I don’t care what you want to call it — discussion, debate, discourse, arguing, whatever it is — any kind of “deep” discussion on Twitter between two parties is, in practice, virtually impossible.
This is for two key reasons — the nature of the site itself, and the culture surrounding its used. These two aspects are tied together in such a way as to defeat the very principle of in depth discussion, unless the parties involved go out of their way to allow it to happen, which is rarely the case.
First is, as said above, the nature of the site itself. Twitter is, in effect, a “microblogging” site. The idea is that a user will post small thoughts on there, as opposed to longer, more in depth articles like one would put on a “normal” website. This means Twitter is, naturally, a place for quick thoughts. Originally Twitter had a 140 character limit (a hold-over from the days of SMS (commonly known as text messages) being a main way to update your account) but this was increased a few years ago to 280 characters.
Sometimes, though, a thought will go beyond those character limits. This isn’t much of a problem because you can just reply to your first post, and go on replying to each previous post, expanding on the idea and creating a thread – a single main tweet which you follow via subsequent replies to read the complete thought.
This concept, in varying ways, is actually a fundamental aspect of discussion on the internet — forums, for example, have threads of discussion all related to some original post. This exists on Facebook as well, with replies to comments creating their own threads to follow. It’s really just a natural part of non-real time internet communication.
Nothing is to guarantee that people read the whole thread though, and in many cases if you, for example, clarify something in a second or third post that may be ambiguous in the first post, people will still sometimes reply regarding that lack of clarification which wouldn’t be necessary if they just read the follow up posts.
Quirks like this require, in a sense, that you condense your thought into as simple a form as possible to ensure it can fit in a singular post. That’s not always easy, or even possible. Complex thoughts can require more complex explanations, or more information or examples be given. This limits what one is “best” able to do on such a site, and it’s easy for an idea expressed on Twitter to be lacking in depth or clarity, leading to the reader interpreting it any way they may see fit.
This leads to part two, and the culture surrounding Twitter. To say it’s not a very sane place would be an understatement – Twitter is a fucking mess of outright insanity. A billion people screaming into the digital ether, hoping for their voice to be heard. That’s not necessarily the point here, however, I just wanted to get that out there as I’ve never found a better description of the site.
It does relate, though, to the fact that some things that seem logical as an internet user are seen as “taboo” on Twitter. The above threads I mentioned, for example? Those are often derogatorily called “sub tweeting” and, for some inexplicable reason, that’s a bad thing on Twitter.
I’m not joking. One time I had a conversation with someone regarding a certain high-profile celebrity whom I dislike and while I articulated my reasons fine, and they even agreed and understood where I was coming from with forming my opinion. They then, apparently, saw that the original post they replied to had follow up replies from me, explaining myself with the very same points I had made in the original chat with them, and said something akin to “oh, now I see you’re sub tweeting” like it was some kind of crime, and that was the end of that. They suddenly went to disliking me and my opinion again, even though nothing had actually changed. It was literally the fact I had created a condensed thread about my thoughts that they had a problem with.
What would they rather me do, make just random post after post, unrelated to each other unless you actually look at them in order, and let that be how I try to communicate? That’s nothing but chaos, and isn’t how anyone would do things. It would be as if each paragraph of this article were in and of itself an article — you couldn’t follow it in any sane way. A thread or “sub tweeting” just makes sense!
I honestly think this is something from “kids” who grew up with these services already in existence, and who haven’t used conventional conversation methods online to understand how chaotic things can get. That, and they probably don’t have too much in depth to say. Forgive me for playing the “old man” card, but I can’t find any other reason that anyone would think that creating an easy-to-follow thread of thoughts is a bad thing.
Indeed, it seems having any complex idea expressed on Twitter is a crime. If it won’t fit in one tweet, then it must not be worth saying, according to the masses. This is, of course, absolutely absurd.
This also applies to responses on the site. This is where the subject of actual in depth conversation comes into play and why I say it’s nearly impossible to have a real conversation on Twitter. It doesn’t really matter what the topic is — the culture surrounding Twitter seems hell bent on the idea that if you can’t say it in a single message then it’s somehow wrong.
It’s as if the fact that a bold assertion can be made in only a few words makes it more valid than the sometimes rather in depth discourse that can be necessary to show how wrong most any false assertion is. The irony is, if you were to simply reject ones claim without providing counterpoints they would criticize you on that, so it’s a lose-lose situation: If you explain the problems, people give you a TL;DR reaction (which is shit to begin with,) criticize that it took you that much to say something, or that you “got that much out of it” as if what they said wasn’t deserving of response… even though it somehow was important enough for them to say to begin with.
It’s really the typical internet negation game, but Twitter makes it easy, almost required, for people playing this game to bank on the nature of the site as some sort of criteria as to what is valid and what isn’t. It isn’t what you say, it’s all about if you can fit it into some arbitrary character limit and that, quite simply, is bullshit.
Sorry if this was a bit of an odd read, but to be fair, it’s a really odd subject when you think about it. There’s no simple way to explain it and, as always, I would prefer to be somewhat thorough on how I cover it than, well, not at all.
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