So I have been thinking about this for some time - my love/hate relationship with the Twitter world. According to my phone, the Twitter app is where I spend over 60% of my screen time (and that doesn’t count the desktop version).
Yes, I spend a lot of my time within the Twittersphere, so I feel well qualified to comment about what I wish would be better.
I don’t know if most or any of these are even possible within the framework of this platform - probably not, but I wanted to get them out anyway. Perhaps I will feel better. Or worse.
Many of the points below relate to the character limit - 280 characters is a very hard way to get across anything substantial.
What is missing?
Nuance.
What I found over the years is that I am continually taking anything nuanced out of my own tweets in order to fit them into the character limit. I start writing them the way I would normally present an idea to an audience of people I mostly don’t know in person, carefully framed, generously giving the benefit of the doubt, not making assumptions about the level of understanding of the reader etc etc. And then the dreaded red highlight covers most of that carefully worded attempt and I begin to cut every word that is a nice to have, not an essential. And cut and cut until we are left with a fairly barefaced statement. One that is far easier for people to misinterpret the intent of, take offence at, and generally not receive in the spirit it was originally intended.
And how often I start writing something along the lines above, to share a thought or an opinion, then end up deleting and just not bothering at all because I know it will very likely be misinterpreted and rain a bunch of reckons down on me that I really don’t need in my life.Context.
Very closely connected to point 1. It is all too easy to see an individual tweet as you scroll through the feed and react to that single tweet without taking the time to click through and see the whole thread, and then perhaps go look at the bio and account of the person tweeting … and then what happens? We react to that single tweet out of context.
Resulting in a number of not great outcomes. Assumptions about the lived experience of the tweeter. Misinterpretation of sarcasm or humour as something else entirely and not in a good way. ‘Splaining of all kinds - telling a subject expert how to suck eggs perhaps. Starting a pile-on even, RTing or screenshotting that single tweet to rain down fiery hell on the OP.Incoherence.
One of the things I find very difficult on Twitter (compared to the message boards of old), is the struggle to follow and engage in threaded conversations, especially as they continuously fork into subthreads etc. Which makes it very difficult to engage properly, have a decent debate, or move a conversation on any particular topic forward in a useful way.
People jump into the middle of a thread because that tweet was RTed by one of their connections, and it splits again or loses coherence and goes off on a tangent.Search.
Finding anything without a # is super hard on Twitter, perhaps most of all, trying to find your own conversations and tweets on particular topics aside from the one you might have pinned. This contributes to the lack of coherence and flow in quite a big way.Malice aforethought.
Twitter seems to have more than it’s fair share of bad actors aka trolls, aka baiters who spend their time targeting specific individuals or groups of individuals with malicious content, sending their followers to join in on harmful pileons etc.
And because you can’t delete tweets from anyone else’s account (unlike nasty FB comments on your page or group), they remain for all to find until complaints to Twitter possibly end up getting them removed.Lack of rules of engagement.
There are no clear rules for playing in this particular playground. Participating on this platform does not mean you have agreed to respect others here, does not mean there is a shared goodwill or intention from those who participate.And there is no real way for people to create such groupings within the platform other than continuously blocking or muting those you disagree with, or creating your own private Twitter account where you keep the numbers down to a select group of people you know.
Inability to edit.
Everyone complains about this one, and Twitter is the one standout among social media channels that still doesn’t allow people to edit mistakes out of their tweets. Why? We really don’t know. They just won’t.
I have more points to make, but again I am interested in what you think of the above, and what else you would add. What would change? How might the overall vibe of Twitter improve perhaps?
I have to say there are also lots of things I love about the place - otherwise why would I be there at all, and I prefer it to Facebook or Insta by far. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want it to be better. HBU?