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Comment by colmvp | Hacker News Reader

I like Twitter because it forces people to be concise. There are already plenty of places on the web where people can post long thoughtful articles or op-ed pieces.

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It forces people to not write a complex English sentence, is what it does. You literally can't express complex thought without multi-tweeting. Which is annoying.

There's concision, and then there's nuking the concept of the paragraph.

I for one welcome our new longer-Tweet overlords.

The length of your entire message: 285 chars

Length of "You can't express complex thought without multi-tweeting": 56 chars (took "literally" out, because that's incorrect).

Is that "you can't", or "you can't"?

It's "one can't".

Yes, thank you for the char-counting. I'm aware that my comment was not the height of profundity, nor was it particularly long. However, I do occasionally post more interesting things, and some of them need to be longer, because they discuss a complex issue or cite many facts. My comment was not intended to, in itself, justify the need for a longer Tweet length.

http://reddit.com/r/iamverysmart

>"You can't express complex thought without multi-tweeting"

This is not a complex thought.

Which doesn't make it wrong.

This response tactic is tedious every time it comes up. "Tweets r 2 short" is never a valid complaint unless the limit is below 16 characters?

This is a non argument. Dismissing an argument out of hand as invalid because you say so adds nothing to the discussion. Feel free to expand that to an actual argument

All I'm saying is that the tired "count the characters of the comment that says tweets are too short to contain a complex thought and point out that it fits within a tweet" method of argumentation doesn't prove anything except an ability to count.

ok got it

I guess the 16 character notion is a classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Not exactly a non argument.

"Literally" is not incorrect.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

"Literally" can mean "virtually," or "figuratively."

Yes and this is unfortunate but modern.

Define "modern." It has been in common use for at least two centuries.

Only if you'd assume the fallacy that an enunciation could ever be "literal" in its meaning. I'd argue this actually points at a structural undecidability which is essential to language.

From your link: "Since some people take sense 2 to be the opposite of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a misuse. Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary."

Seems literally incorrect to me.

We need a new word that non-figuratively means "literally", then.

I propose "figuratively".

Sorry to reply to my own post. It bothered me that I literally knew no good substitute in English for "literally". Did some research, and the best that I found is the phrase "without exaggeration", which actually seems usable to me and might be more likely to be understood than "literally" is today.

"I got literally hundreds of bug reports today" may not be appreciated correctly (a listener who doesn't know me might think that I got 12 and I'm just whining), but "Speaking without exaggeration, I got hundreds of bug reports today" seems airtight.

Or maybe it's time to import >>wörtlich<< into English.

You don't need to throw out a word just because it's become an autoantonym[1]; many words are. To cleave; to hew; to screen; etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

My favorite: "oversight".

nice, so it literally means its opposite as well.

This sort of usage destroys the entire word. If one word has two opposing meanings it's ambiguous to ever use it at all. Language rot via imprecision.

I guess there is a subtle joke in using "literally" in a context where it's about the actual amount of letters.

You can express complex thought in short equations (and in fact it is often preferable), so why would it be the case that it couldn't be expressed in just 140 characters? It doesn't make sense.

Short equations don't express complex thoughts. They express the short result of complex proofs, which are themselves essentially definitions. Math is a process of describing reality using definitions built on definitions. The analogy to communicating social, political, or creative thoughts is ridiculous.

If you want to prove me wrong, show me a complex thought expressed in 140 characters. Again, I agree that complex thought can result in a very interesting tweet, but the tweet will not be able to convey all the thought behind it.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

My response in 136 characters:

That thought is pseudo-profound, not complex. In this context, "sound" is human-audible air vibration. One waving hand doesn't make any.

If nothing else, I inspired one. Well said! I appreciate that response.

But it doesn’t lead to any meaningful discussions.

I’ve tried using twitter for some time now, and you end up sounding a lot more angry when you spend the 20 minutes trying to get your thoughts into 140 characters, and you’ll have to use a horrendous amount of abbreviations.

There’s no space left for polite "hey, sorry, I disagree with your thoughts on [long name of a project], I’d think you could do [feature] better if you’d look at adopting [technology]", there’s only "[project’s feature] is bad, would be better with [technology]".

Especially when you try to use German, you write half a sentence and the box is full.

Same with imgur comments, I frequently end up writing "1/12" as prefix to my comments – at that point it’s useless.

I'm going to go out on what might be something of a limb and suggest that perhaps Twitter is not the place for meaningful discussions, or even, discussion in general.

