Hacker News Reader

Comment by beager | Hacker News Reader

One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and constructive discourse show up as the same thing on the P&L of a social network, that dynamic of Twitter is tolerated, tacitly enabled, or even deliberately built upon.

View on HN

Twitter's competitor Weibo launched a feature called "Long Weibo" years ago. It's essentially a blog service, except that Weibo would display the first 140 characters of a long post as if it is a tweet, and a reader needs to click on an icon to expand the tweet into a full article. It's a really nice feature. Clean time line as before, users who hate changes won't get bothered, but those who crave for longer writings get blogs for free. Better yet, an author gets to publish her thoughts in a single place and to engage readers as usual.

Why Twitter doesn't at least try this feature in an opt-in way beats me.

Well they kind've do. Tweet-chains. If someone replies to their own tweet to create a series of Tweets, Twitter groups them into a chain and puts a "Show This Thread" link to expand it. It's the same thing in practice.

It is not the same thing in practice. It doesn't allow as natural paragraph formatting or sentence flow since the break-up interval for the text is dictated.

It makes it harder for people to reply to the chain (do you reply to the first or last?). The same problem exists for retweets; if someone retweets a tweet partway through the thread, it doesn't behave as neatly as you describe iirc.

Also, there's just a difference for the author. Writing a paragraph of text like this comment, where I get to go back through it and edit it as I go, add and remove paragraphs... It results in me creating a more carefully edited and thoughtful piece of writing. With the tweet threads, someone either has to write the tweets one at a time (and can't edit previous ones) with twitter dictating the breaks, or they have to do paragraph-oriented editing locally, and then figure out how to break it up correctly for tweets (which is non-trivial actually! URLs take up a difficult-to-predict-naively number of characters, so it's not naively 140 chars if you have urls, etc).

Basically, twitter's model facilitates a different sort of writing and reading than a single long post does, even if they are just both a bunch of letters.

Just to back you up, your post is 1022 characters.

If you were limited to 280:

Some discussions have nuance that cannot be expressed in 280 characters.

Yes, when expressing a simple idea or an idea you understand very well, you should be able to do so concisely.

However, when providing information to someone else about a complicated subject, or trying to

It's artificial scarcity, that doesn't really benefit the reader that much, and certainly not the writer.

This would be so cool. I would still limit it somehow, tho, like at 5000 characters, to force everyone to brevity in line with twitter micromessaging branding. Honestly, also think of the amount of subtle, non invasive and highly targeted advertising space they’d just spawn out of thin air...

6.40 kB ought to be enough for anyone.

Interesting. Is it for long-form text? Or can it be multimedia as well?

I like it. Serious twitter users do make heavy use of "threader" and similar apps to roll up discussions, and serialized / daisy-chain conventions indicating long form multi-tweet posts have emerged, but yeah it'd be a lot nicer with native support.

This is exactly one of the selling points of Mastodon: the medium mimics Twitter, but allows you to write long form content at will: the administrator decides what the limit is (500 by default on Mastodon, 5000 by default on Pleroma).

This medium provides the good sides of Twitter with the good sides of a federated system, where content discovery is still done organically through people. If experts want something as easy to use as Twitter _and_ have the possibility of having more space, I feel they should migrate to it. Or anything that uses ActivityPub really, like Write.as or Plume

There's also the whole indieweb movement, with micropub, microformats and stuff that anyone can play with, like with Micro.blog.

All options that give more control to the user

True, but worse than that: it flattens everything. In another medium, we can kind of tell how much work you put into a thought. A well-written 500 word post is a different animal than a throwaway line.

This isn't a good thing. Who's an expert vs an amateur just having fun? Who's just musing idly while sipping scotch versus gone through several drafts and really put a lot of work into this? Who's passionate, if wrong, vs a troll and a provocateur?

It's fine for all those things to exist, it's not fine that we can't tell the difference and then amplify an unsuspecting chunk of them to a massive audience.

Is it?

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

― Mark Twain

Those are almost totally unrelated to length, though. And Youtube encourages the opposite: because of how monetisation works, it encourages people to ramble on at length. Nothing discourages me more than "watch this video", because the chances of it wanting to waste ten or thirty minutes of my time are high. Whereas I can read a lot more tweets.

The medium is the message and the medium is trite, curt, and designed to maximize attention.

My experience w/ twitter has been diametrically opposite - the fact that ideas represented are easily digestible ideas (especially from fields I wouldn't bother about otherwise) have usually driven me towards exploring it further if it piques my interests.

Ofcourse, its about how you're interpreting this information - by inquiry or face value (which can be dangerous).

I was skeptical about feed quality getting diluted when twitter increased character limit to 280 -- fortunately, for me, it hasn't (as much as I expected) with few exceptions.

> Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets.

Or not use Twitter at all.

I fall under this bucket - Twitter is a platform that has always been hostile to nuanced discussion because of its history with length restriction of posts. At that point, I rather use anything else for discussion on ideas/domains.

You see the brevity as a bad thing, I see it as a good thing. If you can’t get to the point in 280 characters you probably don’t know what you’re talking about.

How come?

Some discussions have nuance that cannot be expressed in 280 characters.

Yes, when expressing a simple idea or an idea you understand very well, you should be able to do so concisely.

However, when providing information to someone else about a complicated subject, or trying to provide reasoning for something, it's very easy to need more words.

There's a reason that encyclopedia entries are usually much longer than 280 characters even though they're expressing a single point that supposedly the author knew very well.

When answering a question that requires referencing multiple other pieces of information and where the answers aren't certain, you even more easily overflow 280 characters. For example, saying "I started with a ballpark estimate from these facts (fact, fact fact), and extrapolating with this assumption, you get to this. However, if you extrapolate in this way, you get a slightly different answer" etc etc, expressing that uncertainty, the assumptions, and alternatives are all _very_ verbose.

Very very few things can be properly summed up in 280 characters, and most of them aren't important things. Don't forget that your brain cast its own prejudices and points of view over everything, it's very easy to misinterpret a 280 char long text, not so much when you read a 500 pages book in which the author describes every little bit of his thought process.

There is also a huge issue where people get tricked into thinking familiarity = knowledge. Reading tons of 280 char texts seemingly synthesising complex ideas in "single bite" portions is a problem, it makes you think you know something when in reality you just absorbed 280 characters of "facts" without any context or substance, it doesn't better you. Especially on twitter, which must be the most polarised and polarising medium out there. It is level 0 of knowledge acquisition.

> You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere.- Seneca

Reply on news.ycombinator.com