Why I can’t have conversations using Twitter (2014)

by bjerun • 9 years ago

166 74 9 years ago

(This is a few years old at this point..)

moxious2• 9 years ago

Well the fundamental chosen limitations of the service seem to make it a bad choice for detailed technical arguments. But ultimately social networks are just about who is there. We talk about technical topics on twitter not because it's the right forum, but because the people we want to talk to are there.

Radim• 9 years ago

I think you hit the nail on the head there.

This is also what makes "social networks" so frustrating to technical people: it's not about your idea or even its execution. Rather, it's about how many other apes you've groomed in the past, to the point they'll back you up ("retweet") no matter how stupid your argument or insipid your tweet. The politics of it, tribalism.

A 140 character limit doesn't help of course :-) but the need for soundbites, a shared communication channel for quickly correcting/reinforcing our perception of reality, goes much deeper than that. Twitter is just a medium.

Where it gets interesting is when you consider why human group-think and "shared" perception of reality has been so successful, in evolutionary terms. Why are apes not simply rational animals, instead of spending so much energy forever climbing social ladders and adoring celebrities? Why these complex super-human social hierarchies (religions included), what makes them so efficient?

moxious2• 9 years ago

Well...yes to what you're saying. But there aren't neat lines between our professional technical lives and our personal ones, in particular because we spend a lot of time hanging out with people who share our interests.

Social media is designed for friends, not technical discussion, it's just that human relationships of all kinds are messy and there are no clear lines. So one bleeds over into the other, this can be expected. I don't think that's social media's fault or the people, just a predictable consequence of "how the people be"

jmaa• 9 years ago

Discussing anything of substance on a social media is a bad idea. These sites incentivise short arguments. Twitter very forcefully. Facebook implicitly with its "See more" links, for when comments get long.

But it's also a result of the reactionary culture of those sites. People want to be offended. They think that because the comment is on the internet, that it's final, and intended as is. But it rarely is.

wfunction• 9 years ago

Seems like part of this could've been prevented by just tweeting with (1/) or (2/) in the beginning of multi-tweet posts.

kleiba• 9 years ago

Potentially relevant, since the article draws a comparison between twitter discussions and (what used to be) usenet discussions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Twitter seems to support less of a netiquette, it's more point-and-shoot. Besides that, it seems intuitive that the 140 chars restriction lends itself less to discussions than proper forums.

feral3• 9 years ago

Tech design choices can have profound social impact.

This is just a personal theory, but I suspect Twitter's choices have done huge damage to Western Civilization, by forcing, as a medium, a very short 'soundbite' structure onto debate. (Even more so than the media which gave us the term 'soundbite' ever did!)

So that sounds like a very overblown assertion, right?

But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables. He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium, a mass medium which makes it particularly hard to counteract false claims or have reasoned debate. For exactly the issues Antirez is raising.

I don't have evidence to support my theory, all I can say is I don't think I want Twitter to succeed.

chrisseaton• 9 years ago

I'm not sure if you're trying to make a point with a misspelling, but the term the media gave us was 'soundbite'.

feral3• 9 years ago

Fixed, thanks. Someone should comment about how autocorrect is destroying our civilization :)

(I love autocorrect which I think enables us to concentrate more on meaning of communication than mechanics - occasional errors aside!)

SonOfLilit2• 9 years ago

Is it Twitter's choices, or society's choice to use Twitter?

i.e. do you think Twitter would have reached the status of presidential communication platform had it not made this choice?

feral3• 9 years ago

It's a fair question. I don't know.

But the causal ordering here shouldn't change how we feel about Twitter.

As an analogy, it's a bit like if you have a candidate running on a racist platform in an election.

Maybe you can validly ask whether they are causing racism or whether the racism is causing them; but either way you shouldn't vote for them.

nindalf• 9 years ago

Twitter did what was good for Twitter - becoming fun, addictive and compelling to use. People made a choice to use that compelling product. These choices worked out well for Twitter, but according to the GP, not well for the users, who unknowingly hurt their society.

astrobe_• 9 years ago

It's just one popular platform at the moment. If it was IRC, Trump would have his IRC channel. Had Myspace survived long enough (in terms of popularity, that is), he would have a Myspace page.

