Twitter

Wasn't the whole point of twitter to get your message our in a concise manner within 180 (now 240) characters or less?

Attached: twitterrant.png (601x537, 47K)

Key word: "was"

as if they care, as long as people keep clicking and posting

mate you use twitter and youre white, that's racist

it works better in chinky ching chong languages where five words is five characters. it seems to be mostly english speakers that use twitter to publish entire thinkpieces

Isn't Twitter banned in chinky ching chong countries anyway?

it's supposed to be banned in china, but getting round the firewall there is an absolute joke, even the average rice-gobbling chink can do it

If only one word was allowed what would you post?

nigger

The point of that goal was for the pre-smartphone world, back when you could subscribe to someone's tweets and get them sent to you as text messages. For maximum compatibility across carriers/messaging apps, limiting the number of characters was prudent.

The point was never to make people be concise. Conciseness was/is encouraged by the character limit, but it was always expected that people would make tweet chains.

No, the whole point was to make public discussion as stupid and as easily analyzed and manipulated as humanly possible. It's clear to me that was always the point, due to how it lacks proper timestamps for posts, and how I always have to spend several second staring at a conversation before I can figure out who was talking to who and even then sometimes I realize I was mistaken minutes later. I also know this because when twitter launched it was constantly talked about on national news, and they would ALWAYS mention a related twitter post with every single story they would talk about! It was to send a message: "Twitter is where everything relevant is (or is linked to). If you want to find relevant things, or if you want to be relevant, you HAVE to use twitter." And people clearly believed it. Phones changed to better serve twitter content. Social media site layouts all changed to look more like twitter, especially on phones.
But I hated it from the start. How could I post something meaningful in so few characters?
The old limit was 140 characters by the way, that was so you could post via SMS.

cunt

So like newspeak basically?

140 then
280 now

No. Newspeak is redefining everything so that words only mean what those with power want them to mean.
Twitter doesn't do that. What it and other sites do is turn everything you say into part of a game, where you compete for likes, followers, and retweets, and victory and relevance is determined by your aggregate totals of those things. There are rules of what's allowed and what isn't, and hidden tricks the referees have to rig the game (shadowbanning, deleting posts, constantly changing the rules). The stakes are always higher than just talking to those around you (if you lose at twitter, you can lose your job!), so stress mounts, but because your neighbors are devoting time to the game as well, they don't even want to talk face to face.
It's awful. That's not how people talk about things in person, and it shouldn't be the goal of conversation.

none of this is specific to twitter and you just sound upset with how social media operates in general.

You're right. But twitter stands out to me because of how it was and still is shilled by the mainstream press. Facebook and instagram posts don't seem to end up on national news nearly as often. It's also one of the more egregious examples due to it's layout, nomenclature, and character limits.

twitter gets picked up so often on the news because in principle its a rather unbiased platform. because it has no asymmetrical modes of communication (i.e: there are only tweets, not posts vs. comments) and because there is no meaningful way to recreate substructure that exists in physical society (e.g: work and school affiliation, location, age), what you get is dialogue that is relatively pure of a lot of subtext that is baked into other social networking sites by design.

it is designed to make discussion impossible. Trying to see the comments on any post is an exercise in futility
>click on comments button, it does nothing
>click on post, it redirects to itself

I'm pretty sure the character limit also plays into it, since they can consistently fit a whole tweet in big blown up letters on a TV screen or text article. The word "tweet" also takes up little screen space and is only associated with twitter.

oh and plus the fact that you cant edit tweets beyond deleting them

Speaking of layouts, why the fuck does every social media copy twitter's layout? Not only is it boring, but contrary to normiethink that it is quick, you actually waste more time getting information because of its linear arrangement.