If only there was a way to communicate more than a couple sentences at the time over the internet. Someone should make that!

For sure, https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1189634360472829952.html !

You can't really criticise twitter for this - last year they were all ready to launch a way to embed text posts in a tweet like images can currently be embedded in a tweet, until the userbase revolted and they had to cancel the plan.

Really? The twitter userbase actually prefers it this way? That's baffling to me. Did the revolting userbase provide any reasons or explanations for this preference?

The average Twitter user isn't interested in more than a tweets worth of information.

The pain of embedding a long text post in multiple tweets rewards authors for succinctness, something most places on the internet sorely lack.

I'm not a Twitter user myself, but the character limit is what made Twitter unique. It might be fun to laugh at people who only want to read 140 characters, but we shouldn't assume they aren't going elsewhere to post and read essays. A lot of people use Twitter and reddit/Facebook/HN/ect.

> revolting userbase

There's no need to insult every single Twitter user like that :-)

it was also baffling to me. I interpreted it as just the typical reactionary "we hate change" attitude that any online community has.

Realistically, people don't read longer-than-tweet-sized things. Best of both worlds is probably to tweet the gist then link to a longer explanation.

I find "tweet storms" insufferable

you can thank pmarca for that one

It's just a difference in CSS.

Are you crazy. I'm surprised this app hasn't taken the internet by storm.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=morse.vedppa.a...

This is a great decision, and that's a well reasoned thread. Hopefully this puts pressure on other big players like Facebook.

Thanks! Just gonna put it all inline here:

Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO

1:05 PM · Oct 30, 2019

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1189634360472829952.html

--------------------------------------------------------

We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵

A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.

A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money.

While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.

Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.

These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility.

For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! ”

We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent. Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we're stopping these too.

We’re well aware we‘re a small part of a much larger political advertising ecosystem. Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents. But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow.

In addition, we need more forward-looking political ad regulation (very difficult to do). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough. The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level playing field.

We’ll share the final policy by 11/15, including a few exceptions (ads in support of voter registration will still be allowed, for instance). We’ll start enforcing our new policy on 11/22 to provide current advertisers a notice period before this change goes into effect.

A final note. This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.

>While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics,

It's kind of horrifying that one can make such a statement, acknowledging the dangers of advertising, but still insinuating that commercial advertising somehow isn't dangerous and harmful, just the political ads...

Ultimately, advertising runs the internet, so it's not at all a trivial thing to denounce advertising.

And precisely for that reason, it is dangerous ;)

All ads are adversarial.

Whenever you see an ad, remember that they've diverted funds from improving the quality of their product and paying their workers well, and instead decided to use that money to try to deceive and manipulate the public into forming a positive impression.

> For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! ;)”

savage

Off topic, but who the hell decided we need live updates of retweet and like counts on the page? That is distracting af.

It's a gamification choice. Watching those numbers tick up is proven to be addictive and keep people on the site.

That would make sense if it were numbers for my tweets. I don't get any dopamine hit from seeing that Jack Dorsey is getting another thousand retweets every three seconds. It just makes me give up on reading and close the tab.

Most likely a PM.