Twitter fails public discourse. What a painful format to read a presumably thoughtful statement from an intellectual. This medium is what our society has come to for public intellectual discourse in the sciences?
Your new content appears in feeds in seconds.
The small content size constraints allow readers to follow more people, making the network more connected.
I question the value. Yes, there's discovery but nothing is keeping anyone from clicking through a link from a short summary. And, if people don't? Personally I'm OK with that. No one is paying me for eyeballs. Way too many people are obsessed with pageviews even if they don't get compensated for them.
Well, you can't reach me through Twitter. I think the "everyone" you refer to is "everyone who thinks they're important". Lots of politicians, journalists, "celebrities" and academics.
I tried to read the tweeter's opinions, but gave up after three sentences (3 tweets). That's a truly awful way to consume a reasoned argument.
Couldn't agree more. I grieve the decline of mailing lists.
I see this sentiment posted often on HN and I'm hoping you can help me understand this. I never use Twitter so am not familiar with its interface. When I click on the link in the OP I see a very easy to ready list of 13 contiguous statements.
I'm using Microsoft Edge on Windows 11. I'm curious what you see that makes the format so painful to read?
All of the statements are small and almost have to be encapsulated to make sense. This robs a lot of nuance and background information that is assumed you would know, or you have to dig up (with little help from the Tweet), to appreciate most of the context. Without it, all I get from the tweet is "Intel Bad".
To take a couple of examples fromm the Tweet:
> Yes, Intel is shipping to Argonne now. Great. How much of it? All of it at once?
I have no context for this. Presumably Intel Argonna is an HPC, and I suppose it is late. Is it late by a year, 5 years, 10 years? Is it worse than something else? What am I supposed to make of it? I have to dig up a bunch of background info to understand what this means.
> But I do know the worst thing Intel could do—did do—this week: host a glittering event that heralded an era of sparkling, Moores Law defying technical progress that for people in the HPC camp found *painfully tone deaf.*
Ok...what event? Could you please name it?
3 tweets later...
> This year at the annual Supercomputing Conference
Ok....maybe looking "annual Supercomputing Conference" will find something, (which it does). But There is nothing on "host a glittering event".
https://sc22.supercomputing.org/attend/schedule/
Nope.
I could go on...but you see my point (hopefully). So now I have a bunch of stuff (that I cannot easily verify) from someone I don't know, and presumably I am supposed to take it all at face value.
This person seems like they know what they are talking about, but considering the terrible Signal-to-Noise Ratio of Twitter, I am not going to accept anything on there at face value.
Can you tell me what client you are reading this in that is showing comments in between the original content? Again, I am simply clicking on the link from OP on Windows 11 with Microsoft Edge. If I view it in Chrome it looks to be in the same identical easy-to-read format. I'm wondering what others are using that are making it so difficult.
It's not happening here, so I'd assume that the person you're responding to has just had a few bad experiences trying to read threads like that in the past.
(It happens with the twitter web client and app, so I'd assume it's something to do with how they build the thread server-side, rather than being something where it's meaningful to ask about the client being used.)
@XANi
Even if it is contiguous you still have very long breaks.
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@XANi
About 40% of the space between sentences is taken by the buttons and poster name
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@XANi
Do you really can't see the issue with it ?
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@XANi
It's really obnoxious to read
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@XANi
Or you're just understating those flaws on purpose ?
0 ♺ 0 ♡ 0Also because of the constraints of tweet length the sentences are chopped short rather than being whatever their “natural” length, short or long, would be.
The point of writing as the GP suggested is to minimize the friction between written text and comprehension/reasoning. Twitter is designed exactly against that, so the result is a bunch of slogans or tiny sound bites.
That's what I'm saying. They are completely contiguous and easy to read and follow for me when I view the OP with Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome on Windows 11.
I'm trying to figure out - what are you viewing the OP with to make it not contiguous?
Yes, how did discourse ever happen prior to twitter? We were all just cavepeople, smearing things on walls, until twitter saved us!
I also like that you think any of the 13 statements is even worth individually responding to, when in fact, each one is written in a way to drive reaction, rather than be part of an overall coherent story or thought.
They happen to be a reasonable writer, so they can make it overall seem reasonably coherent, but it's also 100% clear the writing would be better if they weren't trying to generate 13 statements that can be individually responded to.
The platform has not made it better.