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Twitter was a mistake. Think about it. It just pushed people to reduce the depth of the expression of their thoughts to the size of of a slogan. What could poss

Twitter was a mistake. Think about it. It just pushed people to reduce the depth of the expression of their thoughts to the size of of a slogan. What could possibly go wrong? I will tell you what: It incentivize laziness. It makes people less patient. It reduces our ability to argue, make a point. It reduces the quality of the conversations in general. You can't really clarify what you want to say in such a limited number of characters. Is that what you really want?

JoshTriplett 6y ago
I'm not going to argue here about whether Twitter's character limit produces better or worse discourse by any particular metric. My only point in the comment above was that the character limit remains a fundamental characteristic of Twitter, and removing that constraint would qualitatively change Twitter, in a way that "emoji now always count as 2" and "we're moving from 140 to 280 characters" did not. Constraints can lead people to be more innovative and creative. That does not mean they universally do, only that they can. Removing such constraints is thus not an obvious improvement with zero potential downside.
- julienreszka 6y ago
  I used to believe this too but I changed my mind eventually. Do you know what changed my mind? I was swimming in the Lac Leman in Geneva. I decided to go underwater and hold my breath for a while, I noticed that I couldn't stay that long while my brother who had his gear could look underwater for a long time and enjoy it way more. That's when it hit me. Constrains don't make you more creative per se. They only force you to create workarounds, but in the end that's all it is, workarounds not really a good breath of fresh air. Hopefully the analogy makes sense to you too.
- nomagicbullet 6y ago
  I 100% agree that constraints can be great fuel for creativity. Innovation is not about examining all possibilities, is about finding the unexplored paths. Sometimes fewer options means you can more easily focus on discovery something new vs exploring what's already out there.
- grawprog 6y ago
  >My only point in the comment above was that the character limit remains a fundamental characteristic of Twitter, and removing that constraint would qualitatively change Twitter I don't use twitter, so either way it doesn't matter much to me. But was twitter not created with this constraint due to the original intention that tweets could be posted by sms and were thus constrained by the format of sms itself and not actually an inherent and necessary part of the platform? It seems like there's room for twitter to provide at least a method for long form content. Maybe have it seperate from the actual twitter feed and let people use a normal size tweet to link to it? People already seem to use it for longform content, providing a way for people to do it efficiently may provide a positive change. It would give people a reason to use twitter who otherwise might not because of the content limitations. Even adding such a system, I imagine the bulk of tweets will still be the 280 character kind, but it would provide a built in method for that occasional time you want to write something longer.
alecbz 6y ago
I think it's good for some things and really terrible for others. Forcing brevity is often really useful for encouraging more succinct, clearer writing. But sometimes the inherent complexity in what you're trying to say can't be compressed down to 280 characters, and things get really bad. I think twitter tends to be good for sharing relatively uncontroversial information, making jokes, quick "shower thought" type things, but really bad for anything that requires a deep conversation with someone else.
nexuist 6y ago
All Internet comments do the same thing. I put your own reply through a character counter and got 470, roughly 2 tweets. Any transcript of an in person conversation would substantially dwarf all but the longest comments; even a minute of a typical podcast is enough to fill several pages worth of paragraphs. That we all seek the simplest way to express a thought is not a bug, it is a feature. Audible speaking has tons of filler words and useless offshoots that do nothing to further the main concept being conveyed. We choose to write down sentences instead to minimize cruft and maximize content. Twitter just takes it a step further, and incentivizes the optimization of written text itself.
zenojevski 6y ago
Brevity soul wit

JoshTriplett 6y ago

I'm not going to argue here about whether Twitter's character limit produces better or worse discourse by any particular metric. My only point in the comment above was that the character limit remains a fundamental characteristic of Twitter, and removing that constraint would qualitatively change Twitter, in a way that "emoji now always count as 2" and "we're moving from 140 to 280 characters" did not. Constraints can lead people to be more innovative and creative. That does not mean they universally do, only that they can. Removing such constraints is thus not an obvious improvement with zero potential downside.

julienreszka 6y ago
I used to believe this too but I changed my mind eventually. Do you know what changed my mind? I was swimming in the Lac Leman in Geneva. I decided to go underwater and hold my breath for a while, I noticed that I couldn't stay that long while my brother who had his gear could look underwater for a long time and enjoy it way more. That's when it hit me. Constrains don't make you more creative per se. They only force you to create workarounds, but in the end that's all it is, workarounds not really a good breath of fresh air. Hopefully the analogy makes sense to you too.
nomagicbullet 6y ago
I 100% agree that constraints can be great fuel for creativity. Innovation is not about examining all possibilities, is about finding the unexplored paths. Sometimes fewer options means you can more easily focus on discovery something new vs exploring what's already out there.
grawprog 6y ago
>My only point in the comment above was that the character limit remains a fundamental characteristic of Twitter, and removing that constraint would qualitatively change Twitter I don't use twitter, so either way it doesn't matter much to me. But was twitter not created with this constraint due to the original intention that tweets could be posted by sms and were thus constrained by the format of sms itself and not actually an inherent and necessary part of the platform? It seems like there's room for twitter to provide at least a method for long form content. Maybe have it seperate from the actual twitter feed and let people use a normal size tweet to link to it? People already seem to use it for longform content, providing a way for people to do it efficiently may provide a positive change. It would give people a reason to use twitter who otherwise might not because of the content limitations. Even adding such a system, I imagine the bulk of tweets will still be the 280 character kind, but it would provide a built in method for that occasional time you want to write something longer.

alecbz 6y ago

I think it's good for some things and really terrible for others. Forcing brevity is often really useful for encouraging more succinct, clearer writing. But sometimes the inherent complexity in what you're trying to say can't be compressed down to 280 characters, and things get really bad. I think twitter tends to be good for sharing relatively uncontroversial information, making jokes, quick "shower thought" type things, but really bad for anything that requires a deep conversation with someone else.

nexuist 6y ago

All Internet comments do the same thing. I put your own reply through a character counter and got 470, roughly 2 tweets. Any transcript of an in person conversation would substantially dwarf all but the longest comments; even a minute of a typical podcast is enough to fill several pages worth of paragraphs. That we all seek the simplest way to express a thought is not a bug, it is a feature. Audible speaking has tons of filler words and useless offshoots that do nothing to further the main concept being conveyed. We choose to write down sentences instead to minimize cruft and maximize content. Twitter just takes it a step further, and incentivizes the optimization of written text itself.

zenojevski 6y ago

Brevity soul wit