I am begging you to not use twitter as a discussion medium.
(or any microblogging platform. bluesky, mastodon, whatever.)
there are times where I see the appeal of twitter, and then there are times where I think "no, everyone is wrong", and you can imagine how one of these might dominate the other.
the central benefit of twitter is also the central problem. by limiting characters to 280 you are forced to be concise. this means that karenposts such as this:
"4 billion paid out in vaccine court using tax payer dollars because for some odd reason vaccine manufactures are legally exempt from all liability for damages? Strange. The fact that there is no study that exists comparing a vaccine to a placebo injection in a double blind study to prove safety OR efficacy ..."
(this continues; you get the idea)
... such as this are limited, and this perhaps creates a floor on how dumb someone can be, since if you're dumb across 280 characters this is less stupid-per-capita than dumb across 280 words.
however, this of course creates a ceiling for insight also. it’s impossible to get in the weeds of a discussion on twitter; citing your sources in detail is not a thing, and you will just end up with competing tweet threads that are impossible to follow. the length means you can much more easily advance bullshit than you can correct it.
this is a twitter post that went around about a guy in the US removing his own wisdom tooth at age 22 by torrenting a dental textbook and using mexican novocaine.
and since “went around” can mean anything, here is how around:
and it’s fake. provably. I sent it to a dentist I know for a bullshit-check.
(1) you would not be able to obtain leverage for the physical movement of removal
(2) most 22 year olds would need to have the teeth surgically cut/removed; he would not have those tools
(3) it could be possible if the 22 year old had severe periodontal disease, but at that age this is virtually impossible
(4) people do remove their own teeth, but this is when the tooth is already extremely loose
(5) by the time the 22 year old acquired pliers, syringes, elevators and so forth, they might as well have paid for the operation themselves
(6) in the US, dental textbooks don't use novocaine; they use lidocaine or articaine, which one would know if they read a dental textbook
(7) what might have happened: some patients claim to have removed a tooth, but they have in fact yanked on the crown of a heavily decayed tooth that is soft and snapped the crown off, leaving the root inside. this may be misconstrued as tooth removal. it is "surprisingly common."
and the answer to "has this well-circulated image received a fact-check label by moderators" is "absolutely not."
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here’s another egregious example about oxytocin, and was shared by internet veterans who are both educated enough to exercise rigor and experienced enough in the unreliability of anonymity to know better: https://imgur.io/a/WOXnT7E
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notice how everything wrong with either of these does not easily fit into 140 characters. communicating the entirety of why this is fake would require an entire tweet thread, which no one is going to read. if someone posts a blatant lie, you don’t have room for corrections. you have room for "omg wow" and "awesome" and "holy shit bro". this is WORSE than having no room for any discussion at all, and on tiktok or instagram you don’t have room for a conversation. on twitter, you have just enough room to communicate a lie, but not enough to correct one.
and once people have circulated misinformation, they’re reluctant to admit it’s misinformation. it’s obvious why this is — hardly anyone is dandy about believing they’ve spread false info. nonetheless, a person correcting this kind of misinformation has ton to overcome not just the false information itself but the ego investment of others too.
twitter’s design incentivizes misinforming people. it’s not a good discussion platform.
but — facebook is for old people!
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hardly. both are for old people.
there is this bizarre mindset where the genx/millennial segment still thinks twitter is hip or new and that facebook is boomer. both are approximately as old, with twitter being slightly more millennial and slightly less genx.
this is my first facebook interaction, and the first day I made a twitter account, the latter of which is long since deleted. these are 11 months apart. read: I’ve had literally a decade to see what’s on it. I’ve seen your liked posts. I’ve seen the “good” accounts. nothing about twitter is new or interesting.
ok, but — cultural relevance!
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sure, but for whom?
if we want to know what The Youths are thinking, we’re going to use TikTok and to a lesser extent instagram, not twitter. but — twitter is where the discourse is!
is it though? or is it a minority of people who think they are “the discourse”?
note that this was if anything was during twitter’s peak US relevance and doesn’t count antipathy toward the platform; ie the spectrum is "don’t care" to "care a lot", it doesn’t include "I’d be glad if it was gone" and I think you know where I stand on that.
so, if it’s not relevant for most Americans and many would even like to see it gone, and it’s roughly about as old as facebook, then who are we really talking about here? what does twitter have that other platforms don’t?
well, lots of takes and potshots, most of which won’t survive the scrutiny of a real discussion, and the platform constrains scrutiny by design.
take this post, which is a reasonable length and standard format: one headline, one paragraph.
