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".
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.