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> Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain. When I read this, I thought I was on somebody's blog who wanted to give he

by fairpx 9y ago

> Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain. When I read this, I thought I was on somebody's blog who wanted to give her idea on why they didn't like Twitter. Then I realised this was... Twitter's blog. The constraint of 140 characters is what made Twitter, IMHO, interesting. Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy. Then came the bots and the spammers and the place got ruined. Twitter has a bunch of problems, but the 140 characters isn't one of them.

dorfsmay 9y ago
But then people tweet pics of text!
- notatoad 9y ago
  I really wish twitter had stuck to their guns on their previous solution to this: a built-in tool to post longer text blocks as embeds inside tweets, just like people post images of text right now, but essentially "text of text" instead of images of text. But everybody lost their shit when twitter proposed that, so now we get 280char tweets instead.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy. I think most people view “have to do a bit of puzzling” as opposed to, rather than supporting, being “read worthy”. Terse stops being valuable when it goes beyond concise (as brief as possible while still clearly conveying intended meaning.) The 140 character limit was an artifact of Twitter being designed to be usable over SMS in an era of ubiquitous SMS-equipped phones before smartphones were themselves ubiquitous.
1ris 9y ago
I agree that 140 characters is what makes twitter twitter. But then again I can't understand what 140 characters are usefull for. I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure). I didn't get it back then. I came back more than once, as it got constantly more popular. I never got it. The quality of content tends to be, for my opinion, very poor. It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other. 1) Twitter is aswell a tool to share simplistic ideas with people that already agree with you. If the content is better, it's pictures of text and 12 tweets in a row. Right now it seems you have to fight the platform if you want to post something good. Not sure if 280 solves it, but it might become more useful, as it still restricts verboseness. And the aim of twitter should be to be usefull, rather than twitter. As being twitter does not earn them any money. /edit: 1) I feel german "grime twitter", a buch a trolls being extremists of all flavors insulting people with way too much ego is the best part. It's like 4chan, with less racism and slightly more grown up. And it is, as you can image, toxic garbage. And that's the best part in my view.
- hk__2 9y ago
  > I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure) It’s written on your Twitter profile, FYI.
  - 1ris 9y ago
    I'm not a active user and unfortunately don't care enough to go there, log in to check it. If feel like I tried to "get" twitter long before it was mainstream, that's all i wanted to say.
- ianamartin 9y ago
  Agree 100%. I've tried to really get into it many times. Maybe once a year or so, I'll tell myself, "Okay, I'm going to really 'get' twitter this time." The people I follow are some genuinely interesting people. And god writers. I subscribe to their blogs' RSS feeds. But engaging in that conversation with them is almost impossible if you don't already know them in person. I'm not terrible at saying things either. I think I have total fewer than 50 tweets and around 300 followers. 6 new followers per tweet seems like a pretty good rate of gaining attention. But I don't know anything about these people or how to engage with them. So I don't. Frankly, I do assign part of the blame for the rise of the internet outrage machine to twitter conditioning people's behavior, no matter how unintentional. The formulae is simple: find something you think is distasteful. Tweet about how it's evil or racist or sexist or communist or whatever bad thing you want to make sure people don't think you are. Sit back and watch all of the other people who don't want people to think they are that thing pick up their pitchforks and go to town against your target in the manner of something I can only describe as as mindless as a holy war. Now sit back, relax, and feel good: mission accomplished. The same things happen on Facebook and Reddit. But it's more obviously absurd on twitter. Social issues are too complex to be dealt with effectively in 140 or even 280 letters. The best you can do is point a finger at someone or some thing and throw a label at it. It really is garbage that's lowered the standards of discourse. Again, I don't think tha was ever twitter's intent. But that's the effect it's had. I understand the argument that various platforms we use are simply a reflection of society as it really exists and has always existed. And I disagree with it. Every social interaction has a reward potential. Obtaining those rewards is what generally drives behavior. The modes of interaction that we have in person generally reward positive social interactions. Both my parents are conservative, religious people working in a university environment. As I was growing up, they would have liberal and non-religious colleagues over for dinner because that was how university professors hung out after work 30 years ago. Disagreements were polite, thoughtful, and lengthy. This was a positive interaction for both sides of the debate. You get to sit down with someone who strongly disagrees with your foundational principles, eat dinner, and walk away respecting the other people even though you disagree. I'm not pining for the good old days or saying that technology is bad because human interaction promotes social behavior. But the behavioral reward is there: don't act like a dick, and you're colleagues will respect you. With twitter, on the other hand, the only behavioral reward available is attention--measured by likes and followers. And the easiest way to get that attention high is not through genuine, respectful, human interaction. The fastest way to being a twitter super star is anti social behavior: acting like a dick. Humans will always take the path of least resistance to the greatest reward. Whether that's using sloppy logic and false equivocations to label some thing you don't like as evil or if it's embracing the evil label, magnifying it, and claiming it as a right, either way, it represents the lowest form of discourse. And twitter is the emperor of low discourse. Facebook and Reddit are just wannabes. That's a lot of criticism for one of the world's largest communication platforms. You might ask if I have a solution to any of that. I don't. I'm not sure it needs a solution. Maybe twitter should just embrace what it is and accept that. Shit. I think that was more than 280 characters. Oh well. No one on twitter would read it anyway.
JabrZer0 9y ago
This seems to be an unpopular opinion for some reason, but I don't think the core of what you're saying is wrong. There was an article on HN a few weeks ago about how Twitter was originally meant to be the "pulse of the planet". Part of what made it feel like that, for me at least, has always been the ability to get a quick snapshot of what someone has to say. I don't go on Twitter to read in-depth analysis or discussion (though, as has been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Twitter has great potential for improving its ability to support real discussion). Twitter, for me, is a lot like the front page of reddit - I go to my Twitter feed to get an overview of what's going on. If I want to know more, I'm fine being linked to a blog post or article, or getting into a discussion elsewhere. NB: Thinking about it more, I think my opinion stems from filling out one too many "describe your startup in n characters" forms...
- boyce 9y ago
  Pulse of the planet seems a bit high minded for a system for sending group sms
Aeolun 9y ago
140 characters might be one of them. There is honestly not a lot of difference in being limited to either 140 or 280 characters. In that you still cannot tell a whole story. But now you might run into the situation where you can't even finish your sentence a lot less, which is a positive in my opinion.
jlebrech 9y ago
you can now compress it use emojis. now if there was a service that did that it would be great. also the decompress it (change emojis back to words)

