12 ms·

Why I can’t have conversations using Twitter (2014)

166 points by bjerun 9y ago

ealexhudson 9y ago
(This is a few years old at this point..)
moxious 9y ago
Well the fundamental chosen limitations of the service seem to make it a bad choice for detailed technical arguments. But ultimately social networks are just about who is there. We talk about technical topics on twitter not because it's the right forum, but because the people we want to talk to are there.
- Radim 9y ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head there. This is also what makes "social networks" so frustrating to technical people: it's not about your idea or even its execution. Rather, it's about how many other apes you've groomed in the past, to the point they'll back you up ("retweet") no matter how stupid your argument or insipid your tweet. The politics of it, tribalism. A 140 character limit doesn't help of course :-) but the need for soundbites, a shared communication channel for quickly correcting/reinforcing our perception of reality, goes much deeper than that. Twitter is just a medium. Where it gets interesting is when you consider why human group-think and "shared" perception of reality has been so successful, in evolutionary terms. Why are apes not simply rational animals, instead of spending so much energy forever climbing social ladders and adoring celebrities? Why these complex super-human social hierarchies (religions included), what makes them so efficient?
  - moxious 9y ago
    Well...yes to what you're saying. But there aren't neat lines between our professional technical lives and our personal ones, in particular because we spend a lot of time hanging out with people who share our interests. Social media is designed for friends, not technical discussion, it's just that human relationships of all kinds are messy and there are no clear lines. So one bleeds over into the other, this can be expected. I don't think that's social media's fault or the people, just a predictable consequence of "how the people be"
- jmaa 9y ago
  Discussing anything of substance on a social media is a bad idea. These sites incentivise short arguments. Twitter very forcefully. Facebook implicitly with its "See more" links, for when comments get long. But it's also a result of the reactionary culture of those sites. People want to be offended. They think that because the comment is on the internet, that it's final, and intended as is. But it rarely is.
wfunction 9y ago
Seems like part of this could've been prevented by just tweeting with (1/) or (2/) in the beginning of multi-tweet posts.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kleiba 9y ago
Potentially relevant, since the article draws a comparison between twitter discussions and (what used to be) usenet discussions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September Twitter seems to support less of a netiquette, it's more point-and-shoot. Besides that, it seems intuitive that the 140 chars restriction lends itself less to discussions than proper forums.
feral 9y ago
Tech design choices can have profound social impact. This is just a personal theory, but I suspect Twitter's choices have done huge damage to Western Civilization, by forcing, as a medium, a very short 'soundbite' structure onto debate. (Even more so than the media which gave us the term 'soundbite' ever did!) So that sounds like a very overblown assertion, right? But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables. He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium, a mass medium which makes it particularly hard to counteract false claims or have reasoned debate. For exactly the issues Antirez is raising. I don't have evidence to support my theory, all I can say is I don't think I want Twitter to succeed.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  I'm not sure if you're trying to make a point with a misspelling, but the term the media gave us was 'soundbite'.
  - feral 9y ago
    Fixed, thanks. Someone should comment about how autocorrect is destroying our civilization :) (I love autocorrect which I think enables us to concentrate more on meaning of communication than mechanics - occasional errors aside!)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- SonOfLilit 9y ago
  Is it Twitter's choices, or society's choice to use Twitter? i.e. do you think Twitter would have reached the status of presidential communication platform had it not made this choice?
  - feral 9y ago
    It's a fair question. I don't know. But the causal ordering here shouldn't change how we feel about Twitter. As an analogy, it's a bit like if you have a candidate running on a racist platform in an election. Maybe you can validly ask whether they are causing racism or whether the racism is causing them; but either way you shouldn't vote for them.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hota_mazi 9y ago
If you're the kind of person who's comfortable writing texts of two paragraphs or more, you should completely avoid writing on Twitter, period. This will only lead to frustration and interaction with people who don't value the same level of quality writing as you do.
