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Comment by BlueTemplar | Hacker News Reader

While somewhat offtopic, an important question is why would you want one ?

IMHO the main issue of Twitter is not even the way how it's now a walled garden (and since recently, effectively outside of the Web).

It's how the combination of a ~~140~~ 280† character limit, personal walls, hashtags, likes and an horribly hard to navigate comment system has resulted in a medium where constructive debate is almost impossible, while feelings-driven mobs rule.

†While moving to a 280 character limit probably made Twitter better, I'm wondering about the loss of compatibility with texts. One actually remarkable way in how Twitter was good is for post-disaster communication, which is the very situation where Internet might be down while basic cellphone communication still up.

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There's this sort of thing, definitely, but I'll note that Facebook lacks many of these features, and is still a toxic environment, although perhaps less overtly so.

My own guess is that the most fundamental problem is that Dunbar's number is real, and bad things happen if you blow past it. Large scale human communication works best when it is not modeled as an endless, 24/7 masquerade ball where the theme of the party is bullhorns.

There's a lot of toxicity on twitter, but also some interesting discussion that I have not found anywhere else online. I routinely block people who get too political or are gratuitously mean. It makes twitter much more pleasant.

for better discussion, 280 would be a minimum rather than a maximum, but twitter doesn't want better discussion as that also depresses engagement.

Maybe? But, on the other hand, even at 147 characters, your comment seems like a complete and well-composed observation. I don't see how requiring it to be 90% longer would improve it.

I only got past 280 by counting just 185 characters, and deciding to add this sentence as filler.

it's not that you can't have a single, good point fit into a small number of characters, but that good discussion requires more than one good point, and plenty of nuance and thought. it's strictly true that the number limit is arbitrary (and only loosely correlated to 'goodness'), but assuming there is a limit at all, my (simple) point was it should be a minimum rather than a maximum, for better discussion.

Good discussion also benefits from pithy remarks, and suffers from bloviating.

yes, and pithy doesn’t necessarily mean short. =)

While I agree that the medium Twitter enforces is antithetical to reasonable discourse, I think this question is being asked because recently twitter and facebook deleted Trump's account (as well as some other prominent accounts). If you are ideologically aligned with one of those deleted accounts then it's a natural human response to think, "ok what if I'm next?" or "how can I still discuss my views?" and then look for alternatives.

1. Twitter bans people based on their political beliefs

2. Twitter provides a platform for cancel culture

3. I don’t like Jack Dorsey

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