Not all opportunities are exercised - but especially on HN I would think we should realize that it's significant that they exist.

But your comment also brings up a possible secondary benefit: the benefit of the people to see and possibly get in contact with other real people (real for the most part hopefully), as they criticize world figures. This is something that doesn't exist in other media outlets or exists only for people who can afford to take time out to go to a protest or in person official function.

No idea what that first paragraph is trying to say.

And people can contact other people and criticize world leaders whether or not those leaders spend countless hours a day tweeting.

Twitter is quite possibly one of the worst places for that anyways for multiple reasons (established fake account infrastructure distorting conversations, poor layout for async discussion between many people, etc)

I was trying to say that just because one individual leader did not avail himself of the opportunity, doesn't mean that having that opportunity exist isn't valuable overall.

People can contact each other but having the leader somewhere available provides a focal point that otherwise wouldn't exist.

Twitter has problems - but it's not clear to me how a lot of the problem unique problems of twitter vs common problems of meeting and filtering out any anonymous mass of people at a party or conference.

> I was trying to say that just because one individual leader did not avail himself of the opportunity, doesn't mean that having that opportunity exist isn't valuable overall.

Then say that? Because this:

> Not all opportunities are exercised - but especially on HN I would think we should realize that it's significant that they exist.

Sure doesn't mean that.

> People can contact each other but having the leader somewhere available provides a focal point that otherwise wouldn't exist.

What? No. The focal point is the person and their actions.

Donald Trump was also one of the most contentious topics on every other form of social media that doesn't have him posting. Just look at Reddit.

> Twitter has problems - but it's not clear to me how a lot of the problem unique problems of twitter vs common problems of meeting and filtering out any anonymous mass of people at a party or conference.

Then read my comment again.

All platforms have problems, Twitter is just even worse than par, and the format is especially bad.

I can't believe we're actually going to pretend the platform that started by limiting people to discourse based on 140 characters supposed to be some sort of rallying point against bad leaders rather than an echo chamber where everyone talks past everyone except those who agree with their views.

-

Leaders should use their official platforms that aren't subject to the whims of a private company. If news companies or individuals or even the platforms themselves want to drop those official statements into their ecosystem that's on them.

It's one thing if a country just can't put together that infrastructure but the spark for this is literally the only country in the world with a tld for their government (.gov) there is no reason it should have ever come to this.