Micro-blogging gives you a chance to be an introverted extrovert. There is a different mental model: posting to a personal timeline that is free to be read, rat

Micro-blogging gives you a chance to be an introverted extrovert. There is a different mental model: posting to a personal timeline that is free to be read, rather than adding your voice to a stack of existing discussions. Posting on a forum is an open invitation for discussion, and it requires a level of preparedness that is defined by the culture of that specific forum. It implies two requirements: to provide something talk-able, and to talk with people. Posting irrelevant or untalkable content is frowned upon, and ban-able if frequent enough. People treat forum as a community blackboard, and don't like it when someone is drawing random dots every day. Second, the necessity of Q&A is implied. You expect people to interact with you, and people expect you to interact with them. Dropping a post and never replying to the comments is bad etiquette. A micro-blog, on the other hand, is your blog. It's almost entirely yours, and it's you alone who define the culture of interaction. Well, the platform has moderation policies, but beyond that, you are free of expectations. You can post non-sense, bad jokes, or randomly generated words. Many micro-bloggers only make announcements and never replies. Some replies some times, to a selected a few. And if some nosy commenters criticize your posting habit, it's on them to unfollow you. The blackboard is in your own yard after all. Who cares if it's all noise and no signal? Why go out of your way to follow me if you got a problem with my posts? --- That is not to say that no one uses a forum like a micro-blog, or vice versa. But the normative behaviors tend to gravitate towards different places.