many good thoughts on an issue have this structure — headline sentence + a single paragraph. this is midform, which is anything from a paragraph to 2000 words; responses by experts from interviews will be midform. emails will be midform. twitter may be mid, but it’s horrible for midform. doing this non-awkwardly is impossible on the medium.
what’s going to happen if you put this on twitter is that you’re going to break this up into three tweets — the headline, paragraph part 1, paragraph part 2 — and many people will read the first tweet and nothing else, because they just see the first tweet when scrolling through their feed. this creates the dual-problem of people responding to only the first part of the thought (the headline) and the awkward dilemma where people must pick a part of the post to respond to - should they still respond to the headline or should they respond to the final part of the tweet thread? both are reasonable thoughts.
this, additionally, makes navigation impossible because you’re not sure which part you, as a viewer, should even be following. try linking someone to a highly active twitter discussion; it is a nightmare to follow compared to a threaded discussion over facebook.
twitter absolutely does work, and ideally, for some forms of newswire-style communication — especially declarations or short PSAs, such as by a local fire department or health agency or business. but those are not the things twitter mains want it to work for. it doesn’t work for extended thought, nor does it work for midform, and it especially does not work for discussions.
but I know so many good tweet threads!
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you really don’t, because this is oxymoronic: tweet threads are not-good by design, due to all of the previous reasons mentioned for why discussions are difficult to follow — they don’t properly show in your feed, the interface makes them difficult to follow, and the best solution involves a third party website called threadreaderapp that imitates very basic functionality twitter should have had since always: it turns a series of twitter posts into one long blog post, and at that point you could have just posted it here. https://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10227628727930712 is what a tweet thread looks like as a facebook post, which is to say it is much more readable and more importantly much more followable. any tweet thread could and should be a facebook post or short blog post — even tumblr works, just don’t use twitter for this purpose.
“so if you hate twitter so much…”
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yes, yes, yes, I can "just not use twitter". my handle is @ihatethismedium to symbolically make the point. I do in fact Not Use Twitter, and I will continue to not use it. however, not using twitter isn’t enough, because I am still affected by what happens when people use it — one professor even listed twitter as her *primary form of contact* — so it is My Business if this pernicious platform is popular no matter how much I, personally, refrain from being on it.
before I shit on twitter more -- I’m definitely still going to -- it’s fair to mention that twitter is good for some things, and not just as consolation prizes.
for one, twitter is good for news wire style reporting and general updates about the status of things. this is the most defensible and obvious use-case for twitter and *the* OG use-case as per the book Hatching Twitter, a biography of the company.
twitter is good for link aggregation; this is obvious and perhaps the second-most obvious use-case.
twitter is good for humor, and I will get to that later.
twitter is good for more blown-up photo sharing than instagram, where you want to make a very specific photo viral.
twitter is good for people who have tremendous follower counts that don't transfer as easily on other platforms. this is another OG use of twitter, and courting celebrities — ashton kutcher, snoop dogg, hillary clinton, oprah, various prime ministers — was its main competitive advantage over facebook because of facebook's friend limit of 5000. on facebook you need to make a page or be "followed"; following is clunkier on facebook and making pages is beyond the digital literacy of most celebrities. when demonstrating how to use twitter on oprah, the twitter staff had taped the order of keys she would need to press to make a tweet and she still screwed it up by pressing escape instead of caps lock. twitter is designed to be an idiot-friendly public stage for famous people who *want* their interactions to resemble the short nothings of conversations like "how are you?" "good" "oh that's great, see you later" "you too! bye!". this and the newswire feature were its two primary use-cases and are still its competitive advantage.
twitter is good for neologisms. so is facebook though.
twitter is good for creative and novel uses of language. so is facebook though, and if anything twitter's snowclones — memes that propagate through language structures, like "x bf y gf", or "he/she's a 10 but (insert horrible quality)", or "men will do x before going to therapy" — if anything twitter's optimization for this kind of language means you'll see a flood of antifunny, not just unfunny, variations in the same digital square footage.
and, reluctantly, twitter is good for takes -- i.e. undeveloped opinions. beginner thoughts. tadpole views. the epistemic equivalent of a chick peeking its head out of an egg.
but what twitter is decisively *not* good for is discussion, and/or the sharing of substantial opinions. yet, putting aside newswiring and celebrity hobnobbing, that remains a major or dominant feature of the platform.
