Except for specifically following personalities/celebrities, I can't see the advantage of Twitter over Reddit.
Ask HN: Is it just me or is Twitter pretty good these days?
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Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is Twitter pretty good these days?
#12Twitter has great tech content and really isn't any more toxic than other social media (and remember, HN is social media too!). For instance, foone threads regularly apear on HN. A lot of the hate here IMO is just people's rationalized politic opinions and not having the discipline to avoid being baited into the politics side of the website. Which again, only has the same problems as getting into political arguments elsewhere online. I have seen plenty of flamewars here too, especially last year.
I have had a really good experience with the platform and actually met friends with my super niche interests that way. It's how I keep up with people in my small academic field in an informal way and talk about the human side of doing science. Also, I believe my papers have gotten more attention since posting there.
The only thing I'm not a huge fan of is how replying boosts posts and there's no downvote. It leads to noobs getting baited into responding to trolling or low effort content and giving it a ton of attention. However, everyone knows about that after their first month on the platform and uses workarounds so it isn't an issue.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is Twitter pretty good these days?
#13In my experience all social media, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, ect. are all incredibly toxic and the most toxic people are backed by toxic moderators.
Nobody is genuine, people say things for upvotes and validation so now everybody has a political agenda. This creates mobs that shout people out of their echo chambers for good think points. Everybody is hopped up on dopamine being cruel to each other and they’re addicted.
Id like to this hackernews is different, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. The voting system isn’t good think bad think here it’s good for discussion/bad for discussion.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is Twitter pretty good these days?
#14I think Twitter is awful. I just use it to get up to date opinions and memes on TV shows or sports I am watching.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is Twitter pretty good these days?
#15I use it almost as a newsfeed for things like small artists I like releasing new albums. News that I wouldn't get otherwise. It's really not a social network I think. Communication is not really different to YouTube comment feeds, where there are people with social standing leaving messages and literally thousands commenting with no hope of ever getting a reply (unless they're socially relevant themselves). I can't s…
Thanks, that’s a good perspective
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is Twitter pretty good these days?
#16It is just you
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is Twitter pretty good these days?
#17Didnt someone post something about twitter being awful a couple of days ago? Is op a twitter shill or what
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is Twitter pretty good these days?
#18In my experience all social media, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, ect. are all incredibly toxic and the most toxic people are backed by toxic moderators. Nobody is genuine, people say things for upvotes and validation so now everybody has a political agenda. This creates mobs that shout people out of their echo chambers for good think points. Everybody is hopped up on dopamine being cruel to each other and they’re addict…
Talking up echo chambers and how HN is special and not like other social media is certainly a great way to get karma on HN.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is Twitter pretty good these days?
#19In my experience all social media, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, ect. are all incredibly toxic and the most toxic people are backed by toxic moderators. Nobody is genuine, people say things for upvotes and validation so now everybody has a political agenda. This creates mobs that shout people out of their echo chambers for good think points. Everybody is hopped up on dopamine being cruel to each other and they’re addict…
In my opinion the best thing about HN is that I am never told when someone responds to me. I don't sit there refreshing threads to see if I get a response, and there's no obvious/easy way to check up on my own posts later on without losing too much context. At first this galled me because I couldn't hold a conversation, but now I generally just say my piece and hope it helps or intrigues someone else. Sometimes I might search myself a few months later to see if I triggered more info, but it's not a real time thing, AND THAT'S OK.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is Twitter pretty good these days?
#20It can be good if you use it right.
I like to create lists so I can segment the content I consume. There are a lot of really cool "communities" and users on Twitter tweeting about practically every niche thing you might be interested in (often in real time). I have lists for different tech content (security, web dev, etc), finance, art, psychology, personal friends, and a few political ones (local, political memes/jokes, interesting political commentators).
When politics gets too toxic and I can mostly filter out that side of Twitter by just checking the lists that focus on tech, etc. I wouldn't recommend just going to the homepage and seeing what Twitter feeds you. I also wouldn't recommend reading comments or commenting as people are very cruel in comments on Twitter and rarely respond to anything in good faith.
The reason I personally still use it is because I've found it very good at proving a feed for the latest news within certain niches. I really value this with tech news and finance news. Other places like HN can be good for reading about the latest tech news too, but generally things only get picked up here when a media outlet has reported on the story and although the quality is higher a lot of it is dated and can be years old -- it's still interesting, just different.