Network effects are really powerful.

Same reason at least one person in your company has a windows machine with a copy of excel, even though its a locked in platform which is paid and opaque: its what everyone else uses.

Nitter doesn't let you post to X. It only lets you read when someone else posted something on X and then it hits a place like Hacker News. It's an adversarial interoperability tool.

Because important information or information I care about is at times exclusively posted on Twitter, like news from my local municipality. I am not a Twitter/X user, so having Nitter as an option is important to me.

Because unfortunately people still post things on X that I find relevant, even if I don't use the platform much, and pragmatism wins over pure principles.

A surprising number of official bodies use it (and only it) for realtime updates. e.g. for a very long time the only way to get the latest updates on the NYC subway was to follow their account on there.

More broadly, it’s a platform where prominent people say noteworthy things. I don’t think it’s surprising people want to read it.

Sometimes it's hard to avoid.

One small service provider I use updates its X/Facebook status much faster than its official status page during outages. There can be a gap of a few hours.

Because the alternative we were promised (bsky) is much, much worse than X, albeit at the other end of the political spectrum.

Links mostly. To organization or government agencies or whatever official that shares updates only in one place. (Which is bad)

because sometimes someone links something written there and people want to read it, it's not that complicated