It's a very common HN trope! "I don't even own a television" on threads about cable TV, or "I don't have a Facebook account" on threads about Facebook. These 10x hipsters never want to do anything fun and easy that "the masses" do -- and they have a compulsion to let everyone else know they're special. I think it comes from parents that made a mediocre kid believe he's special and gifted and that all his ideas are profound.
i don't have a twitter either but i follow important people there. (it works on the web version at least).
john carmack for example often updates on his twitter. a couple of programmers & artists i like too. also the trends column is the most accurate "mood indicator" ever.
Seems perfectly reasonable. Here are some reasons:
1. The fraction of people on the world on Twitter is very small. Either most people in the world are missing important information, or not being on Twitter doesn’t cause one to miss important information.
2. If something important does occur on Twitter, it will be repeated on other news sources. It seems like half the news stories these days are just a bunch of tweets surrounded by boilerplate.
I think that listening to emergency radio is a good model for Twitter. It might provide you with information earlier than relying on conventional sources, and it might provide you with more blips of information, but not all of that information is necessarily correct, and you will spend a lot of time and not gain much of value over traditional sources.
I don't think the emergency radio analogy makes much sense since Twitter's value is more than just reading tweets. It can be used for initiating and participating in discussions.
Fair point. Maybe radio in general is a better model. Some people use it to have conversations with friends, and some people use it to listen to the emergency channel.
It still means that cutting it out of your life won’t doom you to missing important information.
I could live without Twitter obviously, but I could say that for pretty much every Internet service other than maybe email. What's great about Twitter is the serendipity; I've been able to follow people with perspectives that I just don't have in my professional or personal circle, and reading/chatting with them over the years has profoundly expanded my worldview. It's not much different in that sense than HN – I could never call any thread or single day of browsing "important", but I know that what I've learned cumulatively over time has been very important.
Actually they don't do that, and neither would I if I could run 50 mph, was huge, and preferred breathing air, but anyway: Importance (which is import, meaning) is mostly subjective. If there's such a thing as objective importance, attention is probably orthogonal to it. And to subjective importance too, at least at first, but then extended attention probably increases perceived/subjective importance just as protracted inattention decreases it.