- pdimitar 9y ago
  Absolutely. I've drawn my conclusions several years ago and stopped being active on Twitter, and stopped trying to look for meaningful material on it. The painful truth is that many people realize this but they agonize over the fact that the people they want to talk with can only be found on Twitter. Network effect + tribalism = today's sad reality.
agentgt 9y ago
For service consistency we have been experimenting with the CV which is the standard deviation over the mean (with of course 99% as well being looked at). I told someone we were looking at it and I too got a similar response.
gkya 9y ago
Twitter is annoying. I signed up a couple years ago to follow some local stuff's news, mostly events. Thus I followed 8-9 accounts that initially were of my interest, and started refreshing and reading my feed. All I got was the same 3-4 posts repeated annoyingly often, so that I had to fish for new things that sink below stuff reposted almost hourly since months. I though, well, maybe it's these accounts that I follow that don't know what to do, and started looking around. What I found is that there are 3 prominent Twitter stereotypes: (i) the reposter, which repeatedly posts the same thing and retweets anybody who mention them, (ii) the dumper, like news sites etc., which just vomit tweets at you one every other minute, and (iii) the spartan which speaks in semi-cryptic punchlines. Given the platform has no spam filtering or any way to indicate whether a post is seen or not, it's byzantine task to extract information from what you get served in your feed.
- orbitur 9y ago
  Maybe I've spent too much time on Twitter, but once you find a decent small group of people/comedians to follow, it becomes easier to find others like them since they tend to all follow each other. I now follow over 900 people, and my Twitter feed is news I care about, opinions I care about, and great "cryptic punchlines" as you call them.
kelukelugames 9y ago
My biggest regret is arguing with people on Twitter. It is not productive. Even less so than arguing on any other forum.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  My biggest twitter-related regret is that my most liked tweet (by thousands) is a terrible joke about Trump. The reason I regret it so much is that within an hour or two, I realized that people weren't liking it because it was funny in an absurd "nothing matters" sort of way...they were liking it because they thought it was funny in a "yeah, that'd show'em" sort of way. I realized that people who took it as an opportunity to argue with me were really stupid...but the people who were agreeing with me and liking it were also really stupid (so what does that make me?). There should be a German word for that feeling. But, also arguing with people on twitter. That's bad, too. Let's just go with that.
  - vultour 9y ago
    I think you also perfectly described what has been happening on Reddit ever since the election.
  - jcbrand 9y ago
    > There should be a German word for that feeling. Best I can think of right now is "fremdschämen", which literally translates into "foreign shame". It means to be ashamed or embarrassed for other people's behaviour (as opposed to your own).
k__ 9y ago
Why care about some ppl in twitter? I met a bunch of people hating on React and a bunch of people loving it. No value in these tweets.
jancsika 9y ago
So far I'm only convinced the author would have gotten longer, more verbose flow on Usenet or Mailman. I am not convinced the ideas contained in that flow would have been any more valuable. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what insight I would gain in this specific case from reading anything other that a) your post on diskless replication, b) the Stripe engineers' report, and maybe c) a few of the paragraphs of your response in this post.
sitkack 9y ago
What Antirez describes is magnified on Twitter but no means isolated to it. Cherry-picking and un-charitably attacking someones statements is a human flaw that everyone should seek to suppress. And it happens for a couple reasons * Weak egos on part of the listener. They want to _take down_ or show their superiority by besting a famous or popular person. * Over Criticality. Instead of waiting for the entire argument to jell, and trying to charitably [1] understand the persons argument, you find the first perceived hole and attack. Often arguing about things that aren't germane to the discussion. * False Drama / Celebrity Association. This is the bullshitter who wants to be "involved in the argument" but doesn't really care about the argument or the outcome. People forget that debate, as practiced in meat space is about winning, not using logic to present cogent arguments. So when Antriez gets beaten on Twitter, he losing the debate due other's rhetorical skill. Your mom. [1] http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html
- the_af 9y ago
