Whilst Twitter has someone tweet the occasional gem, it's genuinely few and far between. I honestly feel that the format was great when it was only really programmers who used it (and even then I'm not so sure...) but limiting people to 140 characters, even discounting images and links, means most people can't convey views on most complex issues.
I have an unpopular view, but I'm firmly of the belief that all Twitter did was amplify the voice of celebrities - most of whom have not much to really say, made it easier for abusive speech to be targeted towards individuals and amplified moral outrage. Facebook has as well, but nowhere near as badly as Twitter.
Edit: like I say, it's an unpopular view! If only someone would tell me why my view is wrong or unreasonable. In 140 characters...
Edit 2: It's suddenly occurred to me that if someone was able to give a highly convincing argument in favour of Twitter's ability to convey all complex arguments and views and did so with a lengthy response, but there was no way of distilling the message to 140 characters... would that invalidate it?
Definitely twitter is entirely about who you follow. I tried it out early on, saw no value, and ignored it for a year or two, until a friend convinced me it has some value, and there are two uses I find.
I follow several programmers (some internet famous, some merely who I've found from using a project they worked on or someone else's retweet), and through that, find it interesting to get a glimpse at what other people are doing or finding challenging, or see when there's buzz around some new technology in my space.
The other thing I find it useful for is local updates in my (relatively small) city. Traffic updates, road closures, police activity, events, etc. The local public works and city hall accounts are surprisingly active and often useful. I also follow a handful of restaurants nearby the office: they often tweet lunch specials.
I follow exactly zero mainstream celebrities, never look at 'Moments', 'trending', etc -- I find those things full of crap I simply don't care about at all.
That has been my observation as well. It's quite useful as an segregator for local information. Probably because of the character limitation. I think there's a psychological positive to it as in "well I only have to type about 140 characters" (said the event organizer, police pr person, town hall person etc.)
The change will be nice because it'll hopefully be easy to parse the metadata for attachments (images, url) and it should be more elegant to handle them in general than regexping them out.
What's the best strategy for avoiding harassment? I have a Twitter account, but very, very rarely use it. It's my biggest concern really.
Knowing strategies to avoid just nasty people is the main issue I have with it. Like, if you go into Twitter and see that you have a whole bunch of Gamer Gayers targeting you (just an example, I can't see how I would be a target!) then I'd imagine having no Twitter would be preferable to actually having a Twitter account!
You don't have to actually post anything. I use Twitter to consume information, not to blast it. Sometimes I'll retweet a project or maybe post an interesting bit of code, but that's unlikely to attract any negative attention. Avoid posting or retweeting contentious information, you'll be fine.
I'd imagine having no Twitter would be preferable to actually having a Twitter account!
To some people it's so valuable to use as a means of participating in their community of choice that they're willing to keep using it despite severe harrasment.
Not being a woman gives you a big advantage against harrasment. But it can come from all sorts of weird places. My wife is a big Eurovision tweeter and encountered people who search for "Macedonia" to tweet Greek nationalist abuse at.
You're only likely to be 'targetted' by anyone if you post strong opinions on contentious topics. Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't, but you should be prepared to defend your views or ignore certain reactions. This is all just real life, after all.
I think it depends who you choose to follow. Twitter can be different things to different people. I've never been a big fan of Twitter myself, but I follow about a dozen programmers and a few sporting brands and I get some value from that.
Your argument of Twitter being better when only programmers used it doesn't really apply if you only follow programmers, does it?
I have never been a fan of the concept. You have to work really hard to force an interesting thought into 140 characters, which leads most people just post throwaway snark and dark humor. And reading backwards through a chain of posts to simulate a real post is just stupid. I made several attempts to use the thing, anyway, because "everyone else was using it."
I eventually came to use 2 accounts, one anonymous, to interact with brands and personalities (but I repeat myself), and one personal, to keep up with people I knew first-hand. The former devolved into just ranting about everything that I found sub-optimal (usually about the .NET workflow for my day job), and the latter didn't generate enough interesting activity to care about. Both were just negative pressures on my daily activity, so I finally just shut down both.
Twitter is not great for complex arguments over differing views. Hardly anywhere on the internet is, though! In order to do that you need a small heavily moderated community.
Twitter is great for zeitgeist, silliness, mass-participation solidarity politics (this isn't very thoughtful, yes, but that's not always the most important thing), following live events, international fandoms, and kibitzing.