Politics and companies go where the most people are and use that platform to the best of their own interests. If they don't have the knack for long analytical articles or short witty comments, they just hire people who do.

bsenftner3• 9 years ago

There is a fallacy that society had a choice. News organizations are struggling for any means to hold readership interest, and twitter's format forces nuanced, complex issues to be shorthanded and misunderstood to readership outrage revenue increasing levels. Just follow the money.

dudul• 9 years ago

No needs to play the Trump card IMO. The minute politicians started using Twitter to describe their policy you could tell it was over. And it happened way before Trump.

kakarot• 9 years ago

Consider an alternate perspective:

There were other platforms that opted for a longer format. Yet Twitter became popular.

Perhaps the reality is that, had Twitter opted for a longer format, another platform would have taken its place.

Twitter may not be the cause of societal aversion to meaningful, dense discourse, but a symptom.

tnone• 9 years ago

If Twitter had been preceded by a platform like it, but with longer character length, do you think people would switch to Twitter? I don't think so.

We actually have a case to compare to due to the curiosity of language: Japanese twitter. They can fit much longer ideas in 140 characters. It is a much saner place, and there is no shorter service leeching users.

It's far more likely that what keeps Twitter going is the social network of the existing user base and the vendor lock in of its APIs.

awinder• 9 years ago

I think this is a much stronger historical argument. Twitter came out in 2006, the soundbite culture was a big topic definitely before 2006 (Jon Stewart, for one, had been campaigning against it for years by that point)

supremesaboteur• 9 years ago

But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables. He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium

This is actually not true. Many of Trump's claims are challenged on Twitter and outside of Twitter. Maybe you don't like that he can directly talk to the people rather than twist his words to suit your narrative before heading it over to the masses

sddfd• 9 years ago

They are challenged, true.

But does this impact his tweets?

More importantly, I do not think Twitter is a good platform to present a statement /together/ with its challenges.

subpixel• 9 years ago

Just yesterday I looked at Twitter to read up about a back and forth between two developers I respect. I was reminded that Twitter makes it well-nigh impossible to follow multiple sides of a conversation. (Of course, calling what happens on Twitter a conversation is a stretch to begin with.)

Much of the time, when a tweet says that it's 'in reply to' someone else, the specific tweet it was meant as a reply to is not displayed to third parties.

If you extend this experience to the Trump scenario, it's a total fantasy to think his followers on Twitter are being exposed to rebuttals of his statements.

You see counter-opinions if you follow the person who expresses them. It's the inverse of discourse, and I agree it's cancerous to civil society.

cvsh• 9 years ago

Yeah it's less because of places where news spreads among the savvy like Twitter (and Reddit, and niche communities like HN) and increasingly more about the "last mile" of news -- the increasingly fragmented and ethically unconstrained ecosystem where people actually hear news from.

Facebook is, in my mind, much more culpable, being at the point of the spear for the radicalization of last mile news delivery.

acdha• 9 years ago

Maybe you don't like that he can directly talk to the people rather than twist his words to suit your narrative before heading it over to the masses

It's telling that you chose to twist the original poster's words to suit your narrative with the least fair interpretation. Unchallenged doesn't mean that something gets edited to bits. Traditionally it just meant that, for example, a reporter would ask followup questions to expand an idea or attempt to get the subject to explain things they'd prefer not to discuss (e.g. “How will we pay for that?”), or that controversial claims would be presented with a response from a relevant expert.

Trump is obviously unwilling to submit his ideas to critical review (or even basic editing) and in that sense Twitter is perfect for him. He can hit send and millions of his followers read it without any barrier where someone says “uh, doesn't that contradict what you said last week?”.

Certhas• 9 years ago

Sounds a bit like: "Just give me the facts and let me make up my own mind."

This is a stupid attitude. This should not even need elaborating. There are always more facts pertinent to the situation than any one of us can process. We will almost never have the correct background to correctly understand and interpret the facts.

Some people voted for Trump because he "tell's it as it is" when he has been lying demonstrably over and over.

I would rather have a journalist (or five) report to me what Trump said, together with context that makes it meaningful, and pointing out when he is lying. For the same time invested that will give me a vastly superior understanding of the situation than reading him directly.

