Tech design choices can have profound social impact.<p>This is just a personal theory, but I suspect Twitter's choices have done huge damage to Western Civilization, by forcing, as a medium, a very short 'soundbite' structure onto debate. (Even more so than the media which gave us the term 'soundbite' ever did!)<p>So that sounds like a very overblown assertion, right?<p>But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables. He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium, a mass medium which makes it particularly hard to counteract false claims or have reasoned debate. For exactly the issues Antirez is raising.<p>I don't have evidence to support my theory, all I can say is I don't think I want Twitter to succeed.
Twitter is annoying. I signed up a couple years ago to follow some local stuff's news, mostly events. Thus I followed 8-9 accounts that initially were of my interest, and started refreshing and reading my feed. All I got was the same 3-4 posts repeated annoyingly often, so that I had to fish for new things that sink below stuff reposted almost hourly since months. I though, well, maybe it's these accounts that I follow that don't know what to do, and started looking around. What I found is that there are 3 prominent Twitter stereotypes: (i) the reposter, which repeatedly posts the same thing and retweets anybody who mention them, (ii) the dumper, like news sites etc., which just vomit tweets at you one every other minute, and (iii) the spartan which speaks in semi-cryptic punchlines. Given the platform has no spam filtering or any way to indicate whether a post is seen or not, it's byzantine task to extract information from what you get served in your feed.
Well the fundamental chosen limitations of the service seem to make it a bad choice for detailed technical arguments. But ultimately social networks are just about who is there. We talk about technical topics on twitter not because it's the right forum, but because the people we want to talk to are there.
What Antirez describes is magnified on Twitter but no means isolated to it. Cherry-picking and un-charitably attacking someones statements is a human flaw that everyone should seek to suppress. And it happens for a couple reasons<p>* Weak egos on part of the listener. They want to _take down_ or show their superiority by besting a famous or popular person.<p>* Over Criticality. Instead of waiting for the entire argument to jell, and trying to charitably [1] understand the persons argument, you find the first perceived hole and attack. Often arguing about things that aren't germane to the discussion.<p>* False Drama / Celebrity Association. This is the bullshitter who wants to be "involved in the argument" but doesn't really care about the argument or the outcome.<p>People forget that debate, as practiced in meat space is about winning, not using logic to present cogent arguments. So when Antriez gets beaten on Twitter, he losing the debate due other's rhetorical skill. Your mom.<p>[1] <a href="http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html" rel="nofollow">http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html</a>
If you're the kind of person who's comfortable writing texts of two paragraphs or more, you should completely avoid writing on Twitter, period. This will only lead to frustration and interaction with people who don't value the same level of quality writing as you do.
I like how Benedict Evans describes the 140 char limit: lossy compression.<p>It's hilarious to me that a rule enforced by external technical reasons (length of SMS) has become so important to the product that it's non negotiable.<p>Why can't I even, for example, add a text "attachment" the same way I attach photo, video, links, etc.? There's something hilarious about the CEO of Twitter screenshotting the "notes" app on his iPhone in order to send a message.
This is why I hate that there was such an uproar around raising the tweet length limit. Mastodon's 500 character limit works so much better, especially when paired with the ability to collapse the bulk of a longer post's content under a short summary line.
The big problem I have with having conversations on Twitter is that I wasn't even able to sign up for a Twitter account the last time I tried. It wanted me to provide a phone number. I refuse to do this, as they have no legitimate need for that information, even if it is just a lousy technique to try to avoid spammers from using their service. I think the account was automatically canceled or locked or something like that, just a few minutes after opting not to give my phone number. I don't know if this is still the case, but it turned me off of Twitter.
From the comments in the article: " It certainly works much better as a broadcast medium and for giving occasional shout-outs, high fives, and anything you know isn't going to go beyond a short, positive interaction "<p>Looking at the Twitter design, this seems to be the intended use. At least in my stream almost all tweets are accompanied by a large picture. Quite often something that is not even very relevant, since they are auto picking the pictures for linked web sites. This makes very poor use of screen real estate. If conversations were a thing for them, I would expect a different design.
The newer tendency to mark threads with numbers so that people at least know there <i>is</i> context to a particular mid-thread tweet seems to help somewhat, but the general problem remains.<p>It also fascinates me how badly editors' choice of headlines to make people more likely to click can screw up the debate because many people respond to the clickbait headline without clicking, and end up drawing conclusions that aren't at all supported by the article. Presumably this is also a problem on facebook, but I deleted my account there some time ago.
So far I'm only convinced the author would have gotten longer, more verbose flow on Usenet or Mailman. I am not convinced the ideas contained in that flow would have been any more valuable.<p>To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what insight I would gain in this specific case from reading anything <i>other</i> that a) your post on diskless replication, b) the Stripe engineers' report, and maybe c) a few of the paragraphs of your response in this post.
Twitter wasn't designed to enable good conversations - it was designed for rapid, viral growth thanks to a gimmick which limits message length and sensible, nuanced interaction.<p>Have a look at Lyra - it's a nonprofit conversation service designed with respect for language and attention.<p>www.hellolyra.com
Potentially relevant, since the article draws a comparison between twitter discussions and (what used to be) usenet discussions: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September</a><p>Twitter seems to support less of a netiquette, it's more point-and-shoot. Besides that, it seems intuitive that the 140 chars restriction lends itself less to discussions than proper forums.
For service consistency we have been experimenting with the CV which is the standard deviation over the mean (with of course 99% as well being looked at).<p>I told someone we were looking at it and I too got a similar response.