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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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