To share another perspective, as a gamedev I'll miss Twitter. I doubt there will ever be as many creative people sharing their works in one place again. Things will get siloed and harder to find. Today, it's pretty cool to sign in and see amazing, inspiring work-in-progress. Reddit doesn't come close in my experience.

Today, for example, the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder posted a series of tweets criticising this article: https://phys.org/news/2022-10-bell-theorem-quantum-genuinely...

It was interesting to read and I'm not sure how I'd have seen her thoughts otherwise, unless she makes one of her YouTube videos about it.

I'm not trying to say Twitter is the greatest or even that you should join, just that Twitter has a lot of interesting people posting stuff that has nothing to do with politics or celebrity culture and some of us find it valuable.

It looks like I'm using it exactly the opposite of your "real time event" mode. I follow people that are not journalists and don't comment on people nor events. Strictly ideas. There are other media much better suited to covering people and events and in real-time.

Not having an account - don't see how that can work. In incognito - which I presume is similar to me not having an account - I get to see only a single page with few messages, nothing more. And ofc not possible to follow accounts and thus shape the TL.

I never subscribe to trends, themes, areas of interest and similar devices used by Twitter to guess what tweets I'd like to see. Twitter is hopeless there (as is the rest of social media). Just "show me what the account I selected to follow posted" is plenty good. I can't divine why Twitter does not do that only, why the extra complications wrt what messages I see on my TL. It's not like it can't show me enough adverts while showing only messages from accounts I follow.

Aside: I'm mystified how one goes from "don't like it" to "should not exist". Why, what's wrong with "live and let live"?

Because it's internet boredom distilled into its purest form.

And it's popular with journalists because now they don't even have to leave their house to ask the "man on the street" questions, they can just read twitter and regurgitate what they saw and be done with it. More and more articles are just Twitter posts reformatted, and once you start noticing it it gets painfully obvious how much there is.