what I'm about to say will seem like a good thing, but it's a problem. bear with me.
over the past few weeks I've finally taken the time to add an extensive number of philosophy professors to my facebook. this has resulted in massive improvement in the quality of my feed.
most of these posts are friends-only. so, many of the best posts are made for a network of people you're probably not part of. access to this discourse is something that probably benefits everyone, but many people have their reasons to be reluctant to use the public feature.
(I should add: if you're worried about random people leaving bad comments, you can turn on "only friends can comment" in your privacy settings — so you can make public posts where only friends can reply, which solves a few problems at once and you'll have less reason to block people.)
but a lot of people are under the misconception that twitter is where people ought to go for "the discourse". twitter is simply what's visible, and the character limit necessarily means you're getting shallow content that is at best a summary. many of the people who think twitter is a good place for this aren't used to engaging in depth, so they don't know any better. twitter here is a nightclub: it's not designed to actually have a dialogue, it's designed to exchange a few sentences and do something else, usually with lots of distractions, and much like a nightclub it's what's public-facing; better parties can and do exist elsewhere.
the problem is the knowing people problem. one of the things that makes youtube great is that it's indiscriminate; you don't need to know someone to find really good content on youtube. twitter is less of a function of who you know, and only a weird minority of people have protected accounts, so if people have poor networks on facebook they may be under the false impression that lots of good content is on twitter — instagram has similar dynamics. facebook however is absolutely dependent on your network; if people in your network don't make good posts you won't see good posts.
yet it's ideal for this content to be available to everyone, and it just isn't. I don't know if there's a solution to this, but it certainly isn't a situation that we should settle for.