I'm sure we'll figure out how to have a meaningful public discourse within the context of the Internet eventually, but as it was when other technologies came about, those who are fundamentally interested in _not_ having a reasonable discourse that is listened too, but want to get their superficially plausible demagoguery heard are having their field day right now.

dredmorbius2• 9 years ago

You might find Elizabeth Eisenstein's work of interest: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

I think we might see "Twitter as an Agent of Change" from a future historian. If we have future historians.

Oh, here it is, from 2013: https://earlyamericanists.com/2013/04/29/twitter-as-an-agent...

Eisenstein:

Book 1979: http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-...

Preliminary article, 1968: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877720

Bio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eisenstein

Obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/books/elizabeth-eisenstei...

wyclif• 9 years ago

Eisenstein's work is getting more attention this year, because it's the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Which, of course, couldn't have happened without the printing press and mass publication. It's a great book worth reading if you're into the geekier aspects of print history.

pjc502• 9 years ago

very short 'soundbite' structure onto debate

But as you say the traditional media do this too - and have been just as instrumental in the rise of Trump. The "false equivalence" media structure, and the direct promotion of right-wing editorial through Murdoch news properties, are also extremely important.

sitkack3• 9 years ago

Propaganda is asymmetric, it takes more energy to communicate and rebut with Truth than it does to fabricate lies. Truth requires precision, clarity and subtlety; lies are a dead-blow hammer.

chiefalchemist3• 9 years ago

Thank you for saying "traditional media" and not using the word journalists.

Wanna bring my blood to a quick boil? Have a news program that pulls content from Twitter. And usually completely unvetted. Who needs legit sources?

It this regard, Twitter is an idea shit show. You can find just about anything said about anything there. So to pull more or less randomly is, to me, unimaginable and too often inappropriate and upsetting.

jasonthevillain• 9 years ago

I agree.

Other people are pointing out that soundbites existed before Twitter, but it opened up the ranks of the public babblerati to everyone, and promoted it as a platform for public discussion.

I dropped Twitter years ago, subscribed to a collection of newsletters to fill the gap in technical discussion, and honestly, I think I'm actually more informed for it.

lyra_comms4• 9 years ago

There is plenty of research showing that the patterns and atmosphere a platform promotes can have huge effects on conversation and discourse.

This is what we're doing with Lyra (www.hellolyra.com): using a respect for language and cognitive load to create an open, sensible conversation platform.

DelightOne• 9 years ago

As far as I understand you can chat to exchange news or chat to learn. Twitter is to exchange news. What is yours for and is it any good at that?

chiefalchemist3• 9 years ago

I agree. But I don't think it's Twitter's fault per se. It's just a tool. Sure it can influence, have an effect, but I'm not so sure it's powerful enough to create something from nothing. Especially given the fact it has a limit heavy user base, a fair number of casual and then a whole lotta non users.

My point is, I think the tendency for sound-bite intelligence (hold the applause, you heard it here first. Lol) was already there. I mean, Orwell gets at it in directly in 1984. Also, given the number of non Twitter users, I think this also helps explain why the whole culture shifted. Sure, there are Twitter users with offline influence but that many? I think not.

In any case, to blame Twitter is meta. It's a symptom of the problem itself. That is, less thinking and more simplification is the sign of the times.

bsenftner3• 9 years ago

Twitter is a more powerful a tool than most realize; twitter enables anyone with a public following to direct that public following as a shit-show army destroying any online presence of their opposition. Powerful twitter users direct their followers like an army, and quite effectively. One is POTUS now.

awkwarddaturtle• 9 years ago

It's funny how similar the people on the left are to the people on the right. 9 years ago when Obama was elected with deft use of social media, the right was saying "myspace/youtube/social media" has damaged western civilization.

Now the left is blaming social media for the election of trump and damaging western civilization.

But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables.

Were you complaining about twitter when obama used it well to push his agenda?

He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium, a mass medium which makes it particularly hard to counteract false claims or have reasoned debate.

You mean people have direct access to what the leader thinks? Is that so terrible? Do you really prefer a system when a handful of like-minded editors in media companies frame everything to their agenda?

I don't have evidence to support my theory, all I can say is I don't think I want Twitter to succeed.

