How can debate on Twitter be good when they limit the length of the arguments that you can make to two or three sentences?
Unnecessarily simple arguments -> People get upset because you're misrepresenting them -> essentially screaming at each other instead of discussing.
The fundamental nature of the platform is bad. It's basically arguing in clickbait form.
We once actually used it to have an internal debate about development processes and effort estimation techniques.
Also, even mathematical proofs are cumbersome to state in a purely formal way. Moreover, many of our arguments hinge more on things like accuracy of assumptions, informal inferences, disagreement on "axioms" and goals, etc, not on formal validity of arguments.
1. post something where you can understand what they mean but they didn't spend the time (not that you should have to) to refine the point and people are pedantic
2. post something so absurd that has no basis in reality.
I agree that the end result is screaming at each other but nobody is on Twitter to engage in debates in the first place. Nobody can present a valid discussion that was hampered in any serious way by twitter's character limit.
That said, most people won't read a wall-of-text from a stranger - HN being the exception ;-)
Thinking back it coincides somewhere around the same time HN improved their mobile viewing experience. Unsure if it's related but does feel HN reached some wider audience, or at least has a broader acceptance of varying levels of quality for comments.
Then most people need better education (and not just vocational training).
The amount of things discussed in philosophy and science journals which people aren't aware of is mind-boggling, to the point where every argument online takes place not taking into account any research and resorting to pure speculation and fans of each speculative hypothesis (stated as fact of course) up/downvoting. This happens on Reddit and HN despite it being more visible on Twitter and such. But even I don't have the time to look up the research on any given topic I want to care about.
For some things, absolutely (after all 99% on the internet is crap). But if one can never do it, but can, e.g. spend 3 hours checking celebrity gossip, then there's a problem!
Reading things thoroughly takes time, and time is money. Scientists are paid to read the current literature on their field. Government and corporate analysts are paid to collect data and provide synthetic memos to executives. Journalists are paid to read sources as a background to their story. If you want me to read your wall of text, you either have to convince me that you are worth reading (through your reputation) or pay me to do it.
HN is indeed an exception in that I find the site to be a kind of guarantee that most of users are well-versed in tech topics and thus have something interesting to say. In that sense the whole website provides a reputation to its users. Twitter has no such guarantee.
And I have seen many insightful discussions on Twitter. Not everything has to page long retorts.
I'm not really a Twitter user, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can form a thread containing multiple posts. I don't think that changes much. Suppose you use a post to hold a paragraph of what you're writing. That means that now you have an unlimited (if the thread is unlimited length) size text, but the paragraphs are limited in length. Somehow that sounds even more wrong. What's more, since you're sending paragraphs off in a fire-and-forget sort of way (you can't edit them later, right?), you're essentially entering a sort of flow, no-looking-back type of writting, which is conducive for anecdotal, quick-think, social communications, but, again, not conducive to intellectual discussion.
For example, I'll reformat above text to fit into 280 character buckets, which actually won't even be a good aproximation of what I would have written on Twitter, since I refelected on the text, restructuring it and editing it through out. Here it goes:
> In the pre-internet era, Chomsky said the same about TV. To paraphrase, you are crippled by the length constraints imposed by the talk show/debate genre. In other words, the length of the message already imposes an agenda on the communication.
> Of course there the hard limit was somewhere around 5 minutes, not 5 sentences. Twitter is good for anecdotal communication. Anecdotal, as in conveying casual observations. It's not for meaningful discussion, simply because of the length constraints.
> I'm not really a Twitter user, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can form a thread containing multiple posts. I don't think that changes much. Suppose you use a post to hold a paragraph of what you're writing.
> That means that now you have an unlimited (if the thread is unlimited length) size text, but the paragraphs are limited in length. Somehow that sounds even more wrong.
> What's more, since you're sending paragraphs off in a fire-and-forget sort of way (you can't edit them later, right?), you're essentially entering a sort of flow, no-looking-back type of writting...
> ... which is conducive for anecdotal, quick-think, social communications, but, again, not conducive to intellectual discussion.
By reading that, you can tell that the rhythm of the text doesn't match the rhythm of the divisions. The text is too wordy for the constraints, sentences too long. Last sentence had to be cut into two paragraphs. It's almost giving you indigestion, a feeling like you're taking too large bites too fast.