Then why did Twitter displace RSS readers for the Web?

Google Reader was shut down and lots of tech people were blinded by follower count self importance and early adopter bluechecks to claim Twitter was “just fine” to use instead of RSS.

Twitter replaced the 'web' portion - the publishing of content part that people used RSS to subscribe to.

Twitter is a different thing.

A smart watch is a different thing from a quartz wrist watch but it would be foolish to act like the decline of the latter has nothing to do with the former.

I feel like I stopped seeing quartz wrist watches before smart watches were a thing, because smartphones were always available to tell time. At least from my cohort.

Smartwatches (namely Apple Watch) then became a thing because it provided more than time, such as vibrating alerts, fitness tracking, etc.

Not only that, but the high end of the old-school watch industry has never been healthier than it is now. ( https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/luxury-watches-for-men-... )

The conventional wisdom that smartwatches are killing traditional watches is just like the conventional wisdom that Starbucks and other corporate brands push out local coffeehouses: dead wrong. Instead, the new players validate the market and provide an anchor point for luxury goods.

There's a reason I said "quartz watches" and the mid-range absolutely did get messed up by smart watches, so the only thing "dead wrong" is your reading of my post.

Mea culpa, looks like you win the Internet.

Lots of younger people never had a watch in the first place, sure, but smart watches appealed to people who would have otherwise bought from, say, Fossil.

But Twitter/HN/etc. are all discovery mechanisms. The fact is that I can think that a lot of interesting content is going to cross my screen sooner or later without my actively prospecting for it--and I'm mostly not wrong.

my recollection was that twitter was doing fine when Google Reader was still running, although I'm sure it did benefit some from Google reader going away.

the value proposition for Twitter at this point was different than it is now I believe, but perhaps I am just on the wrong parts of Twitter.

the value proposition for twitter at that time (at least whenever I saw something I thought was valuable) was that it was a TLDR provided by experts regarding some thing. RSS didn't have a length limitation, twitter's length limitation forced experts to write a quick thing as to why you would want to go read anything they pointed to.

When less technical people came on it became a bunch of oh you'll love this, low information tweets, but in the past in my experience they were high information tweets considering the length. So the value of forcing tweeters to provide quality summaries of content for their audience.