Twitter is really nice for me personally. It covers a lot of bases other social media doesn't, having very specific communities that would be hard to meet otherwise. For me, it's good for:
- Having a community of queer programmers.
- Live blogging dwarf fortress runs (streaming doesn't work for me since I play in tiny spurts while working)
- Asking devs & dev communities questions about programming or their opinions on things
- Following blogs that post just pictures of cute dogs
- Very current info on events as they happen
- Getting news from people and groups / orgs you're interested in
- Making twitter bots is fun.
Making twitter bots is what got me into it, then I found communities on twitter that would be hard to find elsewhere. Plus a lot of my coworkers use it (and weirdly a lot of people in tech industry in general it seems like).
As for censorship, political views, etc; I try to keep frustrating political tweets out of my feed by not following those folks. And following a healthy amount of dog picture posting robot accounts. Definitely understand why it can be uninteresting or tedious for some people though.
EDIT: If you're interested in following me on there, I'm @C_L_Ball . You can watch my dwarf forts burn down before the first summer.