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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

Really?

On which other platform can you directly communicate (or at least listen to, unfiltered) to the worlds dictators, political leaders, and billionaires?

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Twitter has destroyed public discourse. It has turned conversations into contents to be as short and as edgy as possible.

I’m sorry you don’t see that.

Hey, that sounds like the mainstream press!

Do you even use Twitter?

You can find a lot of very deep, long-form content. I'd recommend following Samo Burja or Doomberg for example.

Is that really Twitter's fault? Please go through this thread right here and see how many of the comments would fit in a tweet. Many of them also match (or exceed) the Twitter standard for lack of basic humanity. The appetite was there. If Twitter hadn't provided the outlet, some essentially identical alternative would have. It's quite likely that some other will do the same after Musk finishes driving Twitter into the ground.

The platform isn't the problem. The people using whatever platform they can find to spread an anti-democratic anti-intellectual anti-humanitarian message are. I'm sorry you don't want to see that.

153 characters, in response to a message 152 characters in length. Did these shorter-than-twitter lengths destroy this discourse?

that's literally the very mechanism that weakens public discourse because it turns discourse into a 280 word soundbite popularity contest.

Productive and democratic discourse consists of people assembling a community of their peers eye-to-eye to solve local issues, not billionaires and dictators addressing a mob like Mussolini on the Palazzo Venezia with a megaphone.

Any idea of significance has subtlety and complexity, both of which are anathema to Twitter.

Rage, on the other hand, can be perfectly encapsulated in a few characters.

You’re missing the point of their comment. If the medium is the problematic thing being focused on in their comment then who the communicating parties are is not significant.

Checkout Postman and McLuhan.

A lot of people reading this aren't going to understand what you mean by "checkout Postman". I'm guessing you mean "read Neil Postman's books"? If so, I agree - especially Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Technopoly too, for an easy to digest mash-up of McLuhan and Ellul.

Why is it important to directly communicate with or even "listen to unfiltered" the world's dictators and billionaires? As for communicating directly with politicians it's very unlikely that the vast majority of them manage their own social media accounts. You probably have the same level of direct communication as you do sending their office a letter or an email.

Nonsense. This a big beef with me about Twitter. It purports to be an egalitarian platform where you can "directly communicate" with significant people, but the sheer volume and signal-to-noise ratio of popular accounts means that they will never even see your comment, let alone reply, except in extraordinarily rare examples.

in the vast majority of cases it's going to be their PR team, not them

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