I disagree that "the right people" are on Twitter. I will grant that Twitter has historically been the high water mark for having the largest number of those people in one place, and also that a disproportionate number of people who need broad public reach as an intrinsic part of their career will also be their (eg. celebrities and journalists).
But at the same time, being an expert, leader and overall interesting person is not synonymous with public reach, and there is a huge subset of interesting people that have never touched Twitter. There's also been a slow and steady descent in the level of discourse on Twitter to the point that it's widely regarded as a cesspool now, with many formerly active interesting people having abandoned it, and many others holding their nose to drop their broadcasts but not engaging in any discourse due to the amount of polarization and armies of angry partisan nobodies ready to dogpile on the slightest misplaced word.
Ultimately, the most interesting parts of Twitter as being a marketplace for ideas, public square, and open platform with diverse use cases that everyone was so excited about in 2008-2012 was eventually subverted by the financial incentives that VC investment demands. The result is a significant divergence between what constitutes an interesting idea and what will make you successful on Twitter. Therefore I thoroughly reject the idea of treating Twitter as any kind of baseline bar for contemporary human notability. I'd rank a large scale following there somewhere above reality TV star, and somewhere below traditionally published author.
You can either go hunt down very specific narrow spaces where perhaps some special people have gathered. Or you can go to the site where everyone who wants to be in public having interesting engaging discussions with smart people already are.
There's no comparison. This isn't about audiences nor number of users. It's about the ability for people to form connections. Twitter has been way better of a place to do that, to find & discover new connections to make, in a place everyone sharp already was at.
Everyone sharp was not on Twitter, there was always a majority that were not. Like I said, in terms of a single platform it was a high water mark, but it is incredible confirmation bias to claim that everyone sharp went to Twitter.
I would never say this for real, but in my head I've always asked, how smart can you be if you're turning your nose up at or not joining in the most interesting open active conversations in the world?
I agree that the majority of the world or even sharp people weren't actually there. But in effect, every other place for conversations was a drop in the bucket compared to Twitter's ocean. Finding some good inspiring informative people to follow, & look up other potentially interesting conversationalists as you go, and you'd be hella winning.
Twitter enabled following & expanding your network intelligently nearly infinitely. Every other place, you will be bound to whomever you can attract.
> how smart can you be if you're turning your nose up at or not joining in the most interesting open active conversations in the world?
Frankly, I tend towards the opposite view. How smart can you be if you spend any significant amount of time engaged in the worst platform for intelligent conversation on the internet?
Well, clearly there are plenty of smart people in either category, but we can objectively say there are a lot more smart people that don't use twitter than do.
There's a worldview that proritizes/heavily weighs cost, and there's another that prioritizes/heavily weights opportunity.
This continues to strike me as passing up on something amazing. Most issues with birdsite depend on where you tread. The forum itself is not exceptional but really people just make such mountains over little molehills. Just learn to unfollow & trust your own judgements. Focusing only on negatives is a "whether you believe you can or whether you believe you can't, you're right".
But at the same time, being an expert, leader and overall interesting person is not synonymous with public reach, and there is a huge subset of interesting people that have never touched Twitter. There's also been a slow and steady descent in the level of discourse on Twitter to the point that it's widely regarded as a cesspool now, with many formerly active interesting people having abandoned it, and many others holding their nose to drop their broadcasts but not engaging in any discourse due to the amount of polarization and armies of angry partisan nobodies ready to dogpile on the slightest misplaced word.
Ultimately, the most interesting parts of Twitter as being a marketplace for ideas, public square, and open platform with diverse use cases that everyone was so excited about in 2008-2012 was eventually subverted by the financial incentives that VC investment demands. The result is a significant divergence between what constitutes an interesting idea and what will make you successful on Twitter. Therefore I thoroughly reject the idea of treating Twitter as any kind of baseline bar for contemporary human notability. I'd rank a large scale following there somewhere above reality TV star, and somewhere below traditionally published author.