2020-07-22-Microblogging-HOO

Microblogging -- HOO

Let's throw my hat in the ring on this microblogging thing!

RE: bouncepaw

RE: Hannu (twinlog)

I use Mastodon for microblogging, mirrored at Twitter using some free thing. See for yourself:

mastodon

twitter

While I agree with Hannu that microblogging isn't particularly *good* for anything, I don't think it really has to be -- and I like bouncepaw's points about the interactivity and finality aspects of microblogging.

That being said, I've also considered something along the lines of some article I read, which of course I can't now find, about automatically deleting tweets older than 2 years. The argument there was that Twitter (and all microblogging) is *ephemeral* and tied intimately to context, so deleting old tweets only makes sense -- after a while, context fades and tweets become only useful as bad-faith character attacks, as we've seen many times online. Hell, even though I get a lot of enjoyment out of r/TrumpCriticizesTrump, that's basically the entire point of that subreddit.

So I think microblogging has its uses, though they are limited by the medium. Twitter et al. is good for public, quick discussion -- it's easier to use than IRC and more "normal" people (aka, non-techies) are on there. It's also a good news channel for headlines (though that has its own problems, but those plague the news industry as a whole and Twitter is just a symptom of that) and for direct interaction between celebrities and fans, again on a casual level. I don't think microblogging is good for sustained or serious discourse, even though a lot of people try to use it that way. There are multiple forms and formats for talking; I think it's good to use the right one for the message you're trying to convey.

On that last point, a final thought: sometimes an idea might start as a tweet and morph into a blog post, or a magazine article, or even a book. I think that's happened plenty of times in the past, even before Twitter. Ideas don't reveal their full breadth until they're examined and interrogated.

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Copyright (c) 2019-2020 Case Duckworth. CC-BY-SA.

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