Part of the problem is that twitter is just awful. It’s really hard to find the relevant parts of the discussion. But it’s a fascinating research topic, so I’m quite enjoying the discussion. Thanks for laying out the links.
Agreed. Maybe the problem is that everyone uses badly organized and ambiguous Twitter threads as citation sources lately. It’s not a good platform for that, you literally don’t have the character counts to explain something
A Twitter thread is not the way to reveal research like this, it’s terrible for discussion and the character limit prevents your going into proper depth.
Thanks. I appreciate not everyone likes or is willing to use Twitter, but I’ve yet to find a more convenient or accessible channel for this content. I could start a proper blog and worry about my own prompt formatting, but that complicates my workflow a lot — especially since most of these results come directly from my phone in my spare/travel time.
Eventually I may consolidate my better findings into a blog post of some kind.
That’s partly because twitter is just about the worst possible place to have a detailed conversation on an issue, really just about any issue.
I have no idea why anyone of any level of technical sophistication or containing halfway decent communication skills makes the attempt. Choose a free blog, write something more substantive, and write a succinct Twitter post to get people aware of it. Or at least do that at the same time you post a balkanized “thread” like the author here and link to the more substantive post in the process.
It may be because I don't use Twitter, but I found that extremely difficult to follow. It's unfortunate this debate didn't land somewhere more conducive to long-form discussion.
I've found that using Twitter was more trouble than it's worth. Even when I filtered out as many keywords as I could, my feed was just filled with sad or inflammatory content. With their character limit, insightful discussion is basically DOA. I'd recommend sticking to niche forums for this kinda stuff: they might not be as large, but these communities are oftentimes much more dedicated to their field. There's no "I'm right you're wrong" because other people are there to hold them accountable.
Yes it's one of the reasons I hate Twitter. It was designed with aversion to substance. Personally, I find older fashioned forums (with small communities of experts) more illuminating.
Apropos of nothing, thanks for your work on Recoil, it’s awesome :)
I don’t think the discussion on this post here is reddit-level - for example, I found the top level comment on the role of dreams, and the link to the commenter’s paper on psyarxiv super interesting. As I said in my comment, I too find the twitter thread format a bit frustrating to read.
What I was trying to say is that the author (Foone) has previously posted about this - for them, the choice really is between “blog this way or not at all” due to the way their mind works.
Of course the fact that this topic comes up every time is indicative, but I think what it indicates is that Twitter UX is terrible, not that the author is a bad person for choosing to share in this format.
This is exactly why Twitter sucks for discussion. You couldn't possibly illuminate a viewpoint on any matter using it so you end up making broad statements that get trounced by reality. Particularly an issue with such nuances.
The Twitter character limit prohibits going in depth. That is the opposite of what I am looking for. Also, the lack of threading discourages having branches of discussion for the lesser important points.
I think there are decent critiques of the Twitter Thread medium, but complaining about the bandwidth inefficiencies is just kind of silly. 22MB of data (uncompressed, uncached)?!
The good (and bad) aspect of Twitter Threads is that, adapted appropriately to the medium, individual points can be individually addressed and pulled from their original context to start new discussion, or to emphasize the most important part of the essay. I think this is probably good for sparking additional discussions, though of course it can have the down side of removing context.
Was twitter really the right place for this?
Very informational piece, I liked it.
But having to read it in 12 sections was awkward.
Disclaimer, I already dislike twitter.
reply