I'm a researcher and Twitter has been an enormous boon for my work; within my field, most 'big' researchers are active on Twitter, they know me now, I know them, I'm always up-to-date with the research (way easier than following 500 RSS feeds) and the 'trends' within my field. It's also the best avenue for discussing anything work-related, at least 3 international collaborations of mine have started this way. I have a few thousand followers and I follow a few thousand people across different time-zones. Again, an enormous boon if you know how to use it and put in time up-front, people know who I am even though I'm only an early-career researcher. I follow mostly scientists across all career-stages and politicians with power over work-related fields.

One of the best parts of Twitter is that it can give random people a voice and connect then with people who are often hard to get to otherwise. One of the worst parts of Twitter is that can give random people a voice and connect then with people who are often hard to get to otherwise.

As someone without a Twitter account, I miss out on a huge amount of conversation that IMHO can add productive and interesting insights to, even though I’m not well-known like the participants might be. With time, they might come to know me as well, something which is basically impossible outside of the platform. I have heard that it is also a great place to find jobs or the right people through “the Twitter network” where people are known for what they tend to be good at and people can point you around to where you need to be.

On the other hand, having the ability to get random people to interact with you is basically inviting harassment and polarization. The very benefit I just mentioned of having a “personality” in Twitter which people see you as means that you’ll always be dragged into any conflict along those lines, and anything you say has the potential to blow up in a bad way.

I, from outside the platform, have a much harder time getting any of those benefits I mentioned: fewer people read or look at my stuff, I think, since I publish it elsewhere; I have hundreds of things I leave unsaid because I can’t interact with the platform besides observe it; getting in contact with people who share my interests is much more difficult because I’m often cold emailing them or collaborating with them on something before they know me. I don’t get to know about interesting work opportunities very often. But on the flip side, I don’t get dragged into pointless arguments, at least on that platform, so I guess I’ve just been making that tradeoff ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In the points of fairness, in 10 years of Twitter I haven't gotten into any fights on Twitter? I keep fairly close to the 'science twitter' group, never get any fringe weirdos 'walk in' and start fights, but I myself never start fights, Twitter is not the place nor the tool for that.

Hey, I see you everywhere at least.

Thanks for the reminder that I spend too much time on Hacker News ;)

I do this as well. Some of the ML (and lately COVID-19) content that gets posted there is absolute gold, but in consuming it I can be inadvertently sucked into other parts of the site. Such unfortunate occurrences are time consuming and generally have a decidedly negative impact on my mental state.

I keep a list of people who I know are well connected and either post high quality content or retweet it, so I get broad coverage of the communities I’m interested in. Unfortunately even the best accounts get caught up in the worst of a Twitter sometimes, but it’s rare, I’ve trained myself to ignore it, and by not having an account I can’t really interact with the people anyways so I don’t get involved in it myself. (Occasionally I do send out emails in response to people’s tweets, and in one case I wrote a blog post that I doubt was ever seen by the person whose tweet prompted it.)

It's mostly a pointless outrage, virtue signaling, approval-seeking, and social climbing sewer-drain of cyberinhibitionism. Taking the proverbial shit with the sugar would run out of toilet paper, and my supplies are low and it's not in-stock anywhere. No one needs that stuff that just won't flush unless they're hopelessly co-dependent on others to move forward.

Contradicts what the parent said. Seeing no value in anything, are you part of the problem you're describing, perhaps?

I’m chuckling here. A tech podcast I listen to completely changed my perspective on Twitter a few years ago for the better: she described it as a cocktail party. You come, pop your head in for a bit, maybe participate in a conversation for a bit, and then go back to life. The corollary is, to get the most out of it, you need to pick which parties you go to! In the weeks and months following that, I significantly changed the set of people I follow, and now my feed is primarily a bunch of happy tech people sharing the cool stuff they’re working on. Occasionally a bit of political drama or other bullshit leaks through, but it’s pretty rare. If it consistently leaks through due to one person, that “unfollow” button is easy to get at!

Edit: oh, I do sometimes search for some kind of current event on there and am generally horrified by the conversations. Yikes! So I close the stream and go back to my happy curated bubble garden.