Twitter used to be a place where I could aggregate different sources together without visiting the individual websites.
That was probably the only thing I used that for.
This forum does a better job in finding people to post twitter feeds (bless you lot) so that I don’t have to spend the same amount of time anymore.
I do think social media needs a space where people arent getting shouted down by the toxic assholes and instead are free to discuss with whoever they want. Reddit is one approach which worked for a bit. But it’s too geeky in terms of UI.
If I can get relatively the same information from this alternate without needing to spend time sifting through the slagmire that’s twitter and then spending time verifying the sources. It’s better.
Apart from the immediacy, they can signpost to alternative articles, answer questions much more freely or post things that wouldnt feature in an article. Sometimes, leading to interesting discussions between multiple experts in that area. And, your being directed from on site rather than lots of individual sites.
It depends on the question or subject matter. If they have just published an article in a magazine that has prompted further questions from readers or responding to a tv show which has misrepresented evidence on something - they may already be on top of the latest research in the area.
But also, to me the true value for me previously before Musk fucked it up by destroying that exact function; was that when I followed the North Korean ballistic missile program, I had 2 professors I followed in the first days many years ago, but then I clicked on who they followed, and they I selectively followed their sources. This is how I made a very extensive network of expert sources on geopolitics.
Same with the Syrian civil war, the Russian invasion and of course the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You can sieve out the activists that don’t have expertise this way (or who spreads misinformation or disinformation) and gain, with experience in filtering, an incredile timeline of information vastly superior than if I subscribed to quality newspapers. This does not work anymore. So these days I scan the timelines of sources I know have good heads, then I check the ones they re-tweet, then I scan their timelines again, if it looks serious (and when it comes to military analysis and geopolitics I have a rather good eye and head for that, since I already have far more background knowledge than most people on this earth) I click follow. If I see later that I made a mistake and that the source is not as knowledgable as myself or has a bad filter; i unfollow. But the ability to enter your favorite professor’s follower-list and then check those out, it is pure gold, no diamond. Same with OSINT. This way you only get the reliable sources and none of the low-brow or trollish ones. A bit harder these days, as you must manually hunt people’s timelines far more extensively.
Of course, you can do the same with sports. It’s not as serious of course, so “expertise” doesn’t matter that much, and liking someone’s opinions matter more in that field.
Of course. For almost a decade, I did not actually have a twitter account. I had a Word Document of links to twitter accounts that I then manually entered in my chosen browser (worked rather well, I seldom if ever feel the need to comment anyway and twitter is a bad platform for social discussions due to short word count), since I, previous to the Russian invasion, prefered to only read and learn incognito. But even before Musk took over, that became more difficult, so I was forced to create an account to even read all I wanted, but that is a digression I suppose.
