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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

#111

Post by lhnz »

untog wrote: post #92
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…

There's also the problem of "dot-@ing", where instead of starting a tweet with "@staz", people start it with ".@staz", meaning that the tweet appears in the timeline of everyone who follows you. I rarely see this used in situations that aren't passive aggressive attempts to get followers to pile onto someone you disagree with. Totally ruins any chance of good debate.

.@untog Hey, don't you feel shame at being connected with this stigma?

(Whoops, accidentally put a dot in front of your name! So sorry.)

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#112

Post by Mc_Big_G »

My 16 yr. old daughter explained to me two days ago why Twitter conversations are broken, how to fix them and that maybe we should design products together since we can do it better than Twitter or that maybe she should send them her idea.

My response was, if you want to develop products together, let's do that. Second, Twitter probably has 50 product people who have all sat around and discussed her solution in detail and come to the conclusion that, for some reason we won't understand but that is probably better for Twitter, they shouldn't implement it. Most likely it has something to do with more views.

Then I welcomed her to the shitty reality that once a company gets the market share, they stop caring about a better experience for users and more about the bottom line OR maybe they're just stupid. After all, Twitter didn't have a single backup for something like the first year or two of existence.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#113

Post by silverbax88 »

chton wrote: post #93
vacri wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terseness is short, abrupt, irritated. Succinctness is short, clearly explained. They both mean short, but the tones of the words are quite different. '"Leave me be!", he replied succinctly' doesn't work, for example. To me, this is exactly the kind of nuance that is lost by training yourself to limit ideas to 140 characters.

Terse also means short, clearly explained. Yes, 'terse' has an extra meaning, but in a technical context, and especially when contrasted with 'verbose', it should be completely clear which meaning I meant. And for the record: I don't train myself to limit my thoughts, I train myself to use a form for expressing them appropriate to the medium I'm doing it in. Expressing something shorter and in steps is not inferior t…

Please stop elaborating on the definition of terse. It wasn't the correct term to use, please just accept that without additional exposition.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#114

Post by chton »

01Michael10 wrote: post #107
chton wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, use the best tools. But if you email or text them, there is no way for other people to join the conversation. Think of a twitter conversation as one at a party where you know people. Anybody can come join in, and can add value. It's more akin to conversing on IRC than over email.

Holy crap, now it's a multi-person conversation? I would say let's meet for drinks... How about Hangouts or what ever one uses on iPhones? Maybe this is more for the under 25 crowd who like to do things the hard way on 5" screens with no keyboards. Not me...

It can be. This conversation is a multi-person one too. That's still different than, say, hangouts because everybody is free to reply, not just people you invited. Maybe somebody neither of us know will read this next month and come up with an interesting counterpoint.

In any case, using some form of video calling is too intrusive. I can type this reply, do something else for 10 minutes, then check back. But then I was always one for text mediums rather than video or audio calls :)

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#115

Post by streblo »

Mc_Big_G wrote: post #112

My 16 yr. old daughter explained to me two days ago why Twitter conversations are broken, how to fix them and that maybe we should design products together since we can do it better than Twitter or that maybe she should send them her idea. My response was, if you want to develop products together, let's do that. Second, Twitter probably has 50 product people who have all sat around and discussed her solution in detai…

Don't just leave us hanging. What's the problem and how would she fix it?

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#117

Post by specialp »

Mc_Big_G wrote: post #112

My 16 yr. old daughter explained to me two days ago why Twitter conversations are broken, how to fix them and that maybe we should design products together since we can do it better than Twitter or that maybe she should send them her idea. My response was, if you want to develop products together, let's do that. Second, Twitter probably has 50 product people who have all sat around and discussed her solution in detai…

Not sure they are not caring or stupid. Perhaps they decided that Twitter is NOT a platform for conversations. I use Twitter as a real time platform for announcements, status updates, and just general sentiment. I do not really want to read debate there or conversations. If someone wants to discuss things there are other places to do that.

As for their engineering problems at the beginning yes it was bad but then again they grew massively very quickly and they needed to come up with novel solutions at huge scale.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#118

Post by Vendan »

chton wrote: post #79
Jedd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hrm, what you are suggesting sounds like some kind of conversation back and forth between 2 people. Like a chat system or something. Issue is, you are talking in an environment where everyone can interject, and everyone has a strongly felt opinion. Just look at any news show "interview" between 2 sides of an argument. They tend to devolve into shouting matches of who can drown out the other side without getting smacked down by the host.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#119

Post by notacoward »

seiji wrote: post #84
notacoward wrote: post #76

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 seri…

data loss due to a broken replica-repair strategy. That's the thing: Redis has no read repair strategy. Redis has a "be an exact copy of your master" strategy. It's not a secret. It's the exact design. The complaints are like yelling at Linus when you rm -rf / your entire machine. Sure, it sucks, but it's a repercussion if your own actions, not a fault in the system. If you don't want to rm -rf / your machine, go use…

When you say "be an exact copy of your master" is the strategy, you're kind of missing the problem here - who should be the master? In this case, Redis made a really dumb choice of which node should be master, and brought everything in sync by replicating emptiness instead of replicating data. There are very few use cases where that would be preferable. People have pointed out well known and fairly simple solutions to the selection problem, which are leading to the fixes and workarounds you've mentioned (though without the courtesy of acknowledging where the ideas came from).

Your analogy to "rm -rf /" is invalid, because that's well defined, well documented, and well known behavior. That's not true of Redis's autonomous and non-deterministic response to a failure (not to a user action). No spec or doc precluded choosing a different master and preserving data instead of discarding it. In the absence of such explicit guidance, preserving data should always be the default. How can it be user error when the user did nothing? Redis did the wrong thing because something was missed in its implementation, not because of any rational or deliberate choice.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#120

Post by Vendan »

chton wrote: post #93
vacri wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terseness is short, abrupt, irritated. Succinctness is short, clearly explained. They both mean short, but the tones of the words are quite different. '"Leave me be!", he replied succinctly' doesn't work, for example. To me, this is exactly the kind of nuance that is lost by training yourself to limit ideas to 140 characters.

Terse also means short, clearly explained. Yes, 'terse' has an extra meaning, but in a technical context, and especially when contrasted with 'verbose', it should be completely clear which meaning I meant. And for the record: I don't train myself to limit my thoughts, I train myself to use a form for expressing them appropriate to the medium I'm doing it in. Expressing something shorter and in steps is not inferior t…

Terse: adjective, terser, tersest. 1. neatly or effectively concise; brief and pithy, as language. 2. abruptly concise; curt; brusque.

e.g. blunt, rough.

Unfortunately for you, both connotation and denotation were working against you.

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