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Comment by maverwa | Hacker News Reader

I also buy his "Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole" claim.

Its really hard to make a complex argument in 140 characters (as it was back in 2013), even if he wanted to. The short format really invites these "just a few word" opinion pieces. I think its easy to see how this, given the right ingredients, can trigger a misunderstanding or at least an incomplete understanding.

Text lacks a lot of context humans usually communicate via voice and facial expressions. Lowering the information even more by restricting the amount of text can make it hard to convey the intent.

I am not saying "his tweet was fine, just misunderstood" here btw. I do not know his indent when writing this tweet. And I think its on the author to make sure their message can reasonably be understood as intended.

But I also see how something like this can happen without malintent on the authors side.

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To add: I find the "Twitter makes it hard" remarks a total cop-out in this instance. One is responsible for ones conduct whether it's via Twitter, in person, or a series of smoke signals. Am I supposed to believe that a character limit is in some way an excuse for being an arsehole? Those tweets lacked _any_ attempt at nuance so to respond by saying "oh it's hard to express myself accurately with only n characters and this time I came off as a prick" is just utterly ridiculous.

There is that, but the systemic issue holds too : my rule of thumb is that if you use Twitter, then you are an an angry asshole or idiot (until proven otherwise).

That's not a systemic issue. That's your personal stereotype.

Why not both ? Consider for instance 4chan...

Oh for sure. Twitter is stil just "a tool". It might not be the right tool for a discussion, but if you choose it for such, its not the tools fault.

And to be fair, "its twitters fault" is also not what Klabnik claims (as far as I can gather from his blog post).

You may be right but I took this quote of Klabnik's to essentially be him offloading some of the blame to the tool - just my interpretation.

"Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole."

I didn't use Twitter much, but each time I did, it was so frustrating to limit what I wanted to express in less than 280 characters, and splitting felt stupid. So I removed the less important words, replaced long words with short ones, then when it finally fit the limit, I didn't press send, just read it again, and hated it because it was oversimplified, limited my vocabulary, made generalizations without caution, etc.

I can easily see how it can turn normal people into dumb assholes, especially since there's the dopamine rewards of having tons of likes, retweets and comments, incentive to be extreme, by being extremely positive or extremely negative.

> Its really hard to make a complex argument in 140 characters (as it was back in 2013), even if he wanted to

Then don't use Twitter to do it. Use something else, or just don't bother.

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