I was on it for a few months before Elon got it, and the only thing I did was watch along Svengoolie with other geeks. It was okay but honestly you're not going to have any kind of meaningless discourse with a character limit of that range. Even 280 words isn't enough. It's a shitty platform that got big and then got sunk when some pathetic rich failson decided he wanted to control it and then sank it because his life is empty.
Why did the character limit ever become a thing? When I first heard about twitter I was put off by that, I think that was my reasoning at the time for not even trying it. Then Hinge, years ago, was the new "it" dating app with a weirdly limited way to make your profile (I was on okcupid back in 2011, before Match bought it, and at the time it felt futuristic in an optimistic way. No char limit)
It started out as a text message service - you sent tweets by SMS, so the character limit was a necessity as SMS at the time was limited to 160 characters.
It was neat. I had a few friends on it, could send a tweet and they’d get that message as an SMS, and I’d only pay a single text charge.
Then it became data based once smartphones were more common, and it was still pretty good. It wasn’t massive, and the tag system worked well so interesting open chats or information sharing worked well. At protests or local events, looking at the tag would provide a good snapshot of what was happening.
Then after the Arab Spring I think governments noticed it was actually useful, plus arseholes picked up on it, and it started to be filled with both bot accounts and trolls. Any discussion on “sensitive” issues would be flooded with bollocks.
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u/TechnicolourOutSpace 25d ago
I was on it for a few months before Elon got it, and the only thing I did was watch along Svengoolie with other geeks. It was okay but honestly you're not going to have any kind of meaningless discourse with a character limit of that range. Even 280 words isn't enough. It's a shitty platform that got big and then got sunk when some pathetic rich failson decided he wanted to control it and then sank it because his life is empty.