Obviously there's no right or wrong way to use Twitter, but I generally don't follow people who do more than post inane status updates like "i love tacos lol" or links to mildly interesting news articles. For me at least, that's all I want Twitter to be, and it does that admirably. If I want discourse theres room for that pretty much anywhere else on the Internet.

I suspect the majority of the problems people have with Twitter stem from expecting it to be something that it just fundamentally isn't and can't be. If you use Twitter with a desire for serious engagement with others you're almost always going to be disappointed. If you treat it as a place to put silly 140 character messages out into the world whenever you feel like it then it's much more fun. And weirdly, much more useful.

I totally agree with you. I actually think that's what Twitter was originally intended for. But I can't help but think about how a huge portion of Twitter has just devolved into a community of angry, underinformed, unqualified pseudo-activists releasing their rage into the abyss. It's amazing how a completely absurd and incorrect statement can be liked and retweeted thousands of times just because it makes for a good soundbyte. Anywhere else, that behavior would be shut down quick. But not on Twitter. It's almost as if the way the platform is designed encourages the behavior. There is no room for actual discussion, discourse, and statement validation. Just one absurd, oversimplified statement that's subsequently dismissed by an equally absurd and oversimplified reply from another user. Over and over again.

I don't think that Twitter was originally designed for real discussion and discourse, but it's become the Social Activist Platform™, and as such, discourse and discussion are almost necessities. In it's current state, however, it's 140 character format unfortunately aids and promotes ignorant and uninformed statements rooted in mob mentality, killing the possibility of any meaningful discussion or discourse, which could benefit many of the conversations that are occurring on the platform.

Twitter wasn't meant for discussion and discourse, but it's community seems to be demanding that it be exactly that.

That's just my (admittedly biased) take.

I don't think it's become just the Social Activist Platform™. There are just alot of people who are very interested in politics that post on it. The same goes for gaming and music. Not so much books or tech.

The other thing it has going for it is it encourages immediacy, which makes it fun for sports fans and journalists love it for that as well. Which then leads to the modern "immediacy vs. accuracy" problem that broadcasting faces as well. The main reason politicians like it is because that's where the journalists are at.

I think you're putting too much on Twitter if you're trying to blame it for lowering the level of discourse, or for political mobbing of people online. So much of this is a broader symptom of the Internet being accessible to so many people who are enthused but not very informed. And it happens across platforms. Facebook is worse IMO as it really leads to the lowest common denominator of political nonsense being shared out.

TL;DR: Twitter is good if you want to find people who have common interests. Or want to find out more from celebs and/or creatives. Or just from more normal people who have a cool job. It's bad if you want to talk politics, but so is 90% of the Internet.

> "Anywhere else, that behavior would be shut down quick."

Based on what I hear come out of the mouths of politicians, that's emphatically not true.

> I'm going to go out on what might be something of a limb and suggest that perhaps Twitter is not the place for meaningful discussions, or even, discussion in general.

I tend to agree with you, but then again I've never understood the appeal of Twitter. Do people get enough entertainment out of the "i love tacos lol" tweets to continue using it day after day? You could link to mildly interesting articles, but you can hardly say anything about it in 140 characters, so why use that medium to post/reply to articles?

I really enjoy twitter for searching hashtags of current events. If there is some sort of live situation happening I always search twitter first for people near area etc. I almost always find news details on twitter faster than anywhere else. Example would be someone heard the police mention name on scanner and tweeted it long before news broke of persons name. After twitter I find every news source slow.

I agree, there's a lot of value in forcing people to be concise.

That said, it also privileges readily-echoes soundbytes over discussion. This has the side effect of wrecking discussion.

Easy solution: charge users per character. I would happily pay.

How many others do you imagine would pay twitter by the character rather than use mediums not so constrained and how much.

The most expensive medium per character is text messaging

https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing and each carrier effectively holds a monopoly on reaching that customer via that means especially since plenty of phones still can't receive any other form of electronic message.

Twitter has more than ample competition this kind of blackmail would destroy twitter.

People would switch to a free social network, guaranteed. Twitter already has a huge problem maintaining loyalty, and creating a class system -- where people who can/will pay actually get more of the stage -- would piss a lot of people off.

And yet that very comment of yours is 164 characters. Do you consider your own comment to be excessively wordy? I don't.

He could leave out the whole 2nd sentence and not change the meaning substantially though.

It forces people to - Write simple sentence bereft of complexity and nuance. - Split the same thought over multiple tweets hurting continuity - Use url shorteners making it harder to discern the source before you click - Write their long post on their blog and tweet the link to it.

This post describing the limitations and disadvantages of the twitter character limit couldn't have been tweeted!

Furthermore generally, people don't use those platforms to post thoughtful articles.

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