  > Cherry-picking and un-charitably attacking someones statements is a human flaw I don't think that's exactly the situation Antirez describes. The way I see it, he's saying that Twitter makes it too easy for people to inadvertently pick isolated tweets out of context, mistakenly thinking they are seeing the whole context (because tracking down the full discussion on Twitter is very cumbersome and time-consuming), and then reply to something different than what was actually argued in the broader context. That's different than cherry-picking on purpose in order to "win" an argument, which is indeed a human flaw and not a technological one.
  - lj3 9y ago
    > That's different than cherry-picking on purpose in order to "win" an argument, which is indeed a human flaw and not a technological one. As much as I want to believe that, it has not been my experience. I've found that if there's a possible way to misinterpret a statement, somebody on the internet will misinterpret it. They don't do it on purpose to win an argument most of the time, either. It happens everywhere on the internet (HN, Reddit, twitter, even blog comment sections) because communication is difficult and internet increases the exposed surface area of a statement. The more people to read a thing, the more likely it is somebody will interpret something that wasn't intended.
mintplant 9y ago
This is why I hate that there was such an uproar around raising the tweet length limit. Mastodon's 500 character limit works so much better, especially when paired with the ability to collapse the bulk of a longer post's content under a short summary line.
DrNuke 9y ago
I find Twitter the only bearable bulletin these days, just following my industry influencers without participating actively.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
austenallred 9y ago
I like how Benedict Evans describes the 140 char limit: lossy compression. It's hilarious to me that a rule enforced by external technical reasons (length of SMS) has become so important to the product that it's non negotiable. Why can't I even, for example, add a text "attachment" the same way I attach photo, video, links, etc.? There's something hilarious about the CEO of Twitter screenshotting the "notes" app on his iPhone in order to send a message.
- eknight15 9y ago
  I like the idea of a text "attachment" but I could also see it being used negatively. e.g. I tweet something positive in the 140 characters, and in the attachment I have something offensive. It's similar to the editing tweet problem. There was some press about expanding the limit https://www.recode.net/2016/1/5/11588480/twitter-considering-10000-character-limit-for-tweets https://www.recode.net/2016/1/5/11588480/twitter-considering...
- awinter-py 9y ago
  Using twitter for 6 months trained me to screenshot text instead of pasting it. Ugh. What a shitty product.
- chippy 9y ago
  We could encourage Twitter clients or browser extensions to OCR the attached images and automatically convert them to text. Indeed - the same addons could encode text all using a standard font to make it easier.
jpalomaki 9y ago
From the comments in the article: " It certainly works much better as a broadcast medium and for giving occasional shout-outs, high fives, and anything you know isn't going to go beyond a short, positive interaction " Looking at the Twitter design, this seems to be the intended use. At least in my stream almost all tweets are accompanied by a large picture. Quite often something that is not even very relevant, since they are auto picking the pictures for linked web sites. This makes very poor use of screen real estate. If conversations were a thing for them, I would expect a different design.
mst 9y ago
The newer tendency to mark threads with numbers so that people at least know there is context to a particular mid-thread tweet seems to help somewhat, but the general problem remains. It also fascinates me how badly editors' choice of headlines to make people more likely to click can screw up the debate because many people respond to the clickbait headline without clicking, and end up drawing conclusions that aren't at all supported by the article. Presumably this is also a problem on facebook, but I deleted my account there some time ago.
lyra_comms 9y ago
Twitter wasn't designed to enable good conversations - it was designed for rapid, viral growth thanks to a gimmick which limits message length and sensible, nuanced interaction. Have a look at Lyra - it's a nonprofit conversation service designed with respect for language and attention. www.hellolyra.com
epoch1970 9y ago
The big problem I have with having conversations on Twitter is that I wasn't even able to sign up for a Twitter account the last time I tried. It wanted me to provide a phone number. I refuse to do this, as they have no legitimate need for that information, even if it is just a lousy technique to try to avoid spammers from using their service. I think the account was automatically canceled or locked or something like that, just a few minutes after opting not to give my phone number. I don't know if this is still the case, but it turned me off of Twitter.

