I already complained about Twitter, but it's time to do it again.
People used to complain that Powerpoint teaches people to think in bullet points. Twitter is similar or worse. There's no room for references, context, or nuance. It's almost tailor-made to tempt people into quoting you out of context.
I craft precise (and concise!) messages and then butcher them into illegible ambiguity to fit into the character limit. It reminds me of my dismay when IBM's lawyers turned my beautiful technical papers into monstrous pustules of legal verbiage.
I complained about fragmentation last year, but the "1/N" thread trend is now completely out of control.
Don't get me started about the ridiculous "I'll just post a JPEG of the text I couldn't fit into the tweet". Every single one of them announces a failure of the system.
Twitter's issues wouldn't be so bad if so many of them weren't intentional design choices.
I try to not get involved in conversations on Twitter, but it's amazingly difficult when people I care about talk about subjects where I feel I can contribute.
Twitter doesn't have the clout of Facebook or Google; perhaps that's why it escapes the opprobium heaped on other big Internet companies. I think it's a cancer on the body politic.
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