To be clear, I agree I and everyone else is just an ant in Musk's anthill of followers, but there's no disputing that he has directly replied to and argued with

To be clear, I agree I and everyone else is just an ant in Musk's anthill of followers, but there's no disputing that he has directly replied to and argued with me, as he has with dozens/hundreds of other random users. Of course, Musk is an outlier in that respect. Twitter's more day-to-day benefits is the serendipity of finding others interested in the same topics as I am. Most of my personal network is not on HN nor Reddit (or working in tech, for that matter), but more than a few are on Twitter, even as just lurker accounts. You're mistaking tweets as being the only form of discussion on Twitter. What starts as tweets can go into a private discussion or email. My biggest project came from me tweeting about a data-scraping exercise I did -- turned out someone at a major news org was doing an investigation into the topic, and we ended up collaborating instead of competing with each other. I can't think of any other way we would've found each other, because I was only tweeting to show off something I did, and news orgs don't talk about investigations in-progress. The other form of content on Twitter is the non-discussion -- i.e. when someone goes on a long tweet thread, and isn't particularly interested in debating with every reply. This is very similar to an old-fashioned blog post -- but the engagement experience is much different. Random people from all walks of life may publicly respond with personal stories to a trending topic (e.g. mental health), in a way that feels much more natural and frictionless than creating a blog post, if you even had a blog to begin with.