Twitter’s cultural significance is almost net negative. It has been a vehicle for divisiveness and culture wars and not only a vehicle but a self driving one if you catch my drift.
That depends on which aspects of Twitter you focus on. It has added a ton of value for niche interest areas, open source intelligence and reporting, news from underserved areas or issues, and so many others.
The value isn't in the loudest and most active accounts, but the long tail of expertise that was previously either not widely visible or connected in the way Twitter enabled.
I disagree. The internet has increased the reach of individuals by many orders of magnitude: we (humanity) are experiencing the consequences of something we're not equipped for, but that isn't the fault of Twitter or Facebook, it's a consequence of the internet connecting us all.
What, specifically, has Twitter done, that has been a negative influence on the culture? If you look at, say, Donald Trump, he was across the internet being divisive in every venue he could get his hands on, from Facebook to Reddit... and outside of the internet too, on Fox News and the like.
If we went back 2 decades and put all of humanity on a bbs or newsgroup instead, you'd have the same outcome.
Twitter is a cesspool. The three times I've created an account I have deleted it in less than 24 hours because I couldn't figure a way to filter good content from all the noise, toxicity and low quality content. Reddit is not much different but at least you can reduce the scope by staying in small niche subreddits. I'm following this with curiosity to see if all these changes improve the situation or drive Twitter to the ground, but both seem to me like they would be an improvement.
I only tried following a few people that posted programming related stuff, but more then half their posts were completely off-topic, so I had no way to filter all the noise. Everything else Twitter suggested was rubbish.
