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Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

> Sort of made me sad just thinking about that. Twitter really does encourage the worst forms of conversation - outrage, sarcasm, cheapness, drunk humor dominates.

I've never understood why, in the Eternal September, anyone would expect the average late-night conversation on the internet to be any different from the average late-night conversations at the local pub. Sure, you might find that rare table of PhD students/young engineers/residents/academics and teachers/etc. having a genuinely interesting conversation as they transition from work to relaxation after a long night at the lab/hospital/grading. But mostly it's drunk idiots relishing in base pleasures. And after the second drink or so those engaging conversations will devolve.

I don't think Twitter is encouraging anything in particular here. The same thing happened with IRC channels, forums, etc. No point in getting angry or sad about the Eternal September; it was always inevitable.

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You don't think the nature of a tweet, the very limitation placed on the number of characters, encourages a certain type of communication/interaction?

The platform not only discourages long form dialogue, which is especially useful for communicating complex topics, it explicitly prohibits it.

> You don't think the nature of a tweet, the very limitation placed on the number of characters, encourages a certain type of communication/interaction?

Sure, but I don't think that type of communication/interaction causes bad conversations. The conversation was going to be a shit show regardless. Go join any Mome's or Political group on Facebook. The conversation isn't exactly elevated.

> The platform not only discourages long form dialogue, which is especially useful for communicating complex topics, it explicitly prohibits it.

Not really. "1/N"

The pub analogy or even the Facebook group isn't very good.

Tweeting involves getting your short thoughts evaluated and rated by strangers at scale! You're also regularly aware of the properties required to (potentially) go viral.

It is far more difficult, by design, to encourage better conversations there.

Right, and I think most conversations in real-time (like in a pub) involve a decent amount of back-and-forth; most don't consist of people trading long blog-post-length monologues. (Though I suppose there's a certain sort of person who pontificates while drunk.)

While I'm not a big fan of Twitter, "the character limit encourages a weird conversational style" is not on my list of grievances at all.

Few years ago I used to have great conversations on Twitter but now there are too many ppl and many do it full time like a job or something, conditioned by the reward mechanisms to get those Likes and build social media influence. That changes what kind of conversations are possible.

I see Twitter as mostly a broadcast medium where you go to get the latest info on some event.

Conversations the kind that feel natural and human dont have a weird distracting real time ticker above my head scoring every dumb thing that flits through my mind.

"many do it full time like a job or something, conditioned by the reward mechanisms to get those Likes and build social media influence."

Without going into the backstory, there was a period of time where I had to follow about 100 very specific people. I also happen to know how successful these people were financially.

Those who were the most successful financially tweeted the least and those who were the least successful financially tweeted the most. Then there was those who didn't tweet at all because they had no financial incentive to and their egos weren't contingent upon it.

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