by fairpx 9y ago

dorfsmay 9y ago

But then people tweet pics of text!

notatoad 9y ago
I really wish twitter had stuck to their guns on their previous solution to this: a built-in tool to post longer text blocks as embeds inside tweets, just like people post images of text right now, but essentially "text of text" instead of images of text. But everybody lost their shit when twitter proposed that, so now we get 280char tweets instead.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy. I think most people view “have to do a bit of puzzling” as opposed to, rather than supporting, being “read worthy”. Terse stops being valuable when it goes beyond concise (as brief as possible while still clearly conveying intended meaning.) The 140 character limit was an artifact of Twitter being designed to be usable over SMS in an era of ubiquitous SMS-equipped phones before smartphones were themselves ubiquitous.

1ris 9y ago

I agree that 140 characters is what makes twitter twitter. But then again I can't understand what 140 characters are usefull for. I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure). I didn't get it back then. I came back more than once, as it got constantly more popular. I never got it. The quality of content tends to be, for my opinion, very poor. It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other. 1) Twitter is aswell a tool to share simplistic ideas with people that already agree with you. If the content is better, it's pictures of text and 12 tweets in a row. Right now it seems you have to fight the platform if you want to post something good. Not sure if 280 solves it, but it might become more useful, as it still restricts verboseness. And the aim of twitter should be to be usefull, rather than twitter. As being twitter does not earn them any money. /edit: 1) I feel german "grime twitter", a buch a trolls being extremists of all flavors insulting people with way too much ego is the best part. It's like 4chan, with less racism and slightly more grown up. And it is, as you can image, toxic garbage. And that's the best part in my view.

