Now, this has been severely degraded by the changes that Musk has made. The spam in direct messages is off the charts now, whereas in the past I would get maybe a spam per year. And when one of my areas of interest has a post that gets popular, I have to scroll past all the insipid clout-chasing replies from blue check marks which get floated to the top of replies in an attempt to reward some of the worst people on the internet. Also the long form tweets that need to be expanded are a big deflation of user experience, as reading and replying to those are suboptimal compared to a tweet thread.
But this is also the general internet: 99% spam plus 1% quality. And the quality of the 1% of good Twitter is some of the very best of timer material out there.
And since LLMs have been trained on this same mix... they seem to be mostly good at filtering. But they do lie an awful lot.
The best discussion platform is IMHO the older version of reddit / i.reddit with the nested comments + possibility to be indexed by google + possibility to reply to old posts. The super-nesting comments feature is great.
This is actually hugely beneficial to discussion as it makes people focus on the most salient point first, and further points go below, and each are easy to address individually.
Longer form material goes to outside links, sometimes, but Twitter threads are also great for long form content. At least for executive summaries that link out to the detailed bits for each primary point. Once the UI for Twitter prioritized threading, it became quite easy to express extremely long chains of evidence.
Often times the best posters are not the same people publishing the best stuff in their field, but sometimes they are. Aggregators are a different category.
What types of science are you interested in? Some random accounts that I can see right now:
@ShanuMathew93 - renewable energy tech and biz and news
@IdoTheThinking - California housing
@TheStalwart - finance, macroceconomics, microeconomics, etc.
@doctorveera - general genomics
The tweet threads are not terrible, but are inconvenient enough for people to be succinct as possible. Now there are walls of text from blue check marks that like the sound of their own voice far more than their content is insightful.
Sure I've read interesting long tweets, but I'd rather have a link to another site meant for long form writing than it living on Twitter, doubly so now as what bits of good content there were are behind a login wall.
But i get it, Elon needed something to make the blue check "worth it".
I am only half kidding. "Profiles of specialized Twitter readers" would be an excellent dataset if it could somehow be filtered down to that.