Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 161 posts

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#151

Post by GhotiFish »

Jedd wrote: post #63
chton wrote: post #6

There are conversations that work on twitter, and ones that don't. 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. If that conversation model doesn't fit you, that's perfectly fine, but that's not the fault of twitter. It's just a bad match-up. In that case, it's perfectly fine to resp…

> 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…

Bureaucracy isn't the only thing that expands to fill available space.

~125 characters, including this and "125 characters"

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#152

Post by bhaak »

comboy wrote: post #54
bhaak wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hell yes. I don't know how we got there. Mailing lists can be ok with proper client but it's a step back. I found some subreddits useful (with RES) but even then it's hard to track new replies in threads that you are interested in. HN has quality discussions but these are just about some links and it's hard to get back to some thread to see new replies (and preferably prioritize those from people who I value). I too…

Every reddit thread has a separate RSS feed so you can drop it into your favorite RSS reader. I'm using a IRC bot with an RSS plugin to not spam my normal RSS feed aggregator.

But this doesn't solve the issue of being notified of replies to subthreads. Reddit threads up to 100 messages tops are manageable that way but anything larger isn't.

Compare that to usenet threads were you could easily handle thousands of messages in one threads, this is really a shame.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#153

Post by bhaak »

ams6110 wrote: post #71
bhaak wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course this did also happen on usenet. Call me old but a good flamewar beats a good shitstorm any time (and the names might even be an indicator why).

But one design element of twitter might make it easier to stumble into the realm of people who will wildly disagree with a poster's opinion.

Just replying to some tweet you can not know what kind of domain you are entering. With usenet groups the name has always been a strong indicator what people you will encounter.

If you post "Ruby sucks and is dead slow, Perl rulez!!1eleven" into comp.lang.ruby, you shouldn't be surprised if you get flamed. With twitter accounts, this is not that obvious.

Of course, this is a core design element of twitter that it is concerned with accounts and not thematical groups and both have their advantages and disadvantages but I think this is one of the reason that you can much more easily and unintentionally anger the wrong people on twitter.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#154

Post by seppo0010 »

votingprawn wrote: post #141
shangxiao wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really unfortunate though there there are people who can't resist the urge to shame others and enlighten the world with their sharp & intelligent wit, such as the person who wrote: "You have clearly not understood how the math works or why tail latencies matter in dist sys. I think we're done here." Was the bluntness really necessary?

> It's really unfortunate though there there are people who can't resist the urge to shame others and enlighten the world with their sharp & intelligent wit Amusingly this has now happened in another thread in these comments. The meaning of a post has been overshadowed by a conversation on how the author used word A when they really should have used word B, and then they were berated for trying to explain why they th…

I had to go look up that quote.

https://twitter.com/jmhodges/status/527189222546227201

He's saying he's quoted out of context now: https://twitter.com/jmhodges/status/527480854314905600

Reading the full conversation I don't know how that's the case.

Anyway, it doesn't change the point antirez is making on his post.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#155

Post by tsantero »

felixgallo wrote: post #137

The distributed systems community as represented on twitter is pretty shameful; discussions of any non-CA database tend to devolve into intentional misreading and jokey sarcastic pile-on bullying, with Basho folk leading the charge. Personally I get that they've lived through some pretty gruesome use cases and wars, but jesus, glass houses and stones, guys.

hi, ex-basho here. disappointed by antirez's continued, harmful anti-intellectualism. just curious, what exactly is a non-CA database? kthxbai

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#156

Post by Jedd »

davvolun wrote: post #143
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…

Wow, you really, really nitpicked OPs argument and completely ignored things to make your point. The comment was "you're either using the wrong medium or thinking too far". Assuming the false dichotomy here (notably, of a quick comment on HN...), maybe, just maybe , it's not that people who can't fully express their thoughts in around 300 characters are thinking too far, maybe it's the other part -- that they're usin…

Where does one draw the line between cherry-picking from, and identifying the quintessential component of, a message? Rhetorical question. :)

If X or Y --> means that both are possible, right? If you then suggest that it's always and only X, then the or construct is misleading. I was picking up on the fact that there will be some Y, and that worried me.

But, to be absolutely clear, you are completely correct in saying that in some cases X (or inappropriate medium selection) is going to apply. (I wonder whether people who need more than 2 tweets to express their thoughts are capable of self-identifying which category they fit into. If not them, then who?)

Going beyond that I'd suggest that twitter is an appropriate communication medium far less frequently than people evidently believe it is.

I don't believe shortening things to fit into tweets is a healthy aspiration. I ran a character count solely to demonstrate how many tweets would have been required to get that entire message across, and most of chton's message was a guide on how to communicate in a medium that enforces brevity. An undeniably useful guide if you happen to be embracing that medium, mind.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#157

Post by vacri »

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…

But herein lies part of the problem - at first you said that the two meant the same thing in common parlance, then you said the same thing in technical parlance; there's confusion in the audience right there. Anyway, while it was clear what you meant, what you said was not quite correct, which is why I piped up.

