they like Twitter for getting news. I have way better options for that.

I know that I'm not representative of the typical person, generally speaking, but Twitter is one of those things where I really can't understand why anyone likes it and uses it, let alone why it is so popular. And it's not that I'm hating on something I don't know anything about ... I've honestly tried to use it and get value out of it, but I've never found anything of value on offer.

> but Twitter is one of those things where I really can't understand why anyone likes it and uses it, let alone why it is so popular.

I think it's a carryover of general nostalgia for how the Internet "used to be", i.e. before every site with a few million users decided to start experimenting with algorithms to max out user engagement and ad impressions, leading to the hell we see everywhere, from IG to Tiktok.

Yes, there was a time when Twitter wasn't a toxic mess. It's the last social network that was popular before smartphones took off.

Interesting. That might explain why I dislike it so much. As a middle aged person who grew up with an early iteration of the world wide web for a decade to a decade and a half before Twitter even existed, both smart phones and social media mark a turning point for me from what the Internet "used to be."

Twitter, in my mind (and maybe this is perception and not reality), ushered in infinite scroll and short bites of information. Twitter is to forums what TikTok is to documentaries. I see Twitter and the "mobile revolution" going hand in hand (something that left me behind because I still dislike using a smart phone, generally, and rarely do compared to most other people).

But I guess if you're a great deal younger than me, and you grew up with an Internet where Twitter just always existed, then it might represent some earlier version of the Internet that is drastically different from what you consider to be "contemporary" (though, putting the TikTok mention aside, I'm still not sure what that view of the contemporary Internet is if Twitter is what we're comparing it to).

I guess I'm just so old that I still see Twitter as a relatively new phenomenon. Very different from the nostalgia that I feel for what the world wide web used to be when I was young.

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