sysice:

nostalgebraist:

Every time I look at twitter it just seems like this horrible alternate universe where all adults have been replaced with self-righteous 12-year-olds constantly yelling strident mini-speeches at one another which look like they are made up of words used in the real world but fail to quite make sense internally or to collectively add up to anything recognizable as a conversation

Funnily enough, I’ve heard this exact line of thought leveled towards tumblr, and a very similar one towards reddit and 4chan.

I was going to include a bit in the post about that, actually – it seems like every widely used social network has a “bad reputation,” often even among its own users, but even though I’ve (passively, infrequently) used twitter for several years now, there is something uniquely bad about it to me

The behavior feels the most unfamiliar, I guess?  Tumblr (typing styles, shitposting, etc.) felt very unfamiliar to me at first but after I followed some people I got used to it.  Reddit seems to involve conversations that are pretty “normal” stylistically, where the badness if present is just in what is being said.  4chan repels me but I can kinda understand the mindset that shapes the usual posting styles there.

But twitter has its 140 character limit, which is way more restrictive than anything on any of these other sites.  And people try to talk about serious things, not just shitpost, despite the fact that (IMO) this is usually impossible given the character limit.  And so people talk about serious things but have to either make their statements extremely broad and lacking in nuance, or sufficiently vague that there’s room for all sorts of nuances.  And both cases, there is no opportunity to provide context.

So people either become caricatures or obscurantists.  They repeat talking points, or they spout aphorisms.  And you might think this would make people less invested in twitter arguments, because they’re clearly such a “low-quality bootleg” version of actually arguing with someone, but instead people get more invested, I think because they never actually have room to get off their chest what they’re really thinking, and so they just keep going.

So the result is these people saying (literally) very little, and in a very strident and pompous-sounding way because (1) twitter doesn’t give them room to actually resolve their frustration and (2) twitter doesn’t give them (much) room to describe the limits of their understanding or include nuance

(via badeliz)