hk__2 9y ago
> I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure) It’s written on your Twitter profile, FYI.
- 1ris 9y ago
  I'm not a active user and unfortunately don't care enough to go there, log in to check it. If feel like I tried to "get" twitter long before it was mainstream, that's all i wanted to say.
ianamartin 9y ago
Agree 100%. I've tried to really get into it many times. Maybe once a year or so, I'll tell myself, "Okay, I'm going to really 'get' twitter this time." The people I follow are some genuinely interesting people. And god writers. I subscribe to their blogs' RSS feeds. But engaging in that conversation with them is almost impossible if you don't already know them in person. I'm not terrible at saying things either. I think I have total fewer than 50 tweets and around 300 followers. 6 new followers per tweet seems like a pretty good rate of gaining attention. But I don't know anything about these people or how to engage with them. So I don't. Frankly, I do assign part of the blame for the rise of the internet outrage machine to twitter conditioning people's behavior, no matter how unintentional. The formulae is simple: find something you think is distasteful. Tweet about how it's evil or racist or sexist or communist or whatever bad thing you want to make sure people don't think you are. Sit back and watch all of the other people who don't want people to think they are that thing pick up their pitchforks and go to town against your target in the manner of something I can only describe as as mindless as a holy war. Now sit back, relax, and feel good: mission accomplished. The same things happen on Facebook and Reddit. But it's more obviously absurd on twitter. Social issues are too complex to be dealt with effectively in 140 or even 280 letters. The best you can do is point a finger at someone or some thing and throw a label at it. It really is garbage that's lowered the standards of discourse. Again, I don't think tha was ever twitter's intent. But that's the effect it's had. I understand the argument that various platforms we use are simply a reflection of society as it really exists and has always existed. And I disagree with it. Every social interaction has a reward potential. Obtaining those rewards is what generally drives behavior. The modes of interaction that we have in person generally reward positive social interactions. Both my parents are conservative, religious people working in a university environment. As I was growing up, they would have liberal and non-religious colleagues over for dinner because that was how university professors hung out after work 30 years ago. Disagreements were polite, thoughtful, and lengthy. This was a positive interaction for both sides of the debate. You get to sit down with someone who strongly disagrees with your foundational principles, eat dinner, and walk away respecting the other people even though you disagree. I'm not pining for the good old days or saying that technology is bad because human interaction promotes social behavior. But the behavioral reward is there: don't act like a dick, and you're colleagues will respect you. With twitter, on the other hand, the only behavioral reward available is attention--measured by likes and followers. And the easiest way to get that attention high is not through genuine, respectful, human interaction. The fastest way to being a twitter super star is anti social behavior: acting like a dick. Humans will always take the path of least resistance to the greatest reward. Whether that's using sloppy logic and false equivocations to label some thing you don't like as evil or if it's embracing the evil label, magnifying it, and claiming it as a right, either way, it represents the lowest form of discourse. And twitter is the emperor of low discourse. Facebook and Reddit are just wannabes. That's a lot of criticism for one of the world's largest communication platforms. You might ask if I have a solution to any of that. I don't. I'm not sure it needs a solution. Maybe twitter should just embrace what it is and accept that. Shit. I think that was more than 280 characters. Oh well. No one on twitter would read it anyway.

JabrZer0 9y ago

This seems to be an unpopular opinion for some reason, but I don't think the core of what you're saying is wrong. There was an article on HN a few weeks ago about how Twitter was originally meant to be the "pulse of the planet". Part of what made it feel like that, for me at least, has always been the ability to get a quick snapshot of what someone has to say. I don't go on Twitter to read in-depth analysis or discussion (though, as has been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Twitter has great potential for improving its ability to support real discussion). Twitter, for me, is a lot like the front page of reddit - I go to my Twitter feed to get an overview of what's going on. If I want to know more, I'm fine being linked to a blog post or article, or getting into a discussion elsewhere. NB: Thinking about it more, I think my opinion stems from filling out one too many "describe your startup in n characters" forms...

boyce 9y ago
Pulse of the planet seems a bit high minded for a system for sending group sms

Aeolun 9y ago

140 characters might be one of them. There is honestly not a lot of difference in being limited to either 140 or 280 characters. In that you still cannot tell a whole story. But now you might run into the situation where you can't even finish your sentence a lot less, which is a positive in my opinion.

jlebrech 9y ago

you can now compress it use emojis. now if there was a service that did that it would be great. also the decompress it (change emojis back to words)