You are missing the fact that, for many of us who used to enjoy Twitter in exactly the way you described, X no longer fills that need, because the subject matter experts whose real-time thoughts we used to follow have left the platform, and all that remains are people whose real-time thoughts we don't generally want to hear.

That may differ from your experience - your real-time expert community might be different than mine.

But for a lot of us who actually used to enjoy Twitter, what you're describing is no longer to be found there.

Nah, you're probably wrong about HN users not knowing how to use Twitter. You're assuming the worst - perhaps assume that people have good reasons for avoiding it and ask what those might be?

I have about 5k followers on Twitter and have posted roughly 10k tweets over the last 16 years of having an account there. I'm pretty familiar with how to use it. I've moved to mastodon - the part of Twitter I used to value is a dumpster fire, many of my colleagues have moved, and I don't want to contribute to monetizing hateful garbage. And that includes preferring not to log in, which means threads don't show up any more. So it was nitter or nothing.

I used to use Twitter and I simply disagree with it being more useful than HN. I suppose it depends on the focus of content you want to learn or read about

For me it's the abysmal SNR no matter where I look, except if it absolutely needs to be real-time. Even considering just the "content" and ignoring the unfathomable interface that we're left with now.

It’s HN. Everyone here has encountered many true believers who, when confronted with a criticism of their favorite tool, responds “well, you are using it wrong. Change your workflow to match mine, which is superior anyway, and then you’ll see.”

It’s tiresome, and I for one have little patience for someone patronizingly suggesting that I'm being stubborn for refusing to allow them to enlighten me.

Is that what you were doing? Maybe not. But you certainly matched my regex, so to speak.