I've tried Twitter recently for the first time to get more recent information about the Ukraine war. Maybe long-term twitter users see it differently because they've fine-tuned it and got used to it, but to me Twitter looks like a horrible and awful medium. I just can't see any purpose for it. People on Twitter post opinions and are subsequently mocked and insulted by other people who also value their opinions above all else. As far as I can see, Twitter is the most passive-aggressive place on the web. I'd go nuts if I read it daily.
Then I tried the fediverse, and it was worse, except that it was much weirder overall and posts mostly concerned extreme fringe topics and opinions.
I like good blogs and I'm fine with some Youtube channels, even though the signal to noise ratio is high. But microblogs seem like a complete waste of time to me. Can someone explain the appeal of these sites to me? What do people get from them? What interesting things do you read on Twitter?
Perhaps in an ideal sense, it’s like a group chat of people that you find interesting, sharing their thoughts and ideas. It’s also useful as a mechanism for distributing your own work and ideas.
I agree with you in that, it sucks for content consumption, outside of keeping up with things in a shallow way.
I don’t know if you could rise to higher levels of understanding by continually using twitter, in the way you could by reading a lot of books.
It's the de facto only place you can get lots of useful information in tech twitter. The overwhelming majority of good posts I find about interesting snippets, articles about anything from css to typescript and haskell I find them in tweets.
Signal to noise ratio is indeed very high, and sadly I see too much content I don't care about, which makes me abandon Twitter for weeks, but I think that it could be fixed.
Twitter's gambit since its inception has been the ability to magnify your audience more than a blog. This is _despite_ its counterproductive format for actual discussion and debate. All the critiques for how broken Twitter is now bemuse me. Compared to the blogs it supplanted, it's been broken since the start as a medium of informed communication. You're just not going to educate me of much of anything in 140 characters.
Your experience on mastodon is very dependent on which instance you're on.
There are 3 feeds - (1) home, your personal follows, (2) local, the people on your local instance and (3) federated, the people followed by anyone on your instance (+ stuff they boosted).
If you join a server somewhat aligned with your interests, you'll have a much better time.
If you go to Reddit with the default subreddits, the experience is the same. Nothing but noise.
At least Reddit is easier to tune - you can get a great feed by joining a dozen subreddits, instead of following hundreds of individual accounts on Twitter.
Then I tried the fediverse, and it was worse, except that it was much weirder overall and posts mostly concerned extreme fringe topics and opinions.
I like good blogs and I'm fine with some Youtube channels, even though the signal to noise ratio is high. But microblogs seem like a complete waste of time to me. Can someone explain the appeal of these sites to me? What do people get from them? What interesting things do you read on Twitter?