166 points by bjerun 9y ago

(This is a few years old at this point..)

Well the fundamental chosen limitations of the service seem to make it a bad choice for detailed technical arguments. But ultimately social networks are just about who is there. We talk about technical topics on twitter not because it's the right forum, but because the people we want to talk to are there.

Radim 9y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head there. This is also what makes "social networks" so frustrating to technical people: it's not about your idea or even its execution. Rather, it's about how many other apes you've groomed in the past, to the point they'll back you up ("retweet") no matter how stupid your argument or insipid your tweet. The politics of it, tribalism. A 140 character limit doesn't help of course :-) but the need for soundbites, a shared communication channel for quickly correcting/reinforcing our perception of reality, goes much deeper than that. Twitter is just a medium. Where it gets interesting is when you consider why human group-think and "shared" perception of reality has been so successful, in evolutionary terms. Why are apes not simply rational animals, instead of spending so much energy forever climbing social ladders and adoring celebrities? Why these complex super-human social hierarchies (religions included), what makes them so efficient?
- moxious 9y ago
  Well...yes to what you're saying. But there aren't neat lines between our professional technical lives and our personal ones, in particular because we spend a lot of time hanging out with people who share our interests. Social media is designed for friends, not technical discussion, it's just that human relationships of all kinds are messy and there are no clear lines. So one bleeds over into the other, this can be expected. I don't think that's social media's fault or the people, just a predictable consequence of "how the people be"
jmaa 9y ago
Discussing anything of substance on a social media is a bad idea. These sites incentivise short arguments. Twitter very forcefully. Facebook implicitly with its "See more" links, for when comments get long. But it's also a result of the reactionary culture of those sites. People want to be offended. They think that because the comment is on the internet, that it's final, and intended as is. But it rarely is.

wfunction 9y ago

Seems like part of this could've been prevented by just tweeting with (1/) or (2/) in the beginning of multi-tweet posts.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

kleiba 9y ago

Potentially relevant, since the article draws a comparison between twitter discussions and (what used to be) usenet discussions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September Twitter seems to support less of a netiquette, it's more point-and-shoot. Besides that, it seems intuitive that the 140 chars restriction lends itself less to discussions than proper forums.

feral 9y ago

Tech design choices can have profound social impact. This is just a personal theory, but I suspect Twitter's choices have done huge damage to Western Civilization, by forcing, as a medium, a very short 'soundbite' structure onto debate. (Even more so than the media which gave us the term 'soundbite' ever did!) So that sounds like a very overblown assertion, right? But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables. He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium, a mass medium which makes it particularly hard to counteract false claims or have reasoned debate. For exactly the issues Antirez is raising. I don't have evidence to support my theory, all I can say is I don't think I want Twitter to succeed.

chrisseaton 9y ago
I'm not sure if you're trying to make a point with a misspelling, but the term the media gave us was 'soundbite'.
- feral 9y ago
  Fixed, thanks. Someone should comment about how autocorrect is destroying our civilization :) (I love autocorrect which I think enables us to concentrate more on meaning of communication than mechanics - occasional errors aside!)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
SonOfLilit 9y ago
Is it Twitter's choices, or society's choice to use Twitter? i.e. do you think Twitter would have reached the status of presidential communication platform had it not made this choice?
- feral 9y ago
  It's a fair question. I don't know. But the causal ordering here shouldn't change how we feel about Twitter. As an analogy, it's a bit like if you have a candidate running on a racist platform in an election. Maybe you can validly ask whether they are causing racism or whether the racism is causing them; but either way you shouldn't vote for them.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hota_mazi 9y ago

If you're the kind of person who's comfortable writing texts of two paragraphs or more, you should completely avoid writing on Twitter, period. This will only lead to frustration and interaction with people who don't value the same level of quality writing as you do.

