Perhaps in an ideal sense, it’s like a group chat of people that you find interesting, sharing their thoughts and ideas. It’s also useful as a mechanism for distributing your own work and ideas.

I agree with you in that, it sucks for content consumption, outside of keeping up with things in a shallow way.

I don’t know if you could rise to higher levels of understanding by continually using twitter, in the way you could by reading a lot of books.