Over at Gizmodo, Patrick Howell O’Neill belabors—what seems to me to be—the obvious. He posits that RSS is a much better way to keep up on what’s going on than Twitter. Wen I read that, my immediate reaction was, “Well, Duh!” Twitter, he says, is mostly a toxic tsunami of half-baked hot takes, propaganda, hostility, and outright hate. That characterization is probably more apt for feeds concerned with social issues and politics than those dealing with tech but I think the conclusion holds in both cases: RSS is better.
Although I do check some technical feeds or hashtags on the Twitter website, I use those as pointers to longer more thoughtful posts or articles. I’ve never understood why anyone would think you can say something useful in under 280 characters. I’ve seen more than one blogger quit Twitter and say that it felt like getting off drugs.
On the other hand, I’ve depended on RSS for years to point me to interesting articles that I can write about or otherwise enjoy. These days, I use the outstanding elfeed to do all this from within Emacs.
Lots of folks love Twitter, of course, but at least for my purposes, RSS is a much better solution. A Tweet is a good way to discover that the latest version of Emacs, say, has been released but if you want thoughtful analysis a blog or technical article is a much better bet.