"As simple as possible, but no simpler" is a great dictum.

Unfortunately, Twitter has no concept of "but no simpler." And I'm not sure there are any meaningful insights on controversial topics which can be expressed in <140 characters. Certainly there are none which can be conveyed to a hostile audience, since hedges and caveats are the first things sacrificed for concision.

Social media already rewards brevity with attention, we don't need maximum lengths. The good conversations should have happened on Facebook (but it's for people who already agree with you), Reddit (but it rewards pandering to the masses), or Tumblr (but it's designed to connect you with people who will threaten to murder you).

For some people even the 140 characters were too much, so they started retweeting hashtags instead. And the conversation gradually evolved to an exchange of screams...

#onlyMe! #notYou! #myProblemsMatter! #yoursDont! #killYourself! #killEveryone! #etc

Note that they changed it to 280. It's possible to express a slightly more nuanced view in a tweet now. You've got room for a brief hedge or caveat along with your main point.

What's amazing was that when they introduced this change, a lot of dedicated Twitter addicts hated those long tweets with a passion, as if someone had cut their favorite cocaine with chalk. Now they can barely remember what it was like.

Twitter rots the brain. With every doubling of the message length, they will reduce the harmfulness of the product, bur also remove its addictive appeal at the same time. So every business metric they have tells them not to do it.

> Unfortunately, Twitter has no concept of "but no simpler."

I would extend this to most of modern Western civilization. The world is an incredibly complex place, but it's pretty hard to find anyone on either side of the numerous partisan debates that realize it.

I would suggest this may be false equivalence. In the US, we have one party which insists on adherence to a few key ideas, and heretics will be outcast. The other is a much more diverse collection of people with a relatively more diverse set of ideas.

Unsurprisingly, the latter party is more comfortable with the idea that there aren’t simple solutions to important problems, while the former nominated a demagogue who for the most part can’t escape his soundbite politics.

Oh, you'll get no disagreement from me that the Democrats are superior to the Republicans, but they're both so far from being qualified to lead it's pathetic. It's doubly frustrating to open a newspaper and read about everyone peeing their pants about the risks from the scary Russians, who are not much more than a two bit annoyance if it wasn't for their nuclear arsenal, when the real threat to not just the US but the entire world, a behemoth 90% created by the West, barely gets a mention. At least the geniuses who planned this out could have had a backup plan in place for the scenario where they didn't magically transform into a democratic utopia. Where do these naive ideas come from in the first place?

Unfortunately, looks like I've been given a time out again, I guess to reconsider if it's appropriate to hold the opinions I do.

Brevity is the soul of getting people to read your shit.

- nuance

I

M

It might work if the limit were more extreme, like: “160 characters per day; make them count”.