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I really disagree. The forced constraints of Twitter are its greatest virtue. I can follow 200+ people only because I know that they'll be forced to be concise

I really disagree. The forced constraints of Twitter are its greatest virtue. I can follow 200+ people only because I know that they'll be forced to be concise in what they say and how they say it. Google+ felt unwieldily at a half-dozen people because at some point each of them would succumb to the temptation to write a 1600+ word post, and no matter how interesting I found them, it turned the act of surveying my timeline from a nearly effortless, quick glance experience into a depressing exercise in reminding myself that there were endless reams of text I was falling behind on and could never hope to find the time to catch up with. I have the same problem with RSS readers; beyond some very low limit, it becomes dispiriting to see how much stuff I will never find the time to keep up with, so I stop using the app. Twitter doesn't have this effect on me precisely because it forces everyone to be brief and digestible. A "New Twitter" in which I have to curate my timeline down from 200 to 6 is a Twitter I just stop using.

kristofferR 15y ago
No offense, but did you actually read my post? Since I mentioned the exact same issue and presented a solution I guess you didn't. As I said - clutter in the timeline wouldn't be an issue like it is on Google+, since the extra "embedded text" would be hidden by default, just like on Reddit.
- msbarnett 15y ago
  Twitter currently forces you to express your entire thought in 140 characters. Or, at most, in some small multiple of 140-character posts. Usually the friction of splitting something out like that caps people at around 3 posts. Your "self post" style idea with hidden "embedded text" would only really force people to be concise with what effectively become the "titles" of their rambling, hidden, posts. It does nothing to solve any of the problems created when you lift the arbitrary conciseness limit; the manner in which people express ideas gets flabby when they have infinite space in which to express them. I don't want a timeline full of titles to posts I'm rarely going to click into. That's a big decrease in the value Twitter is providing to me.
  - macrael 15y ago
    A lot of the posts in my stream contain links to images, videos, and articles. In a sense, the 140 characters (minus the 20 required for a url) already are a title for something more time consuming. I'm not sure that hosting self posts would really change that, it just makes it easier. Instead of linking to my blog post, I link to a twitter provided long post.

kristofferR 15y ago

No offense, but did you actually read my post? Since I mentioned the exact same issue and presented a solution I guess you didn't. As I said - clutter in the timeline wouldn't be an issue like it is on Google+, since the extra "embedded text" would be hidden by default, just like on Reddit.

msbarnett 15y ago
Twitter currently forces you to express your entire thought in 140 characters. Or, at most, in some small multiple of 140-character posts. Usually the friction of splitting something out like that caps people at around 3 posts. Your "self post" style idea with hidden "embedded text" would only really force people to be concise with what effectively become the "titles" of their rambling, hidden, posts. It does nothing to solve any of the problems created when you lift the arbitrary conciseness limit; the manner in which people express ideas gets flabby when they have infinite space in which to express them. I don't want a timeline full of titles to posts I'm rarely going to click into. That's a big decrease in the value Twitter is providing to me.
- macrael 15y ago
  A lot of the posts in my stream contain links to images, videos, and articles. In a sense, the 140 characters (minus the 20 required for a url) already are a title for something more time consuming. I'm not sure that hosting self posts would really change that, it just makes it easier. Instead of linking to my blog post, I link to a twitter provided long post.