I was almost putting "Why I love Twitter" as the title. So: I'm not a big user (consumer or producer) of social media, but Twitter has become quite important to me, not really to amplify my thoughts (they are few and far between and I've not a lot of followers anyway) - but as a windows to other people experiences.

Twitter incredible strength is allowing you to follow, read ("listen") to other people experiences, without intruding (remember: you don't have to reply/comment on everything - actually you don't have to reply/comment on anything).

To give more concrete examples, when as a white guy working in tech I discovered (initially) one horrible story about what is meant to be a woman in this industry (if you did not yet go read Jessie Frazelle [https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/this-industry-is-fucked/]("This industry is fucked") - there are a lot of others, but that one is short and set the tone pretty well), I looked more closely at what the other women I was following were saying. This helped me realize how common the case was (at some point I pretty much looked specifically at each - and found some kind of story in every case...) - from the people experiencing it themselves.

Since then I've tailored a bit my Twitter list to serve that purpose - give me insights into what other facing, generally people with less priviliege than I have (women, persons of color, disabled people, junior developers, etc) - something that can be difficult to experience directly.

Opinions? Let me know on LinkedIn!