If someone googles a question about programming, the top results are probably not going to be your github repos, your twitter tweets, or your comments on various sites. The top result will probably be Stack Overflow (for small questions) or a blog post (for the more comprehensive ones).
It seems to me that if "helping others" is the goal, your method of sharing is much more self-indulgent than a blog.
Also who imparts actual programming knowledge with their tweets? You find a way past the character limit? That must be one of the sillier things I've heard on here in a long time.
To play devil's advocate, this is little more than a recipe to be followed by rote. I didn't learn anything in that gist other than a clever way to find the version number. Why does it get installed into my home directory... is that suitable for a production server? And so on...
That tweet is too compressed to be googled effectively. The difficulty in internet searching is finding how to describe the problem effectively. Just yesterday I was doing research on algorithms for a graph traversal problem. Since my knowledge on graph theory is pretty low, googling was more of a hierarchy. First I had to google the words I needed to know before I could search effectively for a solution.
How is this any better than the direct link to gist? Why did I have to click and load the (terribly bloated) Twitter website just to see nothing but a link to another another resource. That's like when you're looking up a word in a dictionary and once you find it, you're told to look up another word. A waste of time.
Yeah, but you are not imparting actual knowledge through the tweets. You are sharing a link to where knowledge can be found.
You could also share a link to, you know, a blog.
And you are certainly not growing as a developer by tweeting that, where as the author of the article made the claim that having a blog will develop you as a programmer.
I already have all these tools at my disposal to impart my knowledge. I find blogs too self-indulgent.