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Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

antirez.com

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Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#71

Post by ams6110 »

bhaak wrote: post #29
staz wrote: post #21

I don't think this is due to the limit of 140 characters (even if it doesn't help) but much more due to the audience of fanboys and crow cheered during a fight. There is the same problem on Google+ where there is not 140 characters limit. Any discussions with Linus or any other "celebrity" in it and the comments thread will be full of : "+1", "M. Linus you are so smart, you are my hero", "Well said, ripe him a new on…

I agree that this is not a problem that only affects Twitter. Most of the current discussion platforms are way behind what was standard in Usenet or in your average Usenet client. No threaded discussions, no filtering (not for the one who comments and doesn't want to read those +1 post and most often also not for the OP), not even blocking of people you don't want to read.

Oh I don't know, I remember plenty of people on usenet who would quote a fragment--deliberately eliminating relevant context--to create a straw man that they could tear into. Some people just like to argue, and the only way to deal with them in an unmoderated forum is to ignore them. Kill files were useful for persistent offenders.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#72

Post by eevilspock »

chton wrote: post #60
coldpie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, I know. I keep hearing about conversations and such on twitter, while I have a hard time fitting a single thought into a tweet, much less a thoughtful response to someone's query. Look! Even that sentence was longer than a tweet! I don't know how people do it.

Terseness is a learned skill. Verbosity is too. They're not mutually exclusive, you can apply them where they work. And they're both useful. (That's exactly 140 characters for you :) )

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

— Blaise Pascal (sometimes wrongly attributed to Mark Twain)

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#73

Post by Jedd »

chton wrote: post #68
Jedd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In general, twitter conversations are quick back-and-forth affairs. If you need more than 2 tweets to express your thought, you're either using the wrong medium or thinking too far. Hmmm. I'm not sure how to respond to the suggestion that people who can't fully express their thoughts in around 300 characters are thinking too far ... or the subtly implied pejorative of 'too-far-thinking'. Aside: I note you used 1386…

No pejorative was meant at all. My point about 'thinking too far' was about the singular thought you're trying to express. It's easy to want to say too much, 'walking the chain too far' if you will. Twitter is a far more iterative medium than most, and expressing a complicated thought isn't a case of writing it out in whole. Usually, you will develop the thought together with the other party. Conversations are closer…

Thank you for your thoughtful response.

The idea of iteration through (a) thought I think has been explained to me before, but I must have suppressed it. I can see why it's necessary within the context and medium of twitter ... however I'm unconvinced (duh :) that it's a useful constraint to apply to a communication medium. I don't expect I'm unique in voicing this opinion.

The idea of developing a thought with another party, or as you also describe it, 'collective thinking', is genuinely anathema to me. I'm happy to have a discussion that involves me adjusting my thinking, and, of course, a discussion that results in the other party(/ies) adjusting their thinking. Actually, I expect that essence of conciliation and compromise is what you're describing. However, the idea of avoiding 'long term debate' really does unnerve me.

Perhaps I've been debating for too many years with people that I really wouldn't want to share a collective thought with.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#76

Post by notacoward »

Maybe if antirez doesn't want to read others simplistic responses on Twitter, he shouldn't make simplistic statements on Twitter. It's clearly a medium that doesn't convey nuance very well. There was a great deal of misinterpretation and talking past one another on all sides including his.

This was actually a continuation of a conversation that has been going on for several days, starting with an issue even more serious than 99th percentile latency - data loss due to a broken replica-repair strategy. Some very clueful people have pointed antirez at useful literature on the topic, and made specific suggestions to avoid the problem, only to be met with silence or excuses for why throwing away data was actually OK. Is it any wonder that they're frustrated with him, and ready to interpret an ambiguous statement like "the 99% percentile is bad" in a more negative way than he intended? For him to cherry-pick one exchange and present only one side only continues his own pattern of making constructive conversation almost impossible.

It's not a Twitter problem. It's a people problem.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#77

Post by zaphar »

Beltiras wrote: post #66
jimktrains2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everything you do is CRUD, sure. Often there are non-CRUD, more advanced queries that need to be run. These, and other issues, are normally what gets you. For instance, pgsql will error if you attempt to write 5 chars to a 2 chat field, mysql will silently truncate.

Which is why I never use MySQL ;) I'm trying for the life of me to think of queries I could make that are non-CRUD. Maybe I am just stuck in my current tools to think flexibly about it.

