I dont understand why twitter is so prevalent in the tech community; and it's not like you can just 'not use it' - you are at a true disadvantage if you aren't on twitter because of how much discourse around new tech, private equity, etc transpires on it.
I'm surprised a literal echo-chamber in which free speech is suppressed for disagreeing with the party line is responsible for so much productivity because of how many techbros are active on it. What happened to the time where being a techbro meant you were an open source libertarian like Stallman?
I don't know. I think you can just not use it. You might miss out on the daily chaff but anything of note will get reposted elsewhere.
The feedback mechanism on Twitter allows you to find useful discussions of current affairs in less popular topics. Can you find a good discussion of current events in agribusiness on Reddit? No. On Facebook? No. But if you open up Twitter and search for Arthur Daniels and you'll find something useful.
So, when the manager at a company wants to publicize, he has nowhere else to go.
> I'm surprised a literal echo-chamber in which free speech is suppressed for disagreeing with the party line is responsible for so much productivity because of how many techbros are active on it.
Reddit is worse. Facebook is worse. Bluesky is a community that couldn't stand Twitter changing it's party line, so it's worse. Mastodon is complex and suffers from the same problems as Bluesky.
Like it or not, Musk did choose his acquisition well.
Let me make it clear because I don't want to come across as biased - Reddit, Facebook and platforms like it are 1000% worse and or just as bad, no contest from me on that part; the dialogue just skews a different way depending on the platform.
To the first point though, I guess I just don't understand how such niche and useful discussion ended up on twitter and remains there out of all places. It seems strange to find someone pushing moon-landing-is-fake conspiracies on the same site nuanced discussion occurs on some hyperfocused topic
It's all about the technical features of the platform. Twitter's design is less likely to encourage conformity, so you can find far more insane content in it, but it's also less likely to encourage people to pointlessly discuss popular topics over and over.
Twitter allows for the existence of small ad-hoc communities numbering a dozen people at most, without a designated leader. Facebook groups, subreddits and mastodon instances require that a community has a designated dictatorial leader, be it an admin, a moderator or an instance owner.
The most powerful method of expressing approval - the re-tweet is likely to be used to promote interesting statements. Blind adherence to conformity isn't interesting. Crazy conspiracy theories are interesting, but so is specialized knowledge. All you have to do is ignore the former, (unless conspiracy theories amuse you).
I think that’s just an artifact of twitter’s history. It was “normal” (increasingly algorithm slop driven) website until roughly 1-2 years ago when it was bought out and became maga slop.
Remember twitter came out in like 2007 when only tech people were on the internet.
>What happened to the time where being a techbro meant you were an open source libertarian like Stallman?
As far as I've ever been able to tell, Stallman's positions are much closer to socialism. Perhaps you're thinking of ESR?
They are orthogonal. If you plot him on the political compass, he'd be libertarian-left.