Thank you for your lengthy reply. I'm a CS student and usually attend meetups and workshops, mostly related to startups and entrepreneurship. Nearly everyone there introduces themselves with their names and twitter handles. I have heard this "advice" again and again that if you want to make connections, get active on twitter. How true is it? Is twitter really the place to get in touch with people more so than Facebook?
Yeah, this is really Twitter's saving grace, and also why as much as it is a raging dumpster fire, it is still valuable.
Facebook curbs abuse by basically making sure no one can bug you unless you opt-in to it (friending them), and limiting how viral your posts can go. The flip side of this is that this is a really poor way to talk to people you don't already know.
Twitter is the complete opposite - complete strangers can contact you, read your writings, and do whatever. This is wonderful for networking, but obviously has pretty tremendously large downsides. Because of this there are actual "communities" on Twitter in a way that basically doesn't exist on Facebook, because associating with new people is just so easy.
The existential-scale problem facing Twitter now is that abuse has gotten so out of hand, and that the power-users are far more susceptible to abuse than everyone else due to their visibility. More than that, shutting off abuse in the ways we know how basically means converting to Facebook's social model, which is pretty much the anti-Twitter.
Maybe there are ways to curb abuse while helping Twitter stay Twitter? This is the big outstanding question, clearly I'm pessimistic about it - the two big reasons why Twitter succeeds (vast reach and free interjection) is precisely why it's also a shithole.
> the two big reasons why Twitter succeeds (vast reach and free interjection) is precisely why it's also a shithole
The same could be said for 4chan and it's still here after 15 years and shows no signs of going away. Can't we assume that twitter will continue to exist as it is right now? But then again, twitter and 4chan are different platforms. People get hurt on twitter and by 4chan. I guess twitter is going to become the next MySpace.
