> What does Twitter do so we’ll that we can’t imagine doing without it?

It's a place that media whores love, and they're the ones who make all of the content. That's why we're hearing about it endlessly. One of the biggest media whores bought it, so it should really be considered an internal war that we're just bystanders to.

> I’m not suggesting Twitter has no value, but I question whether it or something very much like it is the only place that value can be realized.

I'm pretty sure that what we wanted was to be able to send public text messages that people could subscribe to, and to be able to subscribe to other people doing the same thing. Putting the right UI over group chats, and making every registered user a mod of a group chat that shares their account name would be Twitter-- i.e. an ideal replacement.

Perhaps expressing your opinion and dislike to a certain group of people in a minimally respectful way would fit better a public forum.

No, I'll instead say exactly what I mean, and not disguise my biases in doubletalk. Calling Musk a media whore is the nicest thing I've ever said about him.

Perhaps you're not helping him or anyone else become better.

You're an articulate, capable being, maybe focusing your energy and time on becoming better and helping others around you become better would be more rewarding to you and the world.

For me it was a way to discover communities of technologists (Erlang, distributed systems), a way to interact with former co-workers, celebrate and commiserate major events… I doubt I would have found the best job I’ve ever had without it.

> What does Twitter do so we’ll that we can’t imagine doing without it?

It is assumed to be the best place to hang out on the internet. This assumption holds so much water that a multi billionaire paid $44B for it.

There's also a lot to be said about shaming public officials/organizations (courtesy of the trending feature) into action.

The fact Elon paid 44b for it doesn't say anything about Twitter's actual value.

Neither does your reply about Twitter's market value.

A lot of artists post exclusively on Twitter and have stated their art will not be reposted elsewhere. It makes me worried for what's going to happen to all that content if there's a mass exodus of users.

I think of all social networks I've used, Twitter was the best at 'getting out of my echo chamber'.

I was able to discover about multiple topics I got interested in, got to read about a lot more technical stuff that otherwise I wouldn't ever heard of it but it's interesting (and even useful to my job!).

And I also found 2 jobs through twitter, that's two more jobs than through linkedin!