I mean, there are lots of niche discussion forums on the internet that are better and worse than Twitter for various reasons. For instance, LessWrong.com is pop

I mean, there are lots of niche discussion forums on the internet that are better and worse than Twitter for various reasons. For instance, LessWrong.com is popular in my niche and has a higher signal-to-noise ratio than Twitter, but contains a much smaller group of expert contributors and (by design) isn't good for short rapid discussion.