> HN is super focused, and while some funny OT stories 
  > make it to the front page, for the most part it is solid 
  > tech news. 

Interesting: My perception is the complete opposite, and I've actually found myself using Twitter (with Tweetbot) for tech news much more than HN lately. I think this is because Twitter uses the people I choose to follow to decide what to show me, whereas HN uses everybody, and to make a story popular with everybody it generally has to make people angry/mad/happy. That means that HN seems to have more and more polarizing stories reaching the front page, whereas Twitter seems more focused.

I'm the same demographic and also never really got into Twitter, but I definitely see the appeal.

Comparing Twitter to RSS is definitely way off as RSS has really nothing to do with social, and Twitter has everything to do with social. HN/Reddit, by comparison, are almost exactly the same thing with just different community standards.

Twitter is really about a streamlined and open conversation. It's a more stripped-down social experience compared to Facebook or Tumblr or whatever other social networks came before, but yet it captures the essence of online interaction in an elegantly minimalist fashion. I think this leads some people to find it utterly vapid because online interaction is simply not the same as in-person, and Twitter exacerbates these characteristics by lowering the time and location requirements down to near zero, so you can participate anywhere, anytime, on any device without ever having to take more than a minute because you're limited to 140 characters anyway. There is definitely a purity and beauty to it, but it always gives me the sense that I'm wasting my time.

> TFA is about the API, but when I read the title prior to clicking my immediate reaction was "it was never fun"

Whoever reverts all titles changed this one from the useful and descriptive title I submitted it with.

This was the original:

> TwitCleaner shutting down due to API changes