So true. it's a toilet. A few months back I told myself no more, I resigned my account and haven't missed it at all. massive time sink, and utterly pointless. It isn't a conversation, it's yelling at a brick wall, then yelling louder when you don't get an answer.

Same here. I realized that using Twitter was just a great waste of time. Deleted my account, became more productive and happier.

Same with all social media, save for HN and light reddit use. In the process of de-googling my life as well.

This is true I think. Twitter is mostly a US thing

Consider your biases. 80% of twitter users are outside the US [0], [1].

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274565/monthly-active-in... [1]: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/twitter-statistics/

Speaking of biases, English-speaking twitter is a powervul vector bringing US biases (whatever they are) through the world.

I have to regularly stop and check that "ha, yes, that's a very USA-centric take on things and does not represent reality outside of it".

Just like Hollywood.

Around 96% of world population is outside the US. Consider your biases indeed.

What about the internet-using population? Supposedly only 60% of the world uses the internet whereas almost all of the US population does

https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-populatio...

250 million non-US users to 4.3 billion Internet users (excluding the US) is about 5.8%. Compared that to 23% in the US.

Twitter is very US-centric.

If Twitter is 20% American users, how can that be considered "US-centric?" The vast majority of Twitter's users are not in the US...

Because the conversation was about Americans taking Twitter too seriously, not Twitter's discourse being dominated by Americans. The relevant metric seems to be the percentage of each population using twitter.

True, 60% of those are Russian bots. /s

Financial markets do. Where acting faster than your competition is essential you don't have a lot of choice.

As for the blackmail and war starting you probably couldn't do much with public tweets (nobody is going to go to war over a tweet without fact checking it) but access to private messages is an entirely different story.

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_Dispatch started the Franco-Prussian war.

Bismarck released his carefully worded readout in the evening of Thursday, 14 July 1870. Assuming the french were "making the bridge" for Bastille Day, they would have had one working day (Monday, 18 July 1870) to fact check, but I don't know if they took even that, because according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Franco-Prussian_... , on 19 July 1870 "Le Sourd, the French Chargé d'Affaires, delivered Napoleon [III]'s declaration of war at the Foreign Office" in Berlin.

https://scholar.dominican.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11... suggests the french were already mobilising on 14 July itself, and that while telegraph use may technically have been possible, US diplomats were still communicating by snail mail with State.

That emotion won over fact checking is supported by Ch. I p.3

> Washburne dismissed the accuracy of the Ems telegram because it had been challenged by King Wilhelm. "There is no truth in the reports concerning the indignity which the King of the North German Confederation offered to Benedetti, the Envoy of France." Washburne based this statement on a published denial by the King which he had read in Cologne while returning to Paris. Though he questioned the veracity of the Ems telegram, Washburne still credited it with arousing the French Chamber of Deputies to vote for war.

(the war vote was Friday, 15 July. It might be interesting to see if any french papers had carried Wilhelm's version of events.)

> As for the blackmail and war starting you probably couldn't do much with public tweets

Depends how tense the situation already was. A well-timed tweet could be enough to tip things over the edge if both sides were already on the edge, and I don't think we're too far away from that.

Also remember that the soldiers themselves have twitter.

Those tweets can make them more itchy than they already are in a tense situation and nervous persons make more mistakes.

German journalists do. Sadly.

French journalists too.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of journalists/new people, are active on Twitter. I would expect them to be over represented given the amount of reports based or citing tweets, but I don’t know.

Frankly the biggest problem with twitter is journalists taking it seriously and abjuring their actual jobs of explaining what's going on in the world in favor of low effort no-information bullshit like "person X said Y on twitter." Literally nobody else with a life and a day job does. It's the comments section they removed from their websites.

The "muh stock market" argument is stupid; there are punters who take it seriously, and obviously, it's a great vola signal for automated traders. So what? Rumors were propagated before twitter and will be propagated long after it goes the way of other useless companies like pets dot com.