I feel like an old man writing this out but I just do not understand the value in Twitter and why people use it. I’ve been using it on and off since late 2009 and to this day the platform perplexes me.
It feels like an unorganized forum with no moderators with threads quickly devolving into people just screaming at each other and trying to one up. Thread navigation is a nightmare seemingly envisioned by someone who was a really big fan of git branching and thought that was needed in a social media site where all you can ever see at once is one branch because everyone clearly likes spending an hour reading the branching comments of comments so that you don’t miss any important information.
On top of this, the platform seems like it’s geared towards wanting low follower count users to start fights. By this I mean starting out on Twitter unless you have an established following or if your goal is just to tweet between you and your friends (at which point why are you not using another social media platform) your posts have no visibility. The easiest way to build up followers as far as I can tell is to find a popular account on Twitter, wait for them to post, then rush to put in a jab or defend them before someone else does so people viewing the original message see yours. The majority of people viewing comments are going to either be those who disagree and want to get in an insult and support others doing the same or you are coming into the comments to defend the OP and what they said. So with a balance between having a witty reply and being fast your comment is going to be more visible than anything you would have just tweeted to your timeline grabbing you more followers and RT’s.
In other words, Twitter really excels at encouraging people to have poorly thought out hot takes and making them clash with others. And this isn’t some grand revelation, people have been saying this for years yet we continue to use it.
So please could someone explain to me why they use Twitter and how they are getting value out of it that they couldn’t anywhere else?