I never quite "got" twitter, it was never fun for me to participate on. It's telling / disturbing that folks had such trust in random accounts ...

It’s an interesting phenomenon. I don’t think people en masse have trust in any of these accounts. But when your feed is filled with the kind of stuff they say day in day out it still affects your overall perspective of the world. “No smoke without fire” on a subconscious level.

hacker news, Reddit and similar have always been about following subjects or topics you like, getting the latest discussion in a field of your interest. twitter was all about following people not topics, so you'd get a wider range of topics, but you tended to focus on accounts more and give more weight to specific users than you might here.

If you followed a variety of people it was quite addictive - so many celebrities or other notable people meant you got actual "first hand news", and it was fun seeing everyone join in on silly jokes and games and whatever, that doesn't hit quite as hard when it's just random usernames not "people".

But it suffered for that success, individual voices got drowned out in favour of the big names, the main way to get noticed becoming more controversial statements, and the wildly different views becoming less free flowing discussion and more constant arguments.

It was fun for a while if you followed fun people, but I think the incentives of such systems means it was always going to collapse as people worked out how to manipulate it.

For a long time, I did not get twitter either. But it seems to be the only popular platform where the academics and intellectual class want to hangout. Economists, researchers, policy wonks prefer posting on twitter over any other social platform.

All social media (including HN) is horrible in some ways. And they all suffer from too many people being overly credulous to random comments.

But the problem with over credulity goes far beyond social media. I've gotten strong push back for telling people they shouldn't trust Wikipedia and should look at primary sources themselves.

My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately.

And to be fair, a lot of these accounts that are exposed as grifters were called out as such for a while now. And most of them were so obviously griftery that the only ones that followed them were those that were already so deeply entrenched in their echo chamber.

It's funny that they're explicitly being exposed now though!

It’s an online bar to meet girls and flex your creativity.

A lot of people did not have trust and have been asking for this country-of-origin feature for years. Better would be if they bring back country of initial account creation, or some way to identify VPN usage.

Probably the thing I loved about it most was the fact that I could talk directly with people that I felt had a real impact in the world

Scientists/Researchers

Journalists

Activists

Politicians

Subject Matter Experts (for the fields I am interested in)

There were (when I was using it) a large number of "troll" accounts, and bots, but it was normally easy to distinguish the wheat from the chaff

You could also engage in meaningful conversations with complete strangers - because, like Usenet, the rules for debate were widely adopted, and transgression results in shunning (something that I rarely see beyond twitter to be honest)

It is basically two totally distinct products: the "Following" feed that you can make it as you like, and the "For You" that is just a stream of the stupidest posts imaginable by people you don't know.