Naval Ravikant called Twitter1 TV for intellectual people. People who love reading really do enjoy Twitter. It matters to be conscious of where your information comes from. People rarely think about where they get their information.
For all its fame, it seems to me that not many people actually use Twitter. Even among the people around me, that's the case. There's also the prejudice that it's an SNS where people talk kind of stupidly. Plenty of bizarre Twitter memes circulate, too.
These days people seem to use Threads more, but I don't like Threads because so many people there talk in an exhausting way. It feels like people nagging and living desperately. It feels like posts only show up in click-optimized formats, all in an effort to grow followers by any means.
On Twitter, at least, people speak a bit more freely. Used well, Twitter is really good. First, you can easily pick up insights. If you only follow odd accounts, it's not very useful. But if you follow good accounts, you get to see lots of short, insightful writing. Aphorism-like things. So it's worth taking the time to follow well. I recommend finding the Twitter accounts of authors whose books impressed you and following them. You can absorb a writer's inner thoughts and perspective. Authors of Korean books rarely have a Twitter account, but authors of foreign books are often very active on Twitter.
Also, information travels fast on Twitter. Whenever there's something like a subway delay, I search Twitter first rather than the news. That's because I can find out what's going on even faster than from the news. It's not only everyday information like this; useful trends spread quickly too.
I already knew about ChatGPT in December 2022, before it became widely known to the public. ChatGPT was already hot on Twitter at the time. All the narratives that people would fall for, like it replacing Google, were already circulating. There weren't even any YouTube videos explaining ChatGPT back then, so I considered uploading the first ChatGPT video in Korea, but for some reason my energy dropped in December and I couldn't do it, which I regret. So if you want to keep up closely with tech trends, Twitter is a must. Thanks to the repost feature, the gap in how fast information spreads between abroad and Korea is very small.
The one thing to watch out for is that Korean Twitter has a lot of pointless venting of negative emotions, fighting, and callouts. In those cases, you should actively use the "not interested" feature to clear them out of your feed. Since information is like food, you need to actively block junk food. If your feed is built around global content rather than Korean content, you can enjoy Twitter in a more worthwhile way. Thanks to the automatic translation feature, you can read posts in foreign languages easily too.
Finally, I'll close by leaving my Twitter address.
https://twitter.com/iamjustsian
Footnotes
-
It's called X now, but saying "X" feels a bit odd, so I'll just use the old name, Twitter. ↩