Giving you more characters

The people I follow are some genuinely interesting people. And god writers. I subscribe to their blogs' RSS feeds. But engaging in that conversation with them is almost impossible if you don't already know them in person.

I'm not terrible at saying things either. I think I have total fewer than 50 tweets and around 300 followers. 6 new followers per tweet seems like a pretty good rate of gaining attention. But I don't know anything about these people or how to engage with them. So I don't.

Frankly, I do assign part of the blame for the rise of the internet outrage machine to twitter conditioning people's behavior, no matter how unintentional.

The formulae is simple: find something you think is distasteful. Tweet about how it's evil or racist or sexist or communist or whatever bad thing you want to make sure people don't think you are. Sit back and watch all of the other people who don't want people to think they are that thing pick up their pitchforks and go to town against your target in the manner of something I can only describe as as mindless as a holy war. Now sit back, relax, and feel good: mission accomplished.

The same things happen on Facebook and Reddit. But it's more obviously absurd on twitter. Social issues are too complex to be dealt with effectively in 140 or even 280 letters. The best you can do is point a finger at someone or some thing and throw a label at it.

It really is garbage that's lowered the standards of discourse.

Again, I don't think tha was ever twitter's intent. But that's the effect it's had.

I understand the argument that various platforms we use are simply a reflection of society as it really exists and has always existed. And I disagree with it.

Every social interaction has a reward potential. Obtaining those rewards is what generally drives behavior. The modes of interaction that we have in person generally reward positive social interactions.

Both my parents are conservative, religious people working in a university environment. As I was growing up, they would have liberal and non-religious colleagues over for dinner because that was how university professors hung out after work 30 years ago.

Disagreements were polite, thoughtful, and lengthy. This was a positive interaction for both sides of the debate. You get to sit down with someone who strongly disagrees with your foundational principles, eat dinner, and walk away respecting the other people even though you disagree.

I'm not pining for the good old days or saying that technology is bad because human interaction promotes social behavior.

But the behavioral reward is there: don't act like a dick, and you're colleagues will respect you.

With twitter, on the other hand, the only behavioral reward available is attention--measured by likes and followers. And the easiest way to get that attention high is not through genuine, respectful, human interaction. The fastest way to being a twitter super star is anti social behavior: acting like a dick.

Humans will always take the path of least resistance to the greatest reward. Whether that's using sloppy logic and false equivocations to label some thing you don't like as evil or if it's embracing the evil label, magnifying it, and claiming it as a right, either way, it represents the lowest form of discourse. And twitter is the emperor of low discourse. Facebook and Reddit are just wannabes.

That's a lot of criticism for one of the world's largest communication platforms. You might ask if I have a solution to any of that.

I don't. I'm not sure it needs a solution. Maybe twitter should just embrace what it is and accept that.

Shit. I think that was more than 280 characters. Oh well. No one on twitter would read it anyway.

This blog post and Jack's subsequent praise of all the hard work that went into this groundbreaking product decision is exactly why they haven't succeeded yet as a company.

People who speak other languages are cheated out of that joy. The best solution is to shorten tweets in those languages!