Particularly in technical writing, you've got to get your words nailed down correctly. This is why there are things like the RFC defining what 'shall', 'should', and 'may' mean (intended for other RFCs, but it's also used elsewhere)[1], or the development of Simplified Technical English[2]. The latter was developed in aerospace engineering, where minor misunderstandings can literally cost lives.

Subtle differences between words are important, and they allow us to communicate more complex ideas. Twitter may have it's place, but any conversation involving nuance really isn't suited for it. A high-quality conversation includes caveats and careful framing, which can't really be fit into 140 characters. At least, in my opinion.

[1]https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#158

Post by felixgallo »

tsantero wrote: post #155
felixgallo wrote: post #137

The distributed systems community as represented on twitter is pretty shameful; discussions of any non-CA database tend to devolve into intentional misreading and jokey sarcastic pile-on bullying, with Basho folk leading the charge. Personally I get that they've lived through some pretty gruesome use cases and wars, but jesus, glass houses and stones, guys.

hi, ex-basho here. disappointed by antirez's continued, harmful anti-intellectualism. just curious, what exactly is a non-CA database? kthxbai

a non-CA database is what you get when you don't have enough coffee. I meant, of course, non-AP.

As far as the rest of your message: the flagrant, embellished insult; the passive-aggressiveness: you're the problem. The problem is coming from inside you.

It's bizarre, because all of you guys seem very sensible at conferences, I've enjoyed examining riak, I'm a big fan of scribbs and big nosk, but there's this virulent strain of selective-quote circlejerking and self-congratulatory in-joke bullying that goes on with you, specifically and only on twitter, that is frankly cringeworthy.

Salvatore can defend himself, but let's be real: he's not harmfully anti-intellectual. He's the incredibly talented author of a novel, rock solid, single-node database/cache/data structure server with very attractive performance characteristics. On distributed systems, he is frequently "wrong", in that he puts out systems with familiar-looking names (like 'cluster') that are CAP-broken. He's tried to make a call that being CAP-broken in certain ways is operationally pragmatically okay given the risks, while still maintaining Redis's high performance.

Would I ever use Sentinel or Redis Cluster? No, because I don't like the idea of that tradeoff and I prefer a system I can reason about in an easier way. But as Riak 1.0 to 1.4 showed, trying to go the AP route can be a hyper confusing hard-to-reason-about clusterfuck that loses data all its own. So like I said, glass houses.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#159

Post by catwell »

nemothekid wrote: post #138
raverbashing wrote: post #25

What is it with Postgres fans that "have to" prove they're better? I don't want to use Postgres. I want to use Redis. Postgres IS NOT the solution for a lot of things. Yeah, feel free to call me stupid for not knowing every nook and cranny of PGSQL. I don't care "I love to argue, but this is just a futile exercise." Very wise words

I've actually been following the "Twitter drama" around antirez, redis and everyone else - and it has little to do with "Postgres being better" and every complaining with Distrubuted Redis (Redis Sentinel/Cluster?) being terrible. AFAIK, the arguing with Antirez with Redis has been going on for weeks now (and it hasn't been necessarily been unfounded). The exact issue the Stripe guys had, had to do with a replicated…

There is nothing specific to replication in the Stripe issue. They noticed a well-known problem which is that, with large datasets and some categories of hardware, forking to snapshot to RDB takes a long time (can be a few seconds) and blocks the Redis process. This also happens on single-instance Redis.

EDIT: actually I am talking about the second problem mentioned in their post here: https://stripe.com/blog/game-day-exercises-at-stripe (latency spikes). The first problem (data loss) is related to replication.

Re: Why I can't have conversations using Twitter

#160

Post by Rapzid »

davidw wrote: post #26
raverbashing wrote: post #25

What is it with Postgres fans that "have to" prove they're better? I don't want to use Postgres. I want to use Redis. Postgres IS NOT the solution for a lot of things. Yeah, feel free to call me stupid for not knowing every nook and cranny of PGSQL. I don't care "I love to argue, but this is just a futile exercise." Very wise words

I can't speak to Redis, because I don't use it, and mostly see it as being fairly distinct from Postgres, but with Mysql it's always frustrating to know that you could be using a tool that's generally better, but can't, because initially someone chose Mysql because they "heard it was fast" or "that's what the hosting company provided", and now they're stuck with it.

It always annoys me to hear people talking about how slow MySQL is and have to deal with them going about modelling things poorly and sweating a few million row when they don't know how to design indexes properly and don't understand predicate order.. Or correlated sub-queries.

That said, PostgreSQL is pretty fantastic software too.

Post reply on HN