[yetanotherHNacc]

If you can't have a conversation on Twitter you may be doing something wrong. Thanks to the peers on the network we've found all sorts of interesting things.

Things like the location of rockets associated with sarin attacks in Syria[0] placed squarely on Mezzeh military airbase in Damascus. The rockets at the time were thought to be Iranian Falaq but more evidence showed them to be part of their own distinct program.

The discussion did not stay entirely on Twitter but was the main venue for it. Without being able to rope millions of random peers you may not know you will converse with later into one IRC channel, Twitter works for wide broadcast fast paced discussion.

Blocking people helps sure, but I think many people's problem seems to be a perceived lack of interesting peers.

[0] http://wikimapia.org/29357078/Falaq-2-Launch-Site

[jameskilton]

Sure sounds like you're blaming antirez for people on Twitter taking his tweet out of context and running with it. It's also completely unfair to say "Twitter was awesome in this very explicit situation so you obviously did something wrong in your situation".

[yetanotherHNacc]

No, that is on the people who did that. If anything I would blame antirez for getting flustered enough about this non-Twitter specific problem to write a blog post.

[WhitneyLand]

He is not to blame at all. He made a good faith effort to communicate which did not work and openly reasoned about the challenges of a relatively new platform that many people are still trying to make the best use of. I'm glad he posted.