I use it to keep on top of what my field of work is doing. Since pretty much all companies and many relevant people regularly post concise short updates with relatively little spam I can do that in about half an hour every few days. I could stop using Twitter and check everyone's website/blog/facebook(?) directly, but that would take a lot more time and I don't know where I would even find most of the individuals, I suspect they only use Twitter, and not all companies crosspost either. It would be a real shame to lose that.
Yeah but wouldn’t your quality of the information you take in go up?
Conversations on twitter are awful especially interesting ones in tech or science with the noise and chaos that always ensues.
Personally I’ve been enjoying using my browsers bookmark manager. I’ve added maybe a hundred bookmarks last year of blogs and whatnot and it’s cool to organize my links and my home tab shows me them easily.
I don't think so. I'd just miss out on more and filtering what's relevant and what isn't would be more time-consuming (I can scan 2-3 sentences in a Tweetdeck cell a lot quicker than a rambling blog post in heavily styled blog). If there's something I need/want to know in detail, I'll read up on it and maybe research further, so that wouldn't change, but I'd have a harder time finding these things and I'd probably spot emerging trends later (that's what Twitter conversations tend to be pretty useful for).
Academic research? Research something else that’s actually novel.
Being able to map the social communication activities of millions of people with well-defined data formats, fine-grained temporal resolution, and in something close to real time is absolutely novel. This jsut says to me you haven't read any serious work in this area.
You’re right I haven’t. The overall harms caused by social media far outweigh any personal interest in knowing the actual discord they cause or worse having that information misused so our personal autonomy suffers.
Feel free to take me not seriously. I don’t particularly care that much about this or that. I said what I wanted.
I swear to god replace meth with twitter and it’s sad how many addicts there are.
Academic research? Research something else that’s actually novel.
Making bots? Try building something new in the AI space.
Need to reach your customers in case your service is down? Just use a different host for ur status.whatever.com and email/sms/whatever else them.