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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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