pdimitar 9y ago
Absolutely. I've drawn my conclusions several years ago and stopped being active on Twitter, and stopped trying to look for meaningful material on it. The painful truth is that many people realize this but they agonize over the fact that the people they want to talk with can only be found on Twitter. Network effect + tribalism = today's sad reality.

agentgt 9y ago

For service consistency we have been experimenting with the CV which is the standard deviation over the mean (with of course 99% as well being looked at). I told someone we were looking at it and I too got a similar response.

gkya 9y ago

Twitter is annoying. I signed up a couple years ago to follow some local stuff's news, mostly events. Thus I followed 8-9 accounts that initially were of my interest, and started refreshing and reading my feed. All I got was the same 3-4 posts repeated annoyingly often, so that I had to fish for new things that sink below stuff reposted almost hourly since months. I though, well, maybe it's these accounts that I follow that don't know what to do, and started looking around. What I found is that there are 3 prominent Twitter stereotypes: (i) the reposter, which repeatedly posts the same thing and retweets anybody who mention them, (ii) the dumper, like news sites etc., which just vomit tweets at you one every other minute, and (iii) the spartan which speaks in semi-cryptic punchlines. Given the platform has no spam filtering or any way to indicate whether a post is seen or not, it's byzantine task to extract information from what you get served in your feed.

orbitur 9y ago
Maybe I've spent too much time on Twitter, but once you find a decent small group of people/comedians to follow, it becomes easier to find others like them since they tend to all follow each other. I now follow over 900 people, and my Twitter feed is news I care about, opinions I care about, and great "cryptic punchlines" as you call them.

kelukelugames 9y ago

My biggest regret is arguing with people on Twitter. It is not productive. Even less so than arguing on any other forum.

SwellJoe 9y ago
My biggest twitter-related regret is that my most liked tweet (by thousands) is a terrible joke about Trump. The reason I regret it so much is that within an hour or two, I realized that people weren't liking it because it was funny in an absurd "nothing matters" sort of way...they were liking it because they thought it was funny in a "yeah, that'd show'em" sort of way. I realized that people who took it as an opportunity to argue with me were really stupid...but the people who were agreeing with me and liking it were also really stupid (so what does that make me?). There should be a German word for that feeling. But, also arguing with people on twitter. That's bad, too. Let's just go with that.
- vultour 9y ago
  I think you also perfectly described what has been happening on Reddit ever since the election.
- jcbrand 9y ago
  > There should be a German word for that feeling. Best I can think of right now is "fremdschämen", which literally translates into "foreign shame". It means to be ashamed or embarrassed for other people's behaviour (as opposed to your own).

k__ 9y ago

Why care about some ppl in twitter? I met a bunch of people hating on React and a bunch of people loving it. No value in these tweets.

jancsika 9y ago

So far I'm only convinced the author would have gotten longer, more verbose flow on Usenet or Mailman. I am not convinced the ideas contained in that flow would have been any more valuable. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what insight I would gain in this specific case from reading anything other that a) your post on diskless replication, b) the Stripe engineers' report, and maybe c) a few of the paragraphs of your response in this post.

sitkack 9y ago

What Antirez describes is magnified on Twitter but no means isolated to it. Cherry-picking and un-charitably attacking someones statements is a human flaw that everyone should seek to suppress. And it happens for a couple reasons * Weak egos on part of the listener. They want to _take down_ or show their superiority by besting a famous or popular person. * Over Criticality. Instead of waiting for the entire argument to jell, and trying to charitably [1] understand the persons argument, you find the first perceived hole and attack. Often arguing about things that aren't germane to the discussion. * False Drama / Celebrity Association. This is the bullshitter who wants to be "involved in the argument" but doesn't really care about the argument or the outcome. People forget that debate, as practiced in meat space is about winning, not using logic to present cogent arguments. So when Antriez gets beaten on Twitter, he losing the debate due other's rhetorical skill. Your mom. [1] http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

