When I saw a photo on Twitter of that plane that had just landed in the Hudson, posted by somebody who had evacuated the plane, I knew something dramatically new had arrived. I later saw that I could search news events and see opinions and perspectives that I'd never heard of in my life. Everybody was in the same room, we could tap into the zeitgeist.

Eventually it just caused my blood pressure to rise and I eventually decided to step away. But for a few years, there was something very interesting going on.

I loved Twitter. More than once I've read tweets thinking "this will be on mainstream media in a few days". It felt like the pulse of the world. For any event, I would check Twitter before any news site.

I also had something similar to a community on there for years.

There's no doubt that Twitter used to be the main platform for promotion of solopreneurs and technical content creators.

For me it's almost all gone.

I wonder if I ever loved a social network website at all.

When Facebook started I sure loved it. For a college kid it was such great way to keep in touch with all the friends you made that transferred schools (or that you met abroad), share pictures, plan events, and give people a quick snapshot of your personality. It really felt like a magical use of the internet that refined myspace in to a useful tool.

This one?

This one is pretty good tbh. I still think fringe beliefs are tolerated so long as the post isn't inflammatory. That's a pretty hard thing to sustain. I think the mods put the right touch on it.

Before any agreement here, we will need a definition for love and an argument on whether this is a social network.

For hear I'd say treating people the way you would hope to be treated is good enough?

I consider it a message board more than a social network, it has no focus on social links between members and nothing fancy that web2.0 era introduced (ajax and such)

Twitter used to be quite useful for breaking news stories. A couple of times a year I'd find out about something big currently happening via Reddit, and jump on Twitter to keep track of it as it was developing.

There was always plenty of misinformation, but you'd still find out about the facts an hour or more before it'd be reported on mainstream media. Of course, by the time it hit mainstream media Twitter would pretty much instantly become useless due to all the "thoughts and prayers" retweet pollution, and spammers hijacking the hashtags.

Can't say I ever loved it, though.

I really like "your dilation may vary".

The Japanese speaking parts of Twitter is (still) quite nice, I am getting good value from it.

I imagine there are still many communities that aren't completely ruined yet, your mileage may vary.

I never joined Twitter, but wasn't there a pretty great statistics Twitter at some point? Dudes like Larry Wasserman, Nate Silver, Hadley Wickham, Andrew Gelman all pretty active and collaborating in the open. I got the impression it had some nice topical communities like that, whereas the frontpage current events feed was pretty much always shit, but that seems like a universal truth of human commons, not something specific to web-based social media or Twitter.