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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.

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.

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)

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