I presided of over a Migration from DB2 to Oracle. All of the operations were CRUD.

However the DB2 database had materialized views that were crucial to the business.

Porting those over was non-trivial. Oracle returned a different value for null fields than DB2 (empty strings for null strings vs actual null in one case) did so various portions of the code would fail seemingly randomly.

Some of the constraints didn't map quite as cleanly as the others.

And we haven't even started on the performance tuning and how your schema affects them.

Sure you may be able to port all or most of your schema and queries over to another database but you'll have a lot of work to do after that verifying that nothing is broken and your performance is still acceptable.

SQL is not even close to a guarantee of portability.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#78

Post by jlouis »

May I recommend using percentiles over the average? Reporting the 50th, 75th, 90th, 95th and 99th percentile is much better at describing the situation. Even better is to report a histogram or a kernel density plot of the the observed values.

Averages tend to be a notoriously bad indicator on their own because they don't describe anything about the distribution. This is obviously not a normal distribution, and even if it was, you need to report some kind of variance measurement as well. Otherwise it is hard to say anything about the shape of the distribution, let alone make tests for statistical significance.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#79

Post by chton »

Jedd wrote: post #73
chton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No pejorative was meant at all. My point about 'thinking too far' was about the singular thought you're trying to express. It's easy to want to say too much, 'walking the chain too far' if you will. Twitter is a far more iterative medium than most, and expressing a complicated thought isn't a case of writing it out in whole. Usually, you will develop the thought together with the other party. Conversations are closer…

Thank you for your thoughtful response. The idea of iteration through (a) thought I think has been explained to me before, but I must have suppressed it. I can see why it's necessary within the context and medium of twitter ... however I'm unconvinced (duh :) that it's a useful constraint to apply to a communication medium. I don't expect I'm unique in voicing this opinion. The idea of developing a thought with anoth…

I would agree that iteration through thought is not necessarily a useful constraint on a medium by itself. In the case of twitter, however, it is merely a product of the 140-character limit for each message. If, during a stand-up debate, your opponent was allowed to interject after every sentence, you would get much the same. That sounds incredibly annoying and counter-productive at first, but the form of the debate would adapt over time.

The advantage of developing a thought in tandem with somebody is that the compromise happens more naturally. You rarely need to 'concede' a point or prove somebody wrong, since you can influence the way the point is made in the first place, pointing out flaws in their reasoning or facts as they happen. Conversely, the other can do that for your reasoning. The result is that, rather than adjust your thinking in a few big steps, you adjust it in minor ways with every sentence. It takes time and practice to get used to this, but it can be very productive and enlightening.

On the other hand, I would never avoid long-form debate either. Both have advantages and disadvantages, just as both have mediums where they work and mediums where they don't. Twitter isn't conducive to classical debate, just as hackernews isn't conducive to the iterative thought development style.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#80

Post by kyro »

Twitter is terrible for meaningful conversation and debate. And I say that as an avid user.

Networking, sharing links, tidbits of insight, short messages, and Q&As all work really well. I've learned quite a bit from the curated articles and reports tweeted by those I follow. And if you follow the right people and engage appropriately, Twitter can open up a lot of opportunities. But anything beyond that is a waste of time, and can border damaging.

In fact, for all the good Twitter has facilitated (protests, revolutions, etc), I think it's having some negative impact. It is by far the most popular platform where individuals of all backgrounds, beliefs, and opinions congregate and interact, but it's built in a way where it is absolutely not conducive to meaningful debate, and so when the huge opinionated masses clash, the bite-sized arguments volleyed by either side are taken without context and nuance, further igniting and polarizing people. I'm seeing this happen with issues like feminism and Islam, where someone will tweet a very distilled version of a larger and more thorough opinion, it will be taken at face-value, someone will retweet it with a snarky comment, it snowballs into a food fight with enraged people retweeting/replying, and the original tweeter trying to add context but not being able to keep up with the reactionary domino effect. And because Twitter has almost become the official sounding board for many people, their tweets and reactions to those tweets contribute to their public image, reputation, and online presence, all damaged by death threats, accusations of sexism, bigotry, racism, etc, often thrown around unwarranted by people taking things out of context and who feel antagonized or polarized because of the way Twitter is structured.

And that's why I avoid tweeting about religion, politics, and databases.

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