Because free speech is such a horrific thing when you don't get your way?

hota_mazi• 9 years ago

If you're the kind of person who's comfortable writing texts of two paragraphs or more, you should completely avoid writing on Twitter, period. This will only lead to frustration and interaction with people who don't value the same level of quality writing as you do.

pdimitar2• 9 years ago

Absolutely. I've drawn my conclusions several years ago and stopped being active on Twitter, and stopped trying to look for meaningful material on it.

The painful truth is that many people realize this but they agonize over the fact that the people they want to talk with can only be found on Twitter. Network effect + tribalism = today's sad reality.

agentgt• 9 years ago

For service consistency we have been experimenting with the CV which is the standard deviation over the mean (with of course 99% as well being looked at).

I told someone we were looking at it and I too got a similar response.

gkya• 9 years ago

Twitter is annoying. I signed up a couple years ago to follow some local stuff's news, mostly events. Thus I followed 8-9 accounts that initially were of my interest, and started refreshing and reading my feed. All I got was the same 3-4 posts repeated annoyingly often, so that I had to fish for new things that sink below stuff reposted almost hourly since months. I though, well, maybe it's these accounts that I follow that don't know what to do, and started looking around. What I found is that there are 3 prominent Twitter stereotypes: (i) the reposter, which repeatedly posts the same thing and retweets anybody who mention them, (ii) the dumper, like news sites etc., which just vomit tweets at you one every other minute, and (iii) the spartan which speaks in semi-cryptic punchlines. Given the platform has no spam filtering or any way to indicate whether a post is seen or not, it's byzantine task to extract information from what you get served in your feed.

orbitur2• 9 years ago

Maybe I've spent too much time on Twitter, but once you find a decent small group of people/comedians to follow, it becomes easier to find others like them since they tend to all follow each other.

I now follow over 900 people, and my Twitter feed is news I care about, opinions I care about, and great "cryptic punchlines" as you call them.

kelukelugames• 9 years ago

My biggest regret is arguing with people on Twitter. It is not productive. Even less so than arguing on any other forum.

SwellJoe• 9 years ago

My biggest twitter-related regret is that my most liked tweet (by thousands) is a terrible joke about Trump. The reason I regret it so much is that within an hour or two, I realized that people weren't liking it because it was funny in an absurd "nothing matters" sort of way...they were liking it because they thought it was funny in a "yeah, that'd show'em" sort of way. I realized that people who took it as an opportunity to argue with me were really stupid...but the people who were agreeing with me and liking it were also really stupid (so what does that make me?). There should be a German word for that feeling.

But, also arguing with people on twitter. That's bad, too. Let's just go with that.

vultour• 9 years ago

I think you also perfectly described what has been happening on Reddit ever since the election.

jcbrand• 9 years ago

There should be a German word for that feeling.

Best I can think of right now is "fremdschämen", which literally translates into "foreign shame".

It means to be ashamed or embarrassed for other people's behaviour (as opposed to your own).

k__• 9 years ago

Why care about some ppl in twitter?

I met a bunch of people hating on React and a bunch of people loving it.

No value in these tweets.

jancsika• 9 years ago

So far I'm only convinced the author would have gotten longer, more verbose flow on Usenet or Mailman. I am not convinced the ideas contained in that flow would have been any more valuable.

To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what insight I would gain in this specific case from reading anything other that a) your post on diskless replication, b) the Stripe engineers' report, and maybe c) a few of the paragraphs of your response in this post.

sitkack3• 9 years ago

What Antirez describes is magnified on Twitter but no means isolated to it. Cherry-picking and un-charitably attacking someones statements is a human flaw that everyone should seek to suppress. And it happens for a couple reasons

* Weak egos on part of the listener. They want to _take down_ or show their superiority by besting a famous or popular person.

* Over Criticality. Instead of waiting for the entire argument to jell, and trying to charitably [1] understand the persons argument, you find the first perceived hole and attack. Often arguing about things that aren't germane to the discussion.

* False Drama / Celebrity Association. This is the bullshitter who wants to be "involved in the argument" but doesn't really care about the argument or the outcome.

People forget that debate, as practiced in meat space is about winning, not using logic to present cogent arguments. So when Antriez gets beaten on Twitter, he losing the debate due other's rhetorical skill. Your mom.

