I love Twitter but I follow a bare minimum of focused accounts.

I'm a prolific follower and follow several thousand accounts making it my primary source for getting a heads-up on what people all over the place in those fields that interest me are thinking and doing (IT, politics, gaming, art, business, etc).

That said, I really miss the good old days before 'social media' when there used to be actual forums and blogs and IRC channels for everything under the sun. Thank heavens we still have HN.

It can be useful when all your infrastructure is down, to get the word out. It’s a decent second channel. But I’ll agree I think most tweets seem like shouting at a cloud.

The reporters are. I haven't visited twitter in a couple of years, but I see plenty of news articles that start Musk, Trump, or somebody tweeted something. It seems to be a pretty good press release pipeline.

Also on the other less cynical version of that, reporters are there - always. If there's something happening on the ground, you can get an unfiltered / unedited feed of what's happening around the world. For example I've got a list of 20 or so reporters from different countries on the ground in Ukraine, covering the situation every day. I find it much better than reading the published summaries.