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Comment by mgalka | Hacker News Reader

People have a tendency to forget that famous public figures are people and feel comfortable saying mean things without thought. I think Few's experience of Twitter is probably an amplified version of what most of us know.

I still like Twitter. Compared to other online forums, it still has the most thoughtful discourse I know of (except for HN). Even if it means tolerating a bunch of unpleasant garbage along the way.

View on HN

I think the fact that Twitter made a name for itself by restricting the degree to which you can actually express your thoughts (by constraining response length) doomed them.

It's far easier to be snarky and mean in 140 characters than it is to be rational and respectful.

You think, if only they were given more space, the trolls would suddenly find themselves unspinning their vitriol into coherent, well-expressed and thoughtful sentiment?

Or would they just shit-talk with more words?

Or just continue to be terse and shitty. Unless the also implemented a minimum, I don't see how raising the maximum would help very much. At least that has been my experience in forums for many years.

by constraining response length

To be fair to Twitter that wasn't a philosophical decision - 140 chars was what fit into the 160-char SMS protocol limit, with the remainder given over to their own layer.

It wasn't originally, but twitter over SMS hasn't been relevant for a long time now. They definitely would have gone away from the 140 char restriction if they thought it would have made their service better.

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they had

    char* msg = malloc(141);

spread throughout their code still... Maybe they can't change it.

Unless that's a 32-bit char, that won't work. These days twitter allows 140 unicode codepoints, not 140 bytes. At it's worst, that's 560 bytes.

There are exceptions now to the length rule - URLs don't count, @names don't count. I would guess that means they've ripped that code all out.

Been on reddit or Youtube lately?

Yes, and IME they are a big step up from twitter, particularly Reddit.

HN hasn't much of a discourse, as in discordinng ideas aren't debated but shunned and driven away.

The technical exchange is fine, but it's more of a dump of experiences and while it's worthwhile at that, it rarely goes into discussion territory, more like throwing opinions to the other side

> HN hasn't much of a discourse, as in discordinng ideas aren't debated but shunned and driven away.

I would have said the exact opposite. As long as they're well supported, HN is more accepting of controversial views than anywhere else I know.

Some of the "troll" problems come from people saying on the web what they've always said in person.

When you say nasty things about Brad Pitt among friends, it stays there. When you say it to your friends on Twitter, it can go viral and be read both by Brad, and people who, unlike your friends, don't get your humor.

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