It wouldn't be special if posts could be longer!

That's... a good point.

It wouldn't be an idiot magnet (Jon`C had a good summary somewhere in this thread) if not for this limitation, and yet this is what makes it Twitter and not just another functional social media site for literate people.

At its height, Twitter had about 4100 employees.

Nobody's quite sure what any of them were doing. Aside from making Twitter even more unprofitable, I guess.

Did u know: Twitter is the world's first VARCHAR(140) that can afford its own office in downtown San Francisco

The only thing more boring than Twitter, an internet text message archive, is Hootsuite, a cron job that sends them.

Did u know: Twitter is the only social network that requires you to use other social networks to find content

I started using Twitter about three or four months ago, and it's grown on me since then. If you follow good people, you can pretty effectively curate a newsfeed of things you find worthwhile.

How does that work?

Fun twitter fact of the day: Twitter's basic design encourages self-segregation, via hashtags and follows. Combine that polarization with a character limit that forces comments to be perfunctory, if not outright curt, and you get something in the middle of a Huxlean triviality and an Orwellian two minutes of hate.

Time for the Twitter quiz of the week! Is Jack Dorsey:

A. The founder of a highly successful social networking site
B. A con artist who somehow convinced people to pay him millions of dollars to run an intro to databases course project
C. Some Bay Area techie who works at a big company and hates it, but he has a really cool startup idea that he's working on part time at Philz, you should totally check it out some time and tell your friends
D. @tedcruz kill any more women lately? #zodiackiller

Secretly, it doesn't matter. The good tweets all get posted to imgur anyway.

I don't really understand getting on Twitter in 2017. If you want to use a minimum-effort social network saddled by a whimsical design that only appeals to the people who grew up using it, and repels literally everybody else, that's doomed to a decades-long slide into obscurity and financial ruin before it is bought up by a telecom for its domain and finally mercy killed, you might as well use Snapchat. At least it's newer.

I gotta give this to Twitter, at least I get a laugh out of it. That's more than I can say for Facebook, an infinite-scrolling news article comment section except that crazy dude talking about Palestine is gonna be at Christmas dinner.

For me, it's mostly the one-to-many follower scheme (which Facebook emulated, but poorly), and the fact that it's used by so many media personalities to directly broadcast to and interact with their audience. I find it much easier to get an impression of what opinions are out there about stories as they break on Twitter than on Facebook, because the opinions are in my feed rather than associated with some article about a relevant topic (and also because they're shorter, it's easier to consume a lot of them). Also, some journalists break news on Twitter without writing an article, which means I can get new info there before it's even been reported on the news outlets.

Twitter isn't a particularly good platform and I hope someone builds something better soon. But it's still, in my opinion, superior to any of the alternative social media platforms (which isn't saying much about my estimation of any of them) if you're trying to get a diverse array of opinions/perspectives on news stories in real time as they unfold.

RSS only ****ty and dumb, in other words.

It's a credible use case for twitter, sure, but only because the media is using twitter to do syndication instead of better alternatives that have existed for a lot longer.

There will never be a "better" twitter. lol, have you checked their financials? And snap's? You might as well throw your money in a literal dumpster fire. (Notice how I used the word literal to distinguish it from Twitter, which is a figurative dumpster fire.)

This is relevant to the Trump thread because Trump uses Twitter to explain to foreign adversaries how sad and angry he is 24/7.

Feelin like bluffing about Crimea this morning #maga

Like so many of these social networks, it's a frustrating reality that Twitter's valuable because of who's on it, and how they use it. It's useful despite the flawed software that powers it.

I dunno. The only useful application of Twitter I can think of offhand is BeijingAir, an air-quality monitoring station in China.

yes

4100 seems like quite a bit. Were they all just playing security guard for the server room?

Are any of the major social media platforms profitable?

Just wait everyone Snapchat stock can only go up uP UP (after it went DOWN DOwn down 20% last night )

It would be fun to have a model that could predict when Wall Street was about to pump a **** stock.

I had no idea you already decided to become a quant

Heh, the belly of the beast, your soul for lots of money.

What the ****

Another gem from Twitter about this ******* in the "not a joke" department

I chuckled a bit at the idea that Mike Pence came out as the only fruit eater.

Oh Republicans, could you please go back to bible stumping and curtailing the rights of gay people, and lay off this treason stuff?

Well this story that hit HN today has a funny headline.

"Uber hit by major legal setback in Europe"

In the United States, apparently, brazen disregard for the law comes with no such "legal setbacks".

I, for one, am enraged at this anecdote that signals Trump's inability as a politician and leader, and I completely understand that this is newsworthy.

Seriously, do you people just look for inane **** to get angry about? I cannot stand the ****er but every time I read about anyone (typically people who identify as very liberal) trying to paint Trump as a prick interpersonally (which I do not disagree with) I am reminded a friend from highschool whose very conservative father hated Obama because he once bowled a 17 or something stupid like that.

I have seen people *****ing about Pence referring to his wife by "Mother" rather than her first name.

Are you aware of how petty you sound?

Here's an idea: write an article about how Pence's favorite sexual position is missionary, extrapolating from his highly religious background. Use this as a segue into sexual repression of conservatives, and end it with a dose of SJW feminism.

HuffPo, you can PM me anytime. Buzzfeed, if you're reading this, I expect credits to go to Zloc Vergo, without the underscore.

The only petty person here is the one in the oval office. Who the **** frames a picture of the election results and hangs