the_af 9y ago
> Cherry-picking and un-charitably attacking someones statements is a human flaw I don't think that's exactly the situation Antirez describes. The way I see it, he's saying that Twitter makes it too easy for people to inadvertently pick isolated tweets out of context, mistakenly thinking they are seeing the whole context (because tracking down the full discussion on Twitter is very cumbersome and time-consuming), and then reply to something different than what was actually argued in the broader context. That's different than cherry-picking on purpose in order to "win" an argument, which is indeed a human flaw and not a technological one.
- lj3 9y ago
  > That's different than cherry-picking on purpose in order to "win" an argument, which is indeed a human flaw and not a technological one. As much as I want to believe that, it has not been my experience. I've found that if there's a possible way to misinterpret a statement, somebody on the internet will misinterpret it. They don't do it on purpose to win an argument most of the time, either. It happens everywhere on the internet (HN, Reddit, twitter, even blog comment sections) because communication is difficult and internet increases the exposed surface area of a statement. The more people to read a thing, the more likely it is somebody will interpret something that wasn't intended.

mintplant 9y ago

This is why I hate that there was such an uproar around raising the tweet length limit. Mastodon's 500 character limit works so much better, especially when paired with the ability to collapse the bulk of a longer post's content under a short summary line.

DrNuke 9y ago

I find Twitter the only bearable bulletin these days, just following my industry influencers without participating actively.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

austenallred 9y ago

I like how Benedict Evans describes the 140 char limit: lossy compression. It's hilarious to me that a rule enforced by external technical reasons (length of SMS) has become so important to the product that it's non negotiable. Why can't I even, for example, add a text "attachment" the same way I attach photo, video, links, etc.? There's something hilarious about the CEO of Twitter screenshotting the "notes" app on his iPhone in order to send a message.

eknight15 9y ago
I like the idea of a text "attachment" but I could also see it being used negatively. e.g. I tweet something positive in the 140 characters, and in the attachment I have something offensive. It's similar to the editing tweet problem. There was some press about expanding the limit https://www.recode.net/2016/1/5/11588480/twitter-considering-10000-character-limit-for-tweets https://www.recode.net/2016/1/5/11588480/twitter-considering...
awinter-py 9y ago
Using twitter for 6 months trained me to screenshot text instead of pasting it. Ugh. What a shitty product.
chippy 9y ago
We could encourage Twitter clients or browser extensions to OCR the attached images and automatically convert them to text. Indeed - the same addons could encode text all using a standard font to make it easier.

jpalomaki 9y ago

From the comments in the article: " It certainly works much better as a broadcast medium and for giving occasional shout-outs, high fives, and anything you know isn't going to go beyond a short, positive interaction " Looking at the Twitter design, this seems to be the intended use. At least in my stream almost all tweets are accompanied by a large picture. Quite often something that is not even very relevant, since they are auto picking the pictures for linked web sites. This makes very poor use of screen real estate. If conversations were a thing for them, I would expect a different design.

mst 9y ago

The newer tendency to mark threads with numbers so that people at least know there is context to a particular mid-thread tweet seems to help somewhat, but the general problem remains. It also fascinates me how badly editors' choice of headlines to make people more likely to click can screw up the debate because many people respond to the clickbait headline without clicking, and end up drawing conclusions that aren't at all supported by the article. Presumably this is also a problem on facebook, but I deleted my account there some time ago.

lyra_comms 9y ago

Twitter wasn't designed to enable good conversations - it was designed for rapid, viral growth thanks to a gimmick which limits message length and sensible, nuanced interaction. Have a look at Lyra - it's a nonprofit conversation service designed with respect for language and attention. www.hellolyra.com

epoch1970 9y ago

The big problem I have with having conversations on Twitter is that I wasn't even able to sign up for a Twitter account the last time I tried. It wanted me to provide a phone number. I refuse to do this, as they have no legitimate need for that information, even if it is just a lousy technique to try to avoid spammers from using their service. I think the account was automatically canceled or locked or something like that, just a few minutes after opting not to give my phone number. I don't know if this is still the case, but it turned me off of Twitter.