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Comment by Pigo | Hacker News Reader

The interview was pretty interesting. Sacca's description of how they make it hard to follow what's going on, even though they know first, sums up why I don't use Twitter. Twitter always feels like I'm walking into the middle of someone else's conversation or inside joke. I rarely have enough context to engage, but people who like to just be loud, or talk to themselves, or don't have a clue can go to town.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

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I use Twitter a lot, but mostly only as a content consumption platform. I follow people who make things I like and who say things on Twitter that I enjoy reading. The idea of using it as a conversation platform is insane to me. Sometimes I have trouble fitting a single sentence into a tweet.

> fitting ... into a tweet.

I enjoy the constraint and view it as a minor new art form, similar to the constraints of a Haiku. Seeing that '0' when I'm done is generally mildly pleasurable for me.

Great, but how many people online read, write or enjoy writing Haiku? If writing a Tweet requires as much time and (intellectual) energy as a Haiku, than I'm not surprised that the growth of Twitter is tanking.

I enjoy reading things that have more time and intellectual energy put into them.

This is not true of a lot of twitter ... but the short constraint I think is the only thing that really moves the needle in that direction on there.

I almost exclusively follow stand up comedians on Twitter, and the character limit is perfect for a concise one line joke. I will actually avoid any "twitlonger" links or images of text, because that's not what I'm there to see. Likewise, I've unfollowed quite a few people on Instagram when they start regularly posting pictures of text. Maybe I'm just a format purist snob?

Images of text on Instagram is definitely wrong. Get a blog.

There's one comedian I know who deleted his twitter account (I think in part because of harassment he was getting, and also in an attempt to obscure his less savory posts from his non-famous days). Then he took to Instagram and started posting images of text with comments disabled. At that point, why even bother? Does the number next to the heart button mean that much to you?

Maybe to preven plagiarism? If people share the same image around, you can trace it back to the original author with a watermark, etc.

You'd be surprised by how little compunction people have with just copying it (via screenshot) and sharing it anyway.

I should've been clearer -- he's not even posting jokes or anything creative, just random social commentary mostly.

Especially with Instagram, you can write as long of a comment as you want. Post a picture of some random thing and then write your long-ass comment below it.

Taking it the extreme, one needs Reply All's "Yes, Yes, No" segment (where the podcast hosts try to break down inside-joke tweets) in order to understand what I'd assume is the cleverest content.

News search & discovery is all I use the service for and I'd like to see Twitter focus on that. Also, the narrow, single-file, non-pagnated way of scrolling & searching is not appealing at all to me. I'd prefer a more horizontal and populated set of tweets with a simple X in the corner of each one in order to teach Twitter what content I'm interested in (think: Youtube's home page while signed in). The way the site looks is obviously in tune with the 140 char limit but I've never much liked that either. In short, I'm not an ideal user.

Back and forth discussions are not the primary use of Twitter. I had a hard time with that for years too before I finally "figured it out." You just need to follow a lot of people who share your interests and then your timeline will become more interesting.

> You just need to follow a lot of people

Or a few people :) I follow less than 50, and a fair number of those are inactive.

I've spent a lot of time curating who I follow, and I generally enjoy the people I have on there. But Tosh and the Mitch Hedberg bot don't put out enough to make up for the on-slaught of garbage, ads, and political opinions. I might find it more interesting if I was into Justin Beiber, who's trending ever time I look. Maybe I just need some suggestions on interesting feeds.

Mitch's low twitter output could come from a variety of factors. I'm banking on either a) heavy touring schedule or b) his death in 2005.

It does... until everyone stops talking about those interesting things, and starts ranting non-stop about politics. I may even share their political views... but I'd rather be able to mute that garbage and only read about the stuff I have interest in.

Yeah, I follow mostly nerds and comedians on twitter. Up until this election season, most of my feed was nerds talking about things they built and comedians telling jokes.

Now my feed is literally 60% nerds talking about politics and comedians talking about politics.

I'm also something like this. Luckily, Americans are a minority in my feed, so while the previously topical tweets of those who I unfollowed will be missed, it was not a big change for me.

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