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Comment by jsidjwjdnwixjwj | Hacker News Reader

> I want to go back to the Twitter thing because I use Twitter a lot.

Wanting to use Twitter makes me sad.

It was always "bad", but it used to be fun

Why does it make you sad? Twitter as a concept is a technically superior platform to keep up with news about interesting things you like. Short-form, multimedia integrated, your own curated timeline. It is literally the perfect platform for following artists, musicians, game developers, programmers, whatever, and seeing what they're up to, vs. trying to follow 100 blogs. Unlike RSS, it is interactive, allowing people to communicate and form connections, and the entire "retweet" thing makes people creating cool things immensely more discoverable, allowing more eyes to see their cool work.

Obviously it has been degraded by the switch to algorithm over user curation of their own timeline, literally everything Musk did to it, etc, but old Twitter was good, hence the desire to "go back".

Twitter was never good. It was always a toxic place thanks to the super short character limit, which pushes people to make punchy hot takes rather than communicating with some nuance.

It was only as toxic as you allowed it to be, because you had control of the content you saw. If you used Twitter for politics, you were basically very stupid and any unpleasantness you endured was entirely self-inflicted. You could just... not do that. A global platform is going to have some wackadoos on it but you don't have to associate with them.

I find for the Ukraine war maybe the best in terms of both sides being able to post. Other places like Reddit subreddits often only allow one side and delete stuff from the other. Like today you have Aleksandr Dugin, one of the architects of the current invasion posting and being community noted in an entertaining manner. You won't find that on other forums. (https://x.com/DarthPutinKGB/status/2106313876119724166)

Which is probably kind of important - when you have a war killing hundreds of thousands it's helpful to be able to discuss the reasons.

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