Comment by nomilk
1 year ago
> Twitter is/was not a utility
I've found no substitute for getting breaking news on a specific topic (e.g. natural disasters, war, politics, sport). Google News is second best, but the sites it indexes are at the absolute least 20 minutes behind twitter.
Zite was my favourite app from many, many years ago. But it was good at collating daily reading, not for up to the minute/second curation.
For certain topics that are time sensitive, I haven't found anything that comes close to twitter.
> the sites it indexes are at the absolute least 20 minutes behind twitter
Genuine question: who cares?
There is almost no news where the difference between getting it now, twenty minutes from now, or tonight makes a meaningful differ to your life. Much of the information in the first twenty minutes of an event will be confusing, misleading, and/or wrong.
It was useful for local news.
E.g., when I saw police helicopter that seemed to be doing a low altitude search pattern about 300 m away, and a TV news helicopter hovering higher up in the same area, I wanted to know if this was something I needed to be concerned about.
A quick search on Twitter and I found a recent tweet about gunfire in a store in that area and a shooter on the loose.
it’s not just big news though, twitter was very useful for hyper local news in cities… to the point that if there were helicopters overhead or some loud noise nearby… usually someone posted about it on twitter - this has been irreplaceable for me, I know less about what’s around me now
Trivial, but salient: sale drops for things like electronics or tickets. The only reason I got Pax East passes in 2014 is because I got a Twitter alert. They were gone 10 minutes later. An email alert showed up a half-hour later. I'm sure people have had similar experiences with more significant events.
Unless you are working as a journalist, or for some other reason you need to respond immediately to world events, you could just abstain.
> you could just abstain.
True for the most part. But occasionally there's good reason to want to know some information sooner rather than later: outbreaks of war, dangerous/breaking events in your localised area, dangerous weather alerts etc.
all of those should have a primary source. Twitter is merely a secondary source.
So to avoid twitter, you can subscribe to the primary source.
At least it used to be this way. But then a few official places that annouce things have turned to use twitter as their primary source.
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Twitter was great for reporting on court cases. For example, last year the Biden administration essentially made millions of Americans into felons via an obscure ATF rule change. The rule has since been enjoined by at least three federal courts, which anyone who follows @2aupdates would know about because he crawls the PACER feeds. My local newspaper has been following this story, but as recently as last week reported that the rule was still in effect. I submitted a correction and they fixed it.
Twitter was really good for some things. For example, there was a thread yesterday contrasting public data on fertility rates with the latest official data as collected by Twitter users. In short, the UN, Macrotrends and CIA World Factbook are publishing data that is extremely inaccurate. For example, Macrotrends reports that China's TFR was 1.7 in 2023, when the official data says it was 1.09. Accounts like @morebirths and @birthgauge even report estimated fertility based on monthly data so following those accounts is like having a time machine.
I guess it depends on what content you want.
I don't really get into the news enough to want a real time feed. Even if I did, I think I'd look for something more reliable than a collection of posts from Twitter users. It probably even goes deeper than not getting into news for me though, because heck, I don't even watch much TV really.
But I am into sports. And I think the best real time sports feeds out there are the reddit game threads. Now maybe the threads on X are better for some people? I don't know? But reddit game threads are far superior for my purposes. ie - Finding out if everyone else is thinking "What The Actual F--- was that?" Whenever Drew Allar threw the ball in a bowl game for instance.
Similar to you not having found a substitute for news over Twitter, I haven't found a substitute for reddit game threads where these kinds of sanity checks are concerned.
This is a void that should be filled but is akin to tv or news paper of the past which were as close as you could get to breaking and also privately owned.
The tech is there now for the government and other entities to distribute with open protocols or things like rss, but Twitter never was that