Slashdot Mirror
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: the 140-Character Limit 'Is Staying'
An anonymous reader writes: The rumor that Twitter will scrap its 140-character limit for tweets just won't die. In an interview with NBC this morning, CEO Jack Dorsey has gone on record to say that the limit is staying.
I've mixed feelings over social media in general, but Twitter in the specific makes my blood boil.
It's a medium that seems designed to kill off nuance, civility and sophistication of thought. By forcing people into 140 characters and providing social incentives for them to use those 140 characters to say something that will be shared as widely as possible, it encourages them to make the crassest, most polarizing statements possible. I'd put Twitter as the number one reason that so many online debates these days devolve into bitter mud-slinging between the loudest fringes of two opposing echo-chambers.
The rapid-response culture of twitter just makes things worse. Combined with the anonymity of online interactions, it compels people to speak before they've had a chance to do a sense-check and think through the consequences. There's no shortage of examples of responsible individuals in major corporations who have thrown away careers because they got sucked into the vortex that Twitter creates. One example, former Microsoft director Adam Orth and the "deal with it" furore over the planned always-online functionality for the Xbox One. Now, you could argue that in this case, Twitter did us a service by providing him with a platform to air his (or the company's) "true feeling". I'm not necessarily sure that's the right response, though. I strongly suspect pretty much everybody has "true feelings" which are pretty appalling at times (I know I do) and a huge part of social interaction is toning those things down before they can fly from your mouth (or indeed, stopping them altogether). Twitter, by design, takes the brakes off.
Some people can be incredibly witty and lucid within a single sentence. You see those in the occasional +5 Funny or +5 Insightful post on slashdot. Those people are a minority (and most of them struggle to manage it consistently). Most one-line posts are badly written crap (and usually from ACs). Twitter just institutionalizes that, except with less anonymity.