Do you think that a big part of that could be the financial incentive to be "popular" on Twitter?
I mean, on hacker news it doesn't seem like a person gains any long term advantage from having their posts engaged with and upvoted. That is to say, the focus is on the content and not on the profiles/usernames.
There is no explicit advertising and most content is posted to create interesting discussion about it.
For me, the idea of twitter style micro blogging itself is a turn off. I always thought the arbitrary character limit was inherently a bad idea and "threads" are a terrible solution. Threads force one to split up a message and allow pieces of it to be taken out of context, retweeted and even quoted. Threads are a great propaganda tool because with every follow up "part", engagement decreases. People see the first part of a thread and only look at that, social behavior that can be abused when posting. Even it's main feature set is antithetical to accurately publishing information. It gets much worse when official institutions use it as their official communications channel and a login gate is in place.
I actually don't even think this is malicious but moreso bad design and failure to anticipate what rhe platform could turn into when it was first conceived.
That's obviously not what I meant. Communication on current social media has only led us into a new era of populism, and seems to only worsen political polarization. Unless something changes, I will continue to think it does more harm than good.
But Twitter is filled with much, much more hate and disinformation than its alternatives. I'd say it is definitely worse than the others.