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>I think Twitter's move to 280 characters led to a massive improvement in overall quality 280 is a far more reasonable limit than 140, but it's too little, to

>I think Twitter's move to 280 characters led to a massive improvement in overall quality 280 is a far more reasonable limit than 140, but it's too little, to late. The Twitter "mindset" has already settled and it's not pretty. > There's no where else I can get into a discussion/argument with anyone from Elon Musk In most cases it's an illusion of a discussion. You think you're being heard, but for a person with as many followers as Musk you're just an ant in an anthill. If you think Twitter has discussions, you haven't seen actual discussions online. I've visited some message boards where the same core group of people participated for years. We did elaborate projects together. The discussions of some subjects there fundamentally changed my outlook on things. Some of those people became my actual friends I keep in touch with. "Social" media has almost none of this. People can cite counter-examples, but those are one in a hundred thousand and could be easily replicated without social media anyway.

danso 8y ago
To be clear, I agree I and everyone else is just an ant in Musk's anthill of followers, but there's no disputing that he has directly replied to and argued with me, as he has with dozens/hundreds of other random users. Of course, Musk is an outlier in that respect. Twitter's more day-to-day benefits is the serendipity of finding others interested in the same topics as I am. Most of my personal network is not on HN nor Reddit (or working in tech, for that matter), but more than a few are on Twitter, even as just lurker accounts. You're mistaking tweets as being the only form of discussion on Twitter. What starts as tweets can go into a private discussion or email. My biggest project came from me tweeting about a data-scraping exercise I did -- turned out someone at a major news org was doing an investigation into the topic, and we ended up collaborating instead of competing with each other. I can't think of any other way we would've found each other, because I was only tweeting to show off something I did, and news orgs don't talk about investigations in-progress. The other form of content on Twitter is the non-discussion -- i.e. when someone goes on a long tweet thread, and isn't particularly interested in debating with every reply. This is very similar to an old-fashioned blog post -- but the engagement experience is much different. Random people from all walks of life may publicly respond with personal stories to a trending topic (e.g. mental health), in a way that feels much more natural and frictionless than creating a blog post, if you even had a blog to begin with.
- gambler 8y ago
  Most of the benefits you ascribe to Twitter aren't exclusive, are far more likely to take place on other media and are, in fact, slowly being eroded by the global and noisy nature of Twitter/Facebook. On the other hand, Twitter created a new set of serious problems that didn't exist before. Heck, Musk was in court and lost a portion of his control over Tesla because he was on Twitter.
  - danso 8y ago
    I agree Twitter's low-friction nature has led to reckless and/or inappropriate usage -- Musk isn't even the most egregious case by far, compared to President Trump using Twitter (instead of the traditional longform mediums) to disseminate his thoughts, or colossal mistakes by people like Rep. Anthony Weiner. But Twitter's benefits do not have to be exclusive to it for Twitter to be a unique service, just as Google and Facebook were not the first or only in their respective categories.

danso 8y ago

To be clear, I agree I and everyone else is just an ant in Musk's anthill of followers, but there's no disputing that he has directly replied to and argued with me, as he has with dozens/hundreds of other random users. Of course, Musk is an outlier in that respect. Twitter's more day-to-day benefits is the serendipity of finding others interested in the same topics as I am. Most of my personal network is not on HN nor Reddit (or working in tech, for that matter), but more than a few are on Twitter, even as just lurker accounts. You're mistaking tweets as being the only form of discussion on Twitter. What starts as tweets can go into a private discussion or email. My biggest project came from me tweeting about a data-scraping exercise I did -- turned out someone at a major news org was doing an investigation into the topic, and we ended up collaborating instead of competing with each other. I can't think of any other way we would've found each other, because I was only tweeting to show off something I did, and news orgs don't talk about investigations in-progress. The other form of content on Twitter is the non-discussion -- i.e. when someone goes on a long tweet thread, and isn't particularly interested in debating with every reply. This is very similar to an old-fashioned blog post -- but the engagement experience is much different. Random people from all walks of life may publicly respond with personal stories to a trending topic (e.g. mental health), in a way that feels much more natural and frictionless than creating a blog post, if you even had a blog to begin with.

gambler 8y ago
Most of the benefits you ascribe to Twitter aren't exclusive, are far more likely to take place on other media and are, in fact, slowly being eroded by the global and noisy nature of Twitter/Facebook. On the other hand, Twitter created a new set of serious problems that didn't exist before. Heck, Musk was in court and lost a portion of his control over Tesla because he was on Twitter.
- danso 8y ago
  I agree Twitter's low-friction nature has led to reckless and/or inappropriate usage -- Musk isn't even the most egregious case by far, compared to President Trump using Twitter (instead of the traditional longform mediums) to disseminate his thoughts, or colossal mistakes by people like Rep. Anthony Weiner. But Twitter's benefits do not have to be exclusive to it for Twitter to be a unique service, just as Google and Facebook were not the first or only in their respective categories.