Twitter can be a very valuable resource if you follow the right people.

No matter what industry you are interested in, there are leaders worth following on Twitter.

One example for finance, Cliff Asness. He's a billionaire quant hedge fund guy, but he tweets every day.

There's a ton of investors, businesspeople, reporters, programmers, researchers, etc. that are very active on Twitter, not to mention the plethora of comedy accounts that I find hilarious.

> it's a street corner in medieval Europe

One laaarge street corner.

Your comparison is inapt. One tweet in your timeline can not drown out other tweets.

That's not entirely true. Twitter doesn't show you all tweets in chronological order, it has some kind of sorting algorithm like Facebook. If you follow enough people popular tweets and tweeters definitely drown out less popular ones

I never said that, nor do I think that was implied.

You did. There is no concept of "volume" on Twitter in the way that a passerby in Medieval Wherever would miss some information over other.