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> Left unsaid, of course, is that ‘the conversation’ at scale is complete garbage Twitter is simply not a conversation platform. The medium is optimized for p

> Left unsaid, of course, is that ‘the conversation’ at scale is complete garbage Twitter is simply not a conversation platform. The medium is optimized for publishing small blurbs to as many people as possible. It's not designed for serious back-and-forth discussion. It rewards quips and got-ems, not nuanced debate. It's almost like a giant comments section with no subject.

hindsightbias 6y ago
What Marshall McLuhan said.
- recuter 6y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk
yurielt 6y ago
This, so much of this. Twitter will just never be the best of the ways to have actual conversations. You just have to ask yourself when has anyone left a twitter exchange with their mind changed? I mean is not like impossible that being said I doubt is a high percentage. In top of that add the fact that a lot of people that grew up on tumblr (with its own h way of having conversations and with its won metalanguage) became a big part of the social justice movements in twitter and you have the perfect explosion. I honestly do not mean that actual and real accountability is bad however when the mob attacks somebody like Joe Rogan they just made him more famous, but when they attack somebody like the kid that said "n*ga guacamoles p*nis" the result is much different. A kid that didnt know quite better had his life destroyed and the lifelihood of his parents too. For those that do not know the life of thta kid and his parents got destroyed. SO instead of accountability and people evolving the dialogue and getting better you have this neopuritan mob destroying lifes, dividing people more and ultimately not changing the incorrect ways of anyone instead you just entrench their positions further. Is cannibalistic.
- mc32 6y ago
  Twitter is good to make short announcements that everyone interested can receive. But the majority of exchange is someone publishing something interesting, a couple of people add something constructive and the enormous tail after that is people trying for brownie points by trying to prove they know more, trying to bring some forced social relevance/intersectionality and a bunch piling on like a yo mama joke that's run its course but the kids who can't do jokes make ham-fisted attempts and pile on more disconnected nonsense.
spondyl 6y ago
Twitter is a platform for amplifying messages to be sure. We can see this fairly plainly when considering that both the @ symbol and hashtag were created by the community as hacks for features that didn't exist natively. I once met one of the original employees of Twitter (back when it was Odeo) at a conference and he explained some of the early uses of the platform when it was built around SMS. There were instances of protestors who would message "police spotted 23rd street" and presumably other users would receive that message on their timelines. To be clear, I'm not saying Twitter was designed for protests but it seems a lot of the things that make it look more "conversational" were definitely after thoughts and so it's no wonder that it's so broken as a medium. Even more plainly, getting anything across with nuance in 280 characters (it was 140!) is swimming against the stream no matter how many pseudo-features like threading are added.
jsemrau 6y ago
In my understanding its a free worldwide immediate news distribution service. Was never planned for a reasonable discourse? I am a bit disappointed that BitClout started with that paradigm.
bentcorner 6y ago
I think the best content I've read on twitter are blog posts chopped up into twitter posts and reassembled on some 3rd-party viewing tool.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  Which is incidentally the worst way to use Twitter
infoseek12 6y ago
I've always thought of Twitter as an indigestible enormous chatroom, that users interact with via the aid of different kinds of filters. The format and platform do sometimes exasperate negative tendencies but I think the primary design flaw is within human nature not Twitter.

hindsightbias 6y ago

What Marshall McLuhan said.

recuter 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk

yurielt 6y ago

This, so much of this. Twitter will just never be the best of the ways to have actual conversations. You just have to ask yourself when has anyone left a twitter exchange with their mind changed? I mean is not like impossible that being said I doubt is a high percentage. In top of that add the fact that a lot of people that grew up on tumblr (with its own h way of having conversations and with its won metalanguage) became a big part of the social justice movements in twitter and you have the perfect explosion. I honestly do not mean that actual and real accountability is bad however when the mob attacks somebody like Joe Rogan they just made him more famous, but when they attack somebody like the kid that said "n*ga guacamoles p*nis" the result is much different. A kid that didnt know quite better had his life destroyed and the lifelihood of his parents too. For those that do not know the life of thta kid and his parents got destroyed. SO instead of accountability and people evolving the dialogue and getting better you have this neopuritan mob destroying lifes, dividing people more and ultimately not changing the incorrect ways of anyone instead you just entrench their positions further. Is cannibalistic.

mc32 6y ago
Twitter is good to make short announcements that everyone interested can receive. But the majority of exchange is someone publishing something interesting, a couple of people add something constructive and the enormous tail after that is people trying for brownie points by trying to prove they know more, trying to bring some forced social relevance/intersectionality and a bunch piling on like a yo mama joke that's run its course but the kids who can't do jokes make ham-fisted attempts and pile on more disconnected nonsense.

spondyl 6y ago

Twitter is a platform for amplifying messages to be sure. We can see this fairly plainly when considering that both the @ symbol and hashtag were created by the community as hacks for features that didn't exist natively. I once met one of the original employees of Twitter (back when it was Odeo) at a conference and he explained some of the early uses of the platform when it was built around SMS. There were instances of protestors who would message "police spotted 23rd street" and presumably other users would receive that message on their timelines. To be clear, I'm not saying Twitter was designed for protests but it seems a lot of the things that make it look more "conversational" were definitely after thoughts and so it's no wonder that it's so broken as a medium. Even more plainly, getting anything across with nuance in 280 characters (it was 140!) is swimming against the stream no matter how many pseudo-features like threading are added.

jsemrau 6y ago

In my understanding its a free worldwide immediate news distribution service. Was never planned for a reasonable discourse? I am a bit disappointed that BitClout started with that paradigm.

bentcorner 6y ago

I think the best content I've read on twitter are blog posts chopped up into twitter posts and reassembled on some 3rd-party viewing tool.

ekianjo 6y ago
Which is incidentally the worst way to use Twitter

infoseek12 6y ago

I've always thought of Twitter as an indigestible enormous chatroom, that users interact with via the aid of different kinds of filters. The format and platform do sometimes exasperate negative tendencies but I think the primary design flaw is within human nature not Twitter.