> Left unsaid, of course, is that ‘the conversation’ at scale is complete garbage
Twitter is simply not a conversation platform. The medium is optimized for publishing small blurbs to as many people as possible. It's not designed for serious back-and-forth discussion. It rewards quips and got-ems, not nuanced debate. It's almost like a giant comments section with no subject.
Twitter is a platform for amplifying messages to be sure.
We can see this fairly plainly when considering that both the @ symbol and hashtag were created by the community as hacks for features that didn't exist natively.
I once met one of the original employees of Twitter (back when it was Odeo) at a conference and he explained some of the early uses of the platform when it was built around SMS.
There were instances of protestors who would message "police spotted 23rd street" and presumably other users would receive that message on their timelines.
To be clear, I'm not saying Twitter was designed for protests but it seems a lot of the things that make it look more "conversational" were definitely after thoughts and so it's no wonder that it's so broken as a medium.
Even more plainly, getting anything across with nuance in 280 characters (it was 140!) is swimming against the stream no matter how many pseudo-features like threading are added.
I've always thought of Twitter as an indigestible enormous chatroom, that users interact with via the aid of different kinds of filters. The format and platform do sometimes exasperate negative tendencies but I think the primary design flaw is within human nature not Twitter.
In my understanding its a free worldwide immediate news distribution service. Was never planned for a reasonable discourse? I am a bit disappointed that BitClout started with that paradigm.
Twitter is good to make short announcements that everyone interested can receive.
But the majority of exchange is someone publishing something interesting, a couple of people add something constructive and the enormous tail after that is people trying for brownie points by trying to prove they know more, trying to bring some forced social relevance/intersectionality and a bunch piling on like a yo mama joke that's run its course but the kids who can't do jokes make ham-fisted attempts and pile on more disconnected nonsense.
Twitter is simply not a conversation platform. The medium is optimized for publishing small blurbs to as many people as possible. It's not designed for serious back-and-forth discussion. It rewards quips and got-ems, not nuanced debate. It's almost like a giant comments section with no subject.