HN isn't so much a movement in the content industry, but a very specialized aggregator. It certainly is one of the ways I try to provide myself with good reading material so it does help.

One of the good things about twitter is if you follow content sharing people with similar interests it acts as a filter. A human filter you are exploiting, but still a pretty good filter. I'm sure somehow content aggregators can move away from a board based format and into a more heavily human filtered format. Trawling through a board is time-consuming and not nearly as well filtered as it could be.

A programmer I know told me once about his method of using Twitter. He doesn't read any normal news sites, use RSS, etc. but just follows on Twitter people who write things that he finds interesting (mostly game development). When someone stops tweeting high-value things (links to interesting articles, etc.) he just stops following him and finds someone with more interesting tweets.

Actually, I just found something which looks like a good solution for developers: http://tagmask.com/ . It allows developers to share not just posts, but code snippets as well. Filtered by tags. A social-news board-community for programmers. Found it via Twitter, Guido shared it. I do indeed use twitter for news and resources.

I think it's disappointing your friend doesn't (presumably) have a Twitter List. Many of us on HN love game programming, even if we don't live it because game programming is an art.