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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, a person skilled at Twitter could have compressed the essence of what you wrote into 280 characters.

I’ve found the best books and essays are similarly compressible, with the rest of the information being about bolstering it as being worthy of the precious few slots in your L1 cache.

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The essence, perhaps... with none of the nuance or shading. If one thinks that is unnecessary, dispensable fluff, Twitter is no doubt sufficient for most writing.

And a rhyming dictionary contains all poetry in many fewer pages.

> The essence, perhaps... with none of the nuance or shading

Precisely why the worlds problems are all solvable on Twitter.

Yep, I do remember the many problems Twitter solved. Without Twitter, we would be centuries away from enlightened world peace and mutual understanding.

Nuance and shading is not entirely unselfish. Too much nuance indicates a lack of trust in your reader.

Given the nature and quality of replies I’ve seen even on HN — where there are no such character limits and the level of education its members have is higher on average — it seems to me that trust has yet to be earned.

I explicitly said that it’s necessary, but generally it’s not for the primary purpose of encoding the core point one is trying to make. Nuance to me is more about convincing the unpersuaded reader the idea has merit and is important or useful. Which is why Twitter allows reasonable idea propagation but does a terrible job of persuading people who disagree.

Before twitter it was called aphorisms and Nietzsche was doing it before it was cool.

Does the master oil painter not start with charcoal pencil?

"Brevity is the soul of wit", and saying what you have to say with as few and simple words as possible is essential for a good writer.

It is, however, far from the only important thing!

I agree: Twitter forces you to be succinct, a useful skill when writing an Executive Summary for a business paper or an Abstract for a paper in a scientific journal.

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