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I can't tell you how depressing I found it when Musk described Twitter as the "town square" and his whole rhetorical take on it needing to be a place for free a

I can't tell you how depressing I found it when Musk described Twitter as the "town square" and his whole rhetorical take on it needing to be a place for free and open discussion as per the "market place of ideas" concept (I don't recall him referencing the quoted term directly- that's my editorial). Like... we really want TWITTER, of all things, to be the place for important social discourse? I never had a Twitter account, but isn't it still limited to some 200 characters and/or an image per post? And from what I've seen the "threading" of discussions also seems to make replies difficult to follow. Apparently, our society wants important social issues to be discussed in 200 character snippets. I'm going to go cry into my coffee.

orblivion 4y ago
> I can't tell you how depressing I found it when Musk described Twitter as the "town square" I'm now imagining a medieval town in an all-out drunken brawl.
- totetsu 4y ago
  Musk's town square by Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel
cle 4y ago
Relax, broad social discourse has never been particularly nuanced or long-form, and has always been partially driven by catch phrases, headlines, and incisive, memorable quotes.
PaulKeeble 4y ago
The market place of ideas that fit within a tweet, which is a pretty limited set of ideas. Most of the ideas Elon has don't fit into a tweet, almost nothing of value does.
dfxm12 4y ago
we really want TWITTER, of all things, to be the place for important social discourse? I certainly don't. But, I can see why an individual who owns Twitter would want it to be the place for important social discourse.
remram 4y ago
Twitter makes it impossible to dig in replies past a very low number of them. Hell, if the tweet is not the last in a chain, you often can't see any replies at all. It is explicitly optimized for very different things than public discussion.
dash2 4y ago
That's not really how it works. The most important tweets are links to long-form discussions. It's a discovery platform. Sometimes the poster will include an executive summary in a thread. That's helpful, too, for deciding if you want to follow the link. A lot of academics are on twitter, and it's a reasonably good way to find interesting new work. It has problems, but the character limit isn't one of them.

orblivion 4y ago

> I can't tell you how depressing I found it when Musk described Twitter as the "town square" I'm now imagining a medieval town in an all-out drunken brawl.

totetsu 4y ago
Musk's town square by Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel

cle 4y ago

Relax, broad social discourse has never been particularly nuanced or long-form, and has always been partially driven by catch phrases, headlines, and incisive, memorable quotes.

PaulKeeble 4y ago

The market place of ideas that fit within a tweet, which is a pretty limited set of ideas. Most of the ideas Elon has don't fit into a tweet, almost nothing of value does.

dfxm12 4y ago

we really want TWITTER, of all things, to be the place for important social discourse? I certainly don't. But, I can see why an individual who owns Twitter would want it to be the place for important social discourse.

remram 4y ago

Twitter makes it impossible to dig in replies past a very low number of them. Hell, if the tweet is not the last in a chain, you often can't see any replies at all. It is explicitly optimized for very different things than public discussion.

dash2 4y ago

That's not really how it works. The most important tweets are links to long-form discussions. It's a discovery platform. Sometimes the poster will include an executive summary in a thread. That's helpful, too, for deciding if you want to follow the link. A lot of academics are on twitter, and it's a reasonably good way to find interesting new work. It has problems, but the character limit isn't one of them.