a discussion, remind, is something with a certain amount of back-and-forth. you can measure how in-depth a discussion is by its reply depth, aka how many replies the participants go before leaving. in-depth discussions will have a reply depth in the double digits; a podcast can have a reply depth of hundreds. twitter, even on highly followed accounts, has a reply depth of one or zero — they're usually one-off exchanges — and at most you'll see two or three, for a variety of reasons: twitter does not have easily readable threading, and the user interface makes anything longer than this difficult to follow to begin with, and the users are nudged by the website"s design to make public one-offs because that is more visible.
there is a kind of pity I take on certain people but especially academics who use twitter as their primary social media for "discussions" or "the people." this is sort of like majoring in political science because you want an intellectual challenge: I mean, sure, I guess, it's not *unchallenging*, it's not the *worst* you could do, but this really looks like a cope on some level.
at best, it's well-meaning scholars/authors/whatever who are forced to use the medium to network with other scholars/authors/whatever and this is reflected in the genre of Post That Could Have Totally Been Just A Blog/Facebook Post (1/32) and the related subgenre of Woah... That Thread Is Deep Man, That's Why I'm On Here, Retweeted, which I suppose these writers think is information or argumentation that would have never reached twitrodytes otherwise. at any rate, watching it feels like My Fair Lady with information.
at worst, the academics who are deep into being twitter mains come off as cliquish cloutwhores and fartsniffing chucklefucks who don't give the slightest shit who they influence or what their audience's information diet is or how their epistemic hygiene is practiced. (and if you are worried if this is you, don't. someone who fits these descriptions wouldn't ever bother to read this.)
it’s obvious that if your reason is actually the discussion you would probably prefer something better and are forced to use this dogshit medium, and/or have via some perversion come to enjoy the attention. twitter is shortform, and longform is of course solveable in the form of a link, but midform is where in-depth replies go. this is not by coincidence the length of a detailed email, or letter to the editor. by disabling midform you’ve restricted discussions to only the intro volleys of a discussion, which means that interlocutors are operating on the verge of starting a new discussion all the time. you are permanently and sisypheanly peeling the rind of an orange.
and, of course, this dynamic is abused. a lot. often. repeatedly. the fact that twitter was in 2020 the nation's dominant source of not memes but *political discussion* is reflective enough of the problems with how the platform is used and what users find acceptable.
due to these dynamics pervading the platform, even the humor is just... annoying.
https://twitter.com/christapeterso/status/1473409883949121540
the above for example was retweeted by a couple of academics I follow, as was a reply attempting humor, and it's... not funny. it's behind on the ea-nasir meme and it's barely smirk-inducing. it is snicker-tier.
https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1473377763855945731
the genre for this is "hehcore". yes I coined that; credit me. (pretty please.)
this is kind-of funny, in a "heh." or "ha." way, but it's not actually laugh-inducing and is miles away from a belly laugh. the sound this produces irl is like "tsch." this is the state of most twitter jokes. twitter is shared constantly on facebook for the same reason that 4chan is shared constantly on reddit -- the peak humor originates there, yes, but finding it requires becoming a pig searching for truffles and plowing your nose in dirt for an evening.
the best use of twitter that I regularly encounter is what might be called High Shitposts, or just really dry and compact jokes that are not so much one-liners but one-to-a-few-liners. some of the most hilarious shit I've ever seen is there, and I tend to share that with my friends. one such example is this -- https://twitter.com/weirdwithwords/status/1473116111768072194 -- which is fucking hilarious to even LOOK AT and I *DID* share it with friends.
one guy I'm in a crypto groupchat with characterized a specific twitter guy's posts as "permanent microhumblebragging" and "punchable words." this is not just accurate for so much of Hobnob Twitter and Opinion Twitter but High Joke Twitter also.
and, as I listed earlier, there are good uses for twitter. it's not a completely purposeless platform.
but what this comes down to and comes back to I suppose is that twitter is to the written word as a nightclub is to the spoken word. conversations are not meant to be had at a nightclub; you can, but the environment is designed to constrain you from doing that, and instead of constraining the spoken word twitter Harrison Bergerons content itself. any platform without length restrictions will have higher variance -- Huge Dumb and Huge Smart. by using character maxima to eliminate Huge Dumb at the expense of neutering Huge Smart, twitter occupies this purgatory of "if you have a lot of great things to say I sure as fuck won't know on here", and my issue is that this is a platform where people with Smart Things To Say go to act as if they're doing anything but be low orbit dumbass cannons.
put differently, and in 140 OG characters, 4chan has no pretensions that it's not 4chan. however, academics don't link to their 4chan.
