Hacker News Reader

I agree, Twitter is the most destructive of the lot. It drives mob behavior and low quality interaction like nothing else.

It doesn't get as much scrutiny in the press though, because it's the home of journalists.

View on HN

This is just a conjecture, but I think the 280 character limit on Twitter (or whatever it is now) is one of the key culprits behind the trend of deteriorating discourse not just at the societal level but even at a personal level. It's simply impossible to express nuance in a 280-character span and if you can't win over an audience within that limit, they'll just scroll past whatever else you have to say. Even if you personally have a more intricate perspective on the matter, you're forced to play by majority rules if you want to reach an audience and that quickly becomes a race to the bottom in a system that rewards whoever can come up with the best one-line mic drop instead of the best formulated ideas. I've noticed in my very limited experience with Twitter that it seems to drive "engagement" from opposing sides more so than Facebook's echo chamber, which is a breeding ground for confrontation (whereas long-form Facebook rants seem more so geared towards getting people on "your side" to egg you on). In theory our society needs that sort of cross-aisle engagement to reverse the trend of political fragmentation, but if all you have is 280 characters to make your case that just simply doesn't work. I wonder if there is a solution that could make it work, but given the trend of social media culture being driven by the lowest common denominator I'm inclined to think you'd need some sort of centralized moderating authority and that just brings us back full circle to traditional media outlets

Reply on news.ycombinator.com