Comment by cstejerean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cstejerean | Hacker News Reader

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I keep hearing Twitter bashing on this site and it's starting to bother me. Twitter is what you make it. It all depends on who you choose to follow. It's perfectly fine if you haven't found a way to make use of Twitter, but for an increasing number of people, Twitter is starting to play a pretty important role.

I dropped my cable subscription when I moved to my new apartment last August and outside of HN I've been relying mainly on Twitter to hear about what's happening in the world at large. I've used it to communicate with friends and coworkers, to see what interesting people in the open source community are doing, to communicate with people during conferences such as at PyCon, to ask for help and to help others, and for entertainment.

Yes, there's plenty of hipsters and social media experts that do nothing more than add noise, but the asymmetrical follow model and the ease to start and stop following people means that you shouldn't care. Choose the people you find interesting and it will make all the difference.

I dropped my cable subscription when I moved to my new apartment last August and outside of HN I've been relying mainly on Twitter to hear about what's happening in the world at large.

That's just a stupid thing to say and exactly the kind of hype that's getting on our nerves (speaking for us, the twitter immune here).

My opinion towards twitter as a technology is fairly ambivalent - It's a horrible implementation but as long as I'm not forced to use it I couldn't care less.

What's annoying is all those people who feel a need to cite the medium as if it added any kind of value to a message.

"That's just a stupid thing to say and exactly the kind of hype that's getting on our nerves"

When making statements of that nature you should rely try to elaborate more. What exactly is a stupid thing to say? Claiming that I rely on Twitter as a source of news? Why is that stupid? I've been doing this since August and it's worked out really well so far. I'm not trying to convince anyone else to do the same, I was just responding to a question of whether or not Twitter provides actual value. To me it does.

The medium does not provide value to the message, but it does provide a very powerful way to spread messages and to organize people. What alternative communication medium would you recommend for organizing a protest? (Like the one that happened in Moldova http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/07/moldovas...)

You're not "relying on Twitter" for a source of news, you're relying on unattributed hearsay which just happens to be transmitted through Twitter.

That's not smart.

How do you know who he follows?

Half a dozen clicks from his HN profile and you're there: http://twitter.com/offbytwo/friends

Impressive, I updated my profile so it should be easier to find now.

Well, what tom says. Relying on twitter for news is like listening to chatter on the street - until you click on one of those tinyurls, which may or may not lead to a tangible source. You'd be better off just subscribing to a few RSS feeds of popular news sites. Even if you only read the headlines that would still provide better information density and at least a bit of hope that these headlines have gotten some scrunity before broadcast. Also there will be a full article waiting behind each link - which helps if you truly want to form an opinion on something beyond catching up keywords for re-tweet.

It's actually more like sitting down with friends for a beer and listening to them talk about the news. This way I get to hear about things that the people I find interesting think are important. It serves exactly the same purpose that visiting this site does, and just as I often read the comments on a post here before clicking the link I often read the Twitter conversation that's developing around a piece of news before deciding if it's important to know more about it. I use an RSS reader as well but that I use solely for keeping track of interesting blogs, mostly about programming related topics.

I like Twitter, but a Twitter mob is no more attractive than any other group of angry villagers with pitchforks.

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