Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer

Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by contravariant on Monday April 25, 2022 @09:36AM (#31154437)

Personally I'd consider it an improvement, but that might be because of my naive assumption that people will finally stop mistaking twitter for a sensible way of communicating.

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Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by ragnese on Monday April 25, 2022 @09:43AM (#31154540)

I can't tell you how depressing I found it when Musk described Twitter as the "town square" and his whole rhetorical take on it needing to be a place for free and open discussion as per the "market place of ideas" concept (I don't recall him referencing the quoted term directly- that's my editorial).

Like... we really want TWITTER, of all things, to be the place for important social discourse? I never had a Twitter account, but isn't it still limited to some 200 characters and/or an image per post? And from what I've seen the "threading" of discussions also seems to make replies difficult to follow. Apparently, our society wants important social issues to be discussed in 200 character snippets. I'm going to go cry into my coffee.

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Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by cle on Monday April 25, 2022 @09:55AM (#31154778)

Relax, broad social discourse has never been particularly nuanced or long-form, and has always been partially driven by catch phrases, headlines, and incisive, memorable quotes.

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Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by orblivion on Monday April 25, 2022 @09:48AM (#31154634)

> I can't tell you how depressing I found it when Musk described Twitter as the "town square"

I'm now imagining a medieval town in an all-out drunken brawl.

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Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by totetsu on Monday April 25, 2022 @09:58AM (#31154834)

Musk's town square by Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel

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Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by remram on Monday April 25, 2022 @10:46AM (#31155622)

Twitter makes it impossible to dig in replies past a very low number of them. Hell, if the tweet is not the last in a chain, you often can't see any replies at all. It is explicitly optimized for very different things than public discussion.

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Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by dash2 on Monday April 25, 2022 @02:02PM (#31158472)

That's not really how it works. The most important tweets are links to long-form discussions. It's a discovery platform. Sometimes the poster will include an executive summary in a thread. That's helpful, too, for deciding if you want to follow the link.

A lot of academics are on twitter, and it's a reasonably good way to find interesting new work. It has problems, but the character limit isn't one of them.

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Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by dfxm12 on Monday April 25, 2022 @10:00AM (#31154849)

we really want TWITTER, of all things, to be the place for important social discourse?

I certainly don't. But, I can see why an individual who owns Twitter would want it to be the place for important social discourse.

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Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by PaulKeeble on Monday April 25, 2022 @09:56AM (#31154786)

The market place of ideas that fit within a tweet, which is a pretty limited set of ideas. Most of the ideas Elon has don't fit into a tweet, almost nothing of value does.

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Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by wonderwonder on Monday April 25, 2022 @09:41AM (#31154506)

Its not so much that twitter is a sensible way of communicating its that twitter gives you such wide access to such a massive array of people and topics. For example its how I get my news, I just follow a ton of journalists from different companies and countries. As 1:1 communication you are right its not built for that but it does what I use it for really well.

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