This feels oddly specific. I'm not sure why you can't engage on Twitter and still not be "lacking in real life." Who even gets to define "real life?" And while I'm sure some people spend 20-30 hours per week on Twitter I'm guessing it's such a small percentage of the world that it might as well be statistically insignificant.

> I'm guessing it's such a small percentage of the world that it might as well be statistically insignificant.

Exactly! The vast majority of content on social media is produced by a vanishingly small slice of the world's population. The views expressed should not be understood as representative.

At the very least is a workable hypothesis. To be active on Twitter one needs the right personality, which means being very upset when other people reply/engage or being indifferent and playing one of the games adults are playing. In the first case, the person is not able to avoid engaging. In the second case, they engage because they have the usual "motives".

Twitter is a very dangerous social media. I consider myself a wordly and experienced person, but I admit I tend to over-value what is shared on Twitter (momentarily, because I look back occasionally at bookmarks and I have very little or no memories of those tweets or I cannot understand why I bookmarked them). I over-value (and not properly value) because I have no clue who is the person who's tweeting (case 1, why should I listen to them? Who are they? Would the same observation "hold" is a face to face conversation?) or I know them/they are public figures (case 2), and they are playing a game of popularity or relevance in which I am, as part of the audience, the sucker.

Just to make an example, the other day someone wrote that "the US should ramp up oil production now". I read it and I told myself "Ok". A reply-guy replied "what are you talking about, this is not like software, when you can "easily" scale up the number of servers". And I thought, man, I was really not thinking, my first reaction when reading a twitter should be "this is bs, who is this person, where is the competence coming from, what it the game they are playing now", but it was not my first reaction, which was instead of passive acceptance. Dangerous game.

Not to mention, you can't even express this thought on twitter. Way too many characters.

I think the character limit creates a blunt form of communication that leads to this toxic environment. It is practically designed to create misunderstandings and dismissive short responses to those misunderstandings.

> This feels oddly specific. I'm not sure why you can't engage on Twitter and still not be "lacking in real life."

It all depends on your definition of "engaging on Twitter". People reading their compiled follow lists and occasionally posting a thing or two are one thing, and that's definitely doable without "lacking in real life". But I struggle to imagine how one can spend 20-30 hours a week engaging in wild debates on twitter and not "lack in real life".

I've noticed similar tendencies in myself recently, but with Discord instead of Twitter. After doing some prolonged soul-searching, I found that to be one of the main reasons.

There are two groups – people you describe (who have no life and spend 8 hours a day on Twitter) and people who have made a career out of being a social media personality. Most online spaces today are simply a series of weird interactions between these two groups with the "normal" user stuck in the middle.

The lurkers have been the majority in every kind of online forum, from usenet to slashdot to HN comment threads to reddit to twitter.

Are you and I lacking in real life for engaging with each other here?

this is not my experience at all. All the people who were popular in high school and who have a very active social life are also the most prolific twitter users.

The aren't generally arguing though.