In my experience that’s about 90% true, but there’s a small minority of people who remain thoughtful and insightful even in 280 characters. If you can find them and mutually follow each other, and then mute or block all the blowhards, tryhards and self-promoters, you’ll have cultivated a useful network of colleagues beyond what you might otherwise have via work and conferences.
And if multi-disciplinary perspectives are valuable to your own research, then that Twitter network is especially valuable in that regard, as it’s likely to be at least as multidisplinary as your day-to-day work environment and more-so than your usual conference circuit.
That said, it does take some work to cultivate that graph. May or may not be worth the time and opportunity cost.
Using the Twitter website is still madness, though. The only way I can survive Twitter is with an app like Tweetbot or Fenix, that doesn't show what other users Like & keeps everything chronological. They're still around from the days when Twitter was designed to be used by third-party client apps, ala IRC.
Second this, absolutely necessary. You don't need many connections to make it worthwhile, just ones you wouldn't otherwise connect with in some other way besides Twitter.
Do you have any people you'd like to call out to follow? I'm curious about good environmental data and how we can better model our investment in our natural resources.
Yes there are hot (wrong) takes, snark, etc., but most of it is just plain old paper / blog post announcements with some helpful summaries in a thread (eg https://twitter.com/kelvin_guu/status/1227378652318330885 , https://twitter.com/lmthang/status/1222234237262159872).
It has definitely allowed me to come across papers and researchers I would not have seen otherwise, and this is it's main utility (aside from just being a great way to keep up with new stuff).
It's helped my career. It's let me connect with senior colleagues who aren't at my institution, introduced me to several people I've invited as speakers, and I've written two papers with people I met over Twitter and who I've never met in real life.
The key is curation.
But there's been one really nice, overriding factor for me: Twitter pals.
I feel like I've gained a few internet ride-or-dies, even if it's mostly us liking / commenting on each other's stuff.