Twitter to remove ‘like’ tool in a bid to improve the quality of debate

Because you have to make assumptions when you only have 140 characters to get an idea through. And yes, I know the limit has been relaxed, but that doesn't change the habit.

> Sarcasm, inside-jokes, rhetorical hyperbole, assumptions that everyone is following the same story they are, and so on. I don't know why they do it.

Done well and taken in context, it's funny?

Context-free humor is extremely hard but somehow twitter has managed to evolve that too. @dril may be the most well known example.

Using the internet for "debate" is pretty difficult outside of fairly homogenous, heavily moderated environments. It just about works on HN and even here it only works on certain subjects.

Besides, the entire premise of "debate" runs out for certain subjects: "we're taking away your rights because you didn't argue convincingly enough that you should get to live in peace" is inherently a disaster.

I've seen some interesting uses of this where eg. liking a specific Westworld tweet would have them message you about new episodes, and liking an Apple event ad will have them message you when it's about to start. I wonder whether they'll have a replacement for that sort of use case.

For a long time i thought the idea that my reply, not a quote, just a reply, to a tweet gets posted to my main timeline / follower's timelines...is also a bad idea, but I guess this also was designed for 'engagement' too

In the pre-internet era, Chomsky said the same about TV. To paraphrase, you are crippled by the length constraints imposed by the talk show/debate genre. In other words, the length of the message already imposes an agenda on the communication. Of course there the hard limit was somewhere around 5 minutes, not 5 sentences. Twitter is good for anecdotal communication. Anecdotal, as in conveying casual observations. It's not for meaningful discussion, simply because of the length constraints.

I'm not really a Twitter user, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can form a thread containing multiple posts. I don't think that changes much. Suppose you use a post to hold a paragraph of what you're writing. That means that now you have an unlimited (if the thread is unlimited length) size text, but the paragraphs are limited in length. Somehow that sounds even more wrong. What's more, since you're sending paragraphs off in a fire-and-forget sort of way (you can't edit them later, right?), you're essentially entering a sort of flow, no-looking-back type of writting, which is conducive for anecdotal, quick-think, social communications, but, again, not conducive to intellectual discussion.

For example, I'll reformat above text to fit into 280 character buckets, which actually won't even be a good aproximation of what I would have written on Twitter, since I refelected on the text, restructuring it and editing it through out. Here it goes:

> In the pre-internet era, Chomsky said the same about TV. To paraphrase, you are crippled by the length constraints imposed by the talk show/debate genre. In other words, the length of the message already imposes an agenda on the communication.

> Of course there the hard limit was somewhere around 5 minutes, not 5 sentences. Twitter is good for anecdotal communication. Anecdotal, as in conveying casual observations. It's not for meaningful discussion, simply because of the length constraints.

> I'm not really a Twitter user, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can form a thread containing multiple posts. I don't think that changes much. Suppose you use a post to hold a paragraph of what you're writing.

> That means that now you have an unlimited (if the thread is unlimited length) size text, but the paragraphs are limited in length. Somehow that sounds even more wrong.

> What's more, since you're sending paragraphs off in a fire-and-forget sort of way (you can't edit them later, right?), you're essentially entering a sort of flow, no-looking-back type of writting...

> ... which is conducive for anecdotal, quick-think, social communications, but, again, not conducive to intellectual discussion.

By reading that, you can tell that the rhythm of the text doesn't match the rhythm of the divisions. The text is too wordy for the constraints, sentences too long. Last sentence had to be cut into two paragraphs. It's almost giving you indigestion, a feeling like you're taking too large bites too fast.