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Comment by 01Michael10 | Hacker News Reader

Conversations on Twitter? I use Twitter as read-only for information to see what certain people and groups are up to in near real-time.

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God, I know. I keep hearing about conversations and such on twitter, while I have a hard time fitting a single thought into a tweet, much less a thoughtful response to someone's query.

Look! Even that sentence was longer than a tweet! I don't know how people do it.

Terseness is a learned skill. Verbosity is too. They're not mutually exclusive, you can apply them where they work. And they're both useful.

(That's exactly 140 characters for you :) )

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

— Blaise Pascal (sometimes wrongly attributed to Mark Twain)

Being terse is not a good thing. Being succinct is.

As far as I know, the two are synonyms in common parlance. I chose 'terse' because it's the usual converse of 'verbose'.

Terseness is short, abrupt, irritated. Succinctness is short, clearly explained. They both mean short, but the tones of the words are quite different. '"Leave me be!", he replied succinctly' doesn't work, for example.

To me, this is exactly the kind of nuance that is lost by training yourself to limit ideas to 140 characters.

Terse also means short, clearly explained. Yes, 'terse' has an extra meaning, but in a technical context, and especially when contrasted with 'verbose', it should be completely clear which meaning I meant.

And for the record: I don't train myself to limit my thoughts, I train myself to use a form for expressing them appropriate to the medium I'm doing it in. Expressing something shorter and in steps is not inferior to long-winded explanations. If you must blame something for a fine nuance I failed to grasp, blame the fact that English is not my first language. I doubt I would have caught it in Dutch either, but at least that could be a valid reason.

Please stop elaborating on the definition of terse. It wasn't the correct term to use, please just accept that without additional exposition.

Terse: adjective, terser, tersest. 1. neatly or effectively concise; brief and pithy, as language. 2. abruptly concise; curt; brusque.

e.g. blunt, rough.

Unfortunately for you, both connotation and denotation were working against you.

But herein lies part of the problem - at first you said that the two meant the same thing in common parlance, then you said the same thing in technical parlance; there's confusion in the audience right there. Anyway, while it was clear what you meant, what you said was not quite correct, which is why I piped up.

Particularly in technical writing, you've got to get your words nailed down correctly. This is why there are things like the RFC defining what 'shall', 'should', and 'may' mean (intended for other RFCs, but it's also used elsewhere)[1], or the development of Simplified Technical English[2]. The latter was developed in aerospace engineering, where minor misunderstandings can literally cost lives.

Subtle differences between words are important, and they allow us to communicate more complex ideas. Twitter may have it's place, but any conversation involving nuance really isn't suited for it. A high-quality conversation includes caveats and careful framing, which can't really be fit into 140 characters. At least, in my opinion.

[1]https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English

There's more than one way to Twitter. If you know some people on it personally, you're more likely to engage in conversations.

There are people I do know on Twitter but do not converse with them on there. I email, text, or IM them. Always use the best tools that are available...

I agree, use the best tools. But if you email or text them, there is no way for other people to join the conversation. Think of a twitter conversation as one at a party where you know people. Anybody can come join in, and can add value. It's more akin to conversing on IRC than over email.

Holy crap, now it's a multi-person conversation? I would say let's meet for drinks... How about Hangouts or what ever one uses on iPhones? Maybe this is more for the under 25 crowd who like to do things the hard way on 5" screens with no keyboards. Not me...

It can be. This conversation is a multi-person one too. That's still different than, say, hangouts because everybody is free to reply, not just people you invited. Maybe somebody neither of us know will read this next month and come up with an interesting counterpoint.

In any case, using some form of video calling is too intrusive. I can type this reply, do something else for 10 minutes, then check back. But then I was always one for text mediums rather than video or audio calls :)

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