It also thrives in "hot takes" that might sound smart at first glance but are incredibly ignorant if you analyse them. Everything is oversimplified to fit the character limit, but nobody seems to notice. It's ignorant hot-takes in answer to other ignorant hot-takes. TikTok is basically the same btw, but in video format.
I first thought the flaw with twitter was that people tweeted insights with a minimal of background or literature research. This leads to shallow analysis of problems others have spent years thinking about.
I realized later that the more accurate flaw is not that, but correlated to that. The real flaw is that it's a breeding ground for low-effort takes. The person espousing some grand theory of life can tweet it after thinking about it for just a few minutes. This leads to theories that not only are not exposed to peer review, but theories that literally the writer herself hasn't spend more than a few minutes thinking carefully about.
If you only have to type 140-characters, you get both really great theories distilled, and fleeting thoughtlets.
Like all social media it values speed way more than anything else. Even on HN you’ll see it. Hundred page document gets posted, but the first comments will be from people who clearly couldn’t have read it.
The PA cartoon, "I'm a Twitter Shitter!" really summed up the potential of the service right at the beginning. Twitter steamrolled other, better discussion sites with a sub-optimal design because it's impossible to have a real discussion there. Look who backed them, look at their early marketing efforts: This shit here was the goal all along.
It's almost the perfect design for dumbing down topics and the population, keeping them fighting among themselves so they don't unify and fight the real enemy.
Which 1-3 tweets though? When I open my Twitter homepage, the top 3 tweets are: art, a selfie, and lighthearted nostalgia about 90s cartoons.
It's very easy to find unpleasantness on Twitter, but it's also very easy to not find it. If you walk down main street, you can look in the storefronts and people watch, or you can look down every alleyway and complain about the existence of dumpsters.
I often catch up on latest news around several topics, sports etc. Twitter is normally faster then news mediums. So every now and then I check the trends. Every single trend you click turns into a cess pit from tweet nr 2 or 3.
Don't check the trends. Find a circle of people with your interests and stay away from political spam you're not interested in. That makes Twitter very useful for e.g. following research or getting informed opinions.
The prolific "threads" that have supplanted blog posts are one of the worst aspects IMHO. The threads get engagement, and that's addictive, but it's a horrible way to consume information.
We made a 100% accessible, globally connected town square, and this is what we got. Either we accept it or admit that humanity can't deal with the kind of interconnected open discourse that proponents of direct democracy dreamed of for ages.
I think the cat's out of the bag and we'll just have to adapt to it, in the long run probably for the better.
It thrives on snarkiness, rage, anger and outrage.
Even though there are some gems in the mud. In this case it would be best to shut it down and start over.