Twitter's actually worse I think, there's almost literally nothing nuanced you can write in 140 characters. The very nature of microblogging reduces discourse to "I'm right, you're wrong, shut up about it".

I don't think the world would be worse off if Twitter or even the concept of microblogging had never taken off.

Yeah, and it makes me kind of sad. I think the idea of microblogging is really cool, and with the right user base it could be really awesome.

But, with a general audience of hundreds of millions of users, it does devolve into smug, uninteresting arguments very quickly.