Seems perfectly reasonable. Here are some reasons:
1. The fraction of people on the world on Twitter is very small. Either most people in the world are missing important information, or not being on Twitter doesn’t cause one to miss important information.
2. If something important does occur on Twitter, it will be repeated on other news sources. It seems like half the news stories these days are just a bunch of tweets surrounded by boilerplate.
I think that listening to emergency radio is a good model for Twitter. It might provide you with information earlier than relying on conventional sources, and it might provide you with more blips of information, but not all of that information is necessarily correct, and you will spend a lot of time and not gain much of value over traditional sources.
I don't think the emergency radio analogy makes much sense since Twitter's value is more than just reading tweets. It can be used for initiating and participating in discussions.
Fair point. Maybe radio in general is a better model. Some people use it to have conversations with friends, and some people use it to listen to the emergency channel.
It still means that cutting it out of your life won’t doom you to missing important information.
I could live without Twitter obviously, but I could say that for pretty much every Internet service other than maybe email. What's great about Twitter is the serendipity; I've been able to follow people with perspectives that I just don't have in my professional or personal circle, and reading/chatting with them over the years has profoundly expanded my worldview. It's not much different in that sense than HN – I could never call any thread or single day of browsing "important", but I know that what I've learned cumulatively over time has been very important.
1. The fraction of people on the world on Twitter is very small. Either most people in the world are missing important information, or not being on Twitter doesn’t cause one to miss important information.
2. If something important does occur on Twitter, it will be repeated on other news sources. It seems like half the news stories these days are just a bunch of tweets surrounded by boilerplate.
I think that listening to emergency radio is a good model for Twitter. It might provide you with information earlier than relying on conventional sources, and it might provide you with more blips of information, but not all of that information is necessarily correct, and you will spend a lot of time and not gain much of value over traditional sources.