Item — HN Reader

A bit off topic but I didn't know that on X people can post this long form texts with images in between (it seems that lacks headings). Is nice! A blogging experience added to a popular platform. I guess is a paid feature, fair to me. Also I don't have an account and I'm able to read it.

Some years ago I appreciated the character limit of Twitter because people have to be creative and to the point to express themselves, but with the years I start to thinking that this limitation was also a curse for communication overall on the platform.

2 comments

I absolutely hate this post. It's reasonably well structured because the author really cared & clearly spent time structuring it. But having a bunch of smaller posts comprising a thread would be much better blocking for me.

I don't log in, so I can't read the comments, but it also is sorely missed that I can't see people reply to specific ideas or comments. It's all just a soupy unstructured mess.

We already had blogs. Why we'd take a medium built for interaction & turn it into a place for long winded things that should be articles or blogs doesn't make sense to me.

> the years I start to thinking that this limitation was also a curse for communication overall on the platform

I would say the popularity of Twitter and its 140 character limit were a curse for communication fullstop. Globally, and irreversibly.

Facebook gets a lot of flak for being an echo chamber with targetted ads and disinformation, but Twitter never got the same level of critique in damaging online discourse.

Twitter specifically required people for a long time not to have long well-thought out ideas - but require hot takes and nothing else. Every political, social or economic position that was discussed had to be distilled to 140 characters - this effectively scrubbed nuance from any position. Along with retweets, this meant that all news, and all online discourse was reduced to "the hottest takes" without any level of complex thought.

Twitter is probably relatively most popular in Japan, and 140 characters is not a problem in Japanese, so this wouldn't be a global issue.

I think they doubled it to 280 forever ago anyway.