I dislike being limited to only 140 characters when trying to convey my thoughts and ideas, so I've never really been a fan of Twitter or tweeting... (as this comment illustrates)
On HN you can sometimes get that by clicking through to the comments first, but it's kind of a frustrating way to browse links. Some subreddits on reddit have moved back to the Slashdot style by only allowing "text" submissions rather than "link" submissions; unlike HN's text submissions those can also contain clickable links, so the effect is to require people to write a little along with the link, instead of just submitting a link.
I often find myself ignoring interesting articles on HN only to go read them later on reddit with a much more descriptive, editorialized headline.
Lately I've seen an increase in memes and trollish comments from new IDs. I worry that if HN doesn't move to limited account signup period or invite only, it will end up another Slashdot.
The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be
arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any
conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent
discourse.
<label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label>
If somebody chooses to be a windbag and someone else chooses to follow them, why should Twitter be standing in the middle telling them both that they're Doing It Wrong?
The thing that differentiates Twitter from its competitors isn't the well-thought-out-ness of the tweets, it's the volume. When you can't write more than 140 characters, you feel OK tweeting almost anything. And you do, and you do it a lot. A blogging platform is a drag because it feels like work to write a meaningful blog post. You start a dozen blog posts that you never publish because they don't feel finished. So you end up never blogging because you "don't have time for it".
Twitter won because their 140 character limit encouraged constant, thoughtless posting, which allowed for an insane volume of tweets. And it turned out that volume is way, way more important for a social network than quality or thoughtfulness.
You're not writing to communicate with yourself, after all.
So, in no anybody tought abut what kind of textual content would fit that size. Or, in other words, it's arbitrary.
It's a bit silly.
Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive.
Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day.
-- George Orwell, "The Principles of Newspeak"
Yet he also wrote this, in "Politics and the English Language":
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
Of course brevity is generally good, and bloat is generally bad. But you can be concise even in 5000 words if the subject is complex, and waste space even in 140 characters. But one thing is sure, a hard limit of 140 makes discussion of anything remotely complex impossible. That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater... the mere possibility of bloat hurts communication less than the impossibility to elaborate, at all, ever. (posting links, or twee+ etc, don't really count IMHO)
In the meantime, I started to watch a talk by Chris Hedges about Journalism, and when I heard this bit I had to think of this thread right here:
.. it's why I don't go on Fox news. I don't go on CNN either, because the most you're ever gonna get is 4 to 6 minutes. And so you have to use the language of easily identifiable clichés in order for the audience to resonate. And if what you're thinking doesn't fit within those clichés, then you become unintelligible. And that of course has now been carried out through the wider culture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAhq-l0LUio&t=4m44s
Twitter is not "just a medium" like those just fall out of the sky in random configurations, it's part of a trend, and THAT I utterly hate, and proudly so. I don't have it in for Twitter as such, rather for the general decline in the ability to think (or answer simple questions). Also, while I'm not forced to use it, if everybody does, there is nobody left to have any meaningful conversations with, so that would kind of suck. To put bluntly: the freedom of people to be stupid, taken to extremes by too many people, kind of intrudes on my freedom to be intelligent. So the very least I can do is ask a simple question. If you can't even stand being asked a question without skipping to ad-hominem plus strawman, I would say the proof is in the pudding.