[1] http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

the_af2• 9 years ago

Cherry-picking and un-charitably attacking someones statements is a human flaw

I don't think that's exactly the situation Antirez describes. The way I see it, he's saying that Twitter makes it too easy for people to inadvertently pick isolated tweets out of context, mistakenly thinking they are seeing the whole context (because tracking down the full discussion on Twitter is very cumbersome and time-consuming), and then reply to something different than what was actually argued in the broader context.

That's different than cherry-picking on purpose in order to "win" an argument, which is indeed a human flaw and not a technological one.

lj3• 9 years ago

That's different than cherry-picking on purpose in order to "win" an argument, which is indeed a human flaw and not a technological one.

As much as I want to believe that, it has not been my experience. I've found that if there's a possible way to misinterpret a statement, somebody on the internet will misinterpret it. They don't do it on purpose to win an argument most of the time, either. It happens everywhere on the internet (HN, Reddit, twitter, even blog comment sections) because communication is difficult and internet increases the exposed surface area of a statement. The more people to read a thing, the more likely it is somebody will interpret something that wasn't intended.

mintplant• 9 years ago

This is why I hate that there was such an uproar around raising the tweet length limit. Mastodon's 500 character limit works so much better, especially when paired with the ability to collapse the bulk of a longer post's content under a short summary line.

DrNuke• 9 years ago

I find Twitter the only bearable bulletin these days, just following my industry influencers without participating actively.

austenallred• 9 years ago

I like how Benedict Evans describes the 140 char limit: lossy compression.

It's hilarious to me that a rule enforced by external technical reasons (length of SMS) has become so important to the product that it's non negotiable.

Why can't I even, for example, add a text "attachment" the same way I attach photo, video, links, etc.? There's something hilarious about the CEO of Twitter screenshotting the "notes" app on his iPhone in order to send a message.

eknight15• 9 years ago

I like the idea of a text "attachment" but I could also see it being used negatively.

e.g. I tweet something positive in the 140 characters, and in the attachment I have something offensive. It's similar to the editing tweet problem.

There was some press about expanding the limit https://www.recode.net/2016/1/5/11588480/twitter-considering...

awinter-py• 9 years ago

Using twitter for 6 months trained me to screenshot text instead of pasting it. Ugh. What a shitty product.

chippy• 9 years ago

We could encourage Twitter clients or browser extensions to OCR the attached images and automatically convert them to text. Indeed - the same addons could encode text all using a standard font to make it easier.

jpalomaki• 9 years ago

From the comments in the article: " It certainly works much better as a broadcast medium and for giving occasional shout-outs, high fives, and anything you know isn't going to go beyond a short, positive interaction "

Looking at the Twitter design, this seems to be the intended use. At least in my stream almost all tweets are accompanied by a large picture. Quite often something that is not even very relevant, since they are auto picking the pictures for linked web sites. This makes very poor use of screen real estate. If conversations were a thing for them, I would expect a different design.

mst• 9 years ago

The newer tendency to mark threads with numbers so that people at least know there is context to a particular mid-thread tweet seems to help somewhat, but the general problem remains.

It also fascinates me how badly editors' choice of headlines to make people more likely to click can screw up the debate because many people respond to the clickbait headline without clicking, and end up drawing conclusions that aren't at all supported by the article. Presumably this is also a problem on facebook, but I deleted my account there some time ago.

lyra_comms4• 9 years ago

Twitter wasn't designed to enable good conversations - it was designed for rapid, viral growth thanks to a gimmick which limits message length and sensible, nuanced interaction.

Have a look at Lyra - it's a nonprofit conversation service designed with respect for language and attention.

www.hellolyra.com

epoch1970• 9 years ago

The big problem I have with having conversations on Twitter is that I wasn't even able to sign up for a Twitter account the last time I tried. It wanted me to provide a phone number. I refuse to do this, as they have no legitimate need for that information, even if it is just a lousy technique to try to avoid spammers from using their service. I think the account was automatically canceled or locked or something like that, just a few minutes after opting not to give my phone number. I don't know if this is still the case, but it turned me off of Twitter.

Why I can’t have conversations using Twitter (2014)

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