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Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

Even increasing the content limit will go a long way towards deescalation. I find that, on Twitter, one often has to resort to oversimplified hyperbole and sarcasm because it's very difficult to fit more thoughtful and nuanced messages in the content limit.

Yes it's possible to write multiple tweets. But that takes significantly more effort.

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Twitter/FB just aren't the right platforms for nuanced discussion. I don't know why people keep trying to treat them that way or keep wanting them to become such. Easy for me to say as someone who has already come to this realization and has actively avoided building dependency on Twitter/FB in my daily life, I guess... But honestly I wish people who wanted to have real meaningful discourse with people would gravitate towards other forums. Maybe the reality is that no good alternative exists? I don't really know of any platforms built for "at scale" social discourse. Discords and Slacks and chats and whatnot work great for localized (in the graph-distance sense) discussion. I have yet to come across a tool built specifically around having nuanced discussion of real social issues at scale in a way that doesn't end in scorched earth.

The reason people want social media to host more nuanced discussion is because we are stuck with them...we can not convince people to stop using the services, so let's convince the service to adjust to the people.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, just stating their case.

I suggest investigating old-style web forums - the kind without individual upvotes/downvotes on posts, where replies in a thread are in the same chronological order for everyone

They still need close moderation, however

Because they’ve become the dominant platforms for debate and dissemination, so many of us want to fix them. Agree that it seems pretty futile, as the platforms will by design push back against the improvements we want.

agree! It’s a challenging problem to solve. Im working on a new project that’s a sort of hybrid between twitter/slack/discord, and actively thinking about these issues... Still young but my aim is both scale and nuanced convo! (example post https://sqwok.im/p/TU2ba6D-iDEYuQ)

Is sqwok that project?

I'm curious to know some of the ideas you have in mind for increasing nuance, have you written them up anywhere?

Hey sorry late response, yes it is the project.

I don't have it written anywhere publicly. In the immediate I'm focused on solidifying the foundational conversation features, which center around fast, open, low-friction live conversation. It should be possible to take advantage of the live nature of it with features like alternate conversation modes, branching, and other ways to signal feedback to users that are engaging. The ranking algo uses chat activity and other data points instead of using voting. Anyways, I'm hoping to engage with others interested in such things to see what types of ideas could work in a new site like this!

The oversimplified hyperbole is also a primary key to twitter's success. If you remove that feature it just creates a vacuum for some other aggregated micro-blog to fill.

Both of these things are probably true, and a good argument for why it can’t be fixed at all.

Then you'll just get increasingly large walls of text as each person refutes every single sentence + adds a few more zingers of their own

The thing is, a long wall of text usually reveals how truly eloquent and thoughtful the writer is.

In a mere 280 characters, some random person could sound just as smart as Paul Graham. It is the essays that set them apart, and not easily replicated the by drive-by-reply-guy.

It doesn't take an essay to convey nuance.

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