> Why use Twitter for such things, given its limitations? Why not use a blog, personal site, or forum where instead of just posting a link you can also write your thoughts about it, etc.?
I actually do. I run a forum that I treat like a blog and link to my posts (and other members' posts) of interest.
No, it was designed to replace SMS. Hence the character limit.
And blogger is easy enough to use. Heck, my computer illiterate grandma was using it before she passed.
The problem is that blogging takes time and effort, and the vast majority of people have no interest in it. The only thing they want to do is share their fleeting thoughts and/or tidbits they have found elsewhere. Which they can do easily on their smartphones. Blogging though, not so much.
> I agree that Twitter is a poor medium for writing. But Twitter gives you an audience (and retweets).
Does it though? I have a blog and occasionally tweet. My blog gets about 30 hits on an average day, mainly through search engines.
If I tweet, I get maybe 20 impressions. And those impressions are all that I get, nobody goes back and reads 6 month old tweets and there is no way to search for them.
> When there is a local event or situation, Twitter is pretty valuable
That seems like a perfectly fine use of Twitter. Not sure why you'd need an alternative?
You don't have to maintain a list of people to follow and watch your feed to get utility out of it.
I mostly interact with Twitter on a case-by-case basis. Either via events, looking at a specific users profile, or coming across tweets via the media or on Reddit.
> To me the magic of Twitter resides in the ability to connect with people with whom I have a professional relationship or interest, but not necessarily a personal one.
You can do that with Fb pages, Medium, blogs, etc, etc.
> The 140 character limit is an archaic relic that I believe is harmful to Twitter.
You are wrong. Twitter was barely used with SMS.
The limit (now) is a product choice, not a technological one.
> a large amount of public discourse and sometimes even official company or government announcements are only available through Twitter.
What exactly are you afraid of missing out on?
I've never had a Twitter account and that has never been a problem for me. The overwhelming majority of my exposure to the site comes from screencaps, embedded tweets in blogs and articles, and the occasional link on HN.
> I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a set of follows which will engage them. Seems like twitter can't either.
The problem is that many people think of twitter as a tool to talk to someone. In reality it is a tool to subscribe to people. Micro-blogging is a stupid word, but it is true. You get use out of twitter by treating it like an RSS client:
Find feeds with content that interests you (personal things of friends, musicians, artists, game devs, people talking about political issues that interest you, activist groups, etc.) and subscribe to them.
That covers the use case of the average person. If you feel ambitious you can also become a content producer, but that is of course a real investment.
The biggest appeal of twitter for me is being able to get insights into the technologies of my interest from the very people that develop and maintain them. Many of those developers, however, do not have the time or willingness to run a blog. And twitter, due to its short and straightforward format, is where they can easily engage in discussions and express opinions, from which I, the lurker, can extract applicable knowledge. The down side is that the same twitter format encourages the quantity-over-quality attitude, which results in me, the lurker, having to dig through layers of idle talk, announcements, and retweets.
> the shorter the format the worse it gets
I tried looking into longer-format platforms, namely medium, but much of the content there is either surface-level or does not instill confidence in its credibility.
Anyway, thanks for the great reply, it has certainly helped me build a clearer picture of what to expect, should I decide to join twitter. I guess, I should just stick to HN without needlessly dispersing my focus.
> I don't understand what's do difficult to understand about Twitter. It's a communication tool.
This isn't the problem with Twitter. I think everybody gets that it's a communication tool. It's just that it's an awful tool for communication. It's designed with a number of ridiculous and artificial constraints to conform to an aging and rapidly dying technology (phone texting).
Almost the entire ecosystem of communication you see on Twitter is designed to overcome the limitations of the medium, from Twitter specific acronyms (RT, OH, b/c, etc.) to url shorteners (http://bit.ly/, http://tinyurl.com/, etc.) to multiple tweets to cover a single topic, and on and on and on. Most of the time, things like urls are simply designed to be pointers to actual content anyways, because you can't fit the content into a Tweet. In effect Twitter becomes an RSS/link aggregator.
Sure it's different than other communication mediums, but it's not really solving a problem that anybody in particular had, and ends up creating a whole new slew of problems because of the poor decision to tie the entire architecture essentially artificial limitations.
> Twitter could've been so much better if people could post into different channels instead of dumping everything into one feed.
Twitter has posting tools for that which could be better, but they exist, are simple, and are widely used) with hashtags and mentions.
What it doesn't do is surface a UI that makes it convenient to set up a list of such channels to view and to set one as your default channel instead of the basic feed.
That is, as I understand, a common tool of third-party clients, though.
For marketers, politicians and others that use Twitter as a megaphone for their personal brand.
Everybody else just wants to see funny memes, cat pictures and occasionally have the small topic conversations that make Twitter occasionally worth it.
Anecdotally, I've found several useful tidbits on twitter that are less than newsworthy (maybe because they are not interesting to a large subset of people) but that never popped up other places- I'm probably not using it correctly though.
Sure, but that's a separate thing. Lots of people don't use Twitter at all. Then, there is a smaller but huge group that uses it purely to read. Then, there is a smaller but large group that writes. Then, there is a tiny group that writes a lot.
> I don't want longer tweets. That's what URL's are for.
This right here.
Medium, PostHaven, Wordpress, blog services, etc. All of those products exist for an extended thought. I always believed that where Twitter excels is in micro-sharing/blogging.
I am not willing to read, let alone comment on a 500+ word Facebook status post. But I'm certainly willing to enjoy/participate in a discourse over a 160 character thought.
If I am in the 500+ word reading mood, I goto Medium or PostHaven or the equivalent blog-platform. Where there's a forum, there's an audience. And Twitter's quick digestible tweets cultivates an insane amount of diverse discourse.
Sure, there's harassment. Sure there's spam. But there's a lot of gems on Twitter.
It has limitations, but it also has a lot of reach. A blog might not reach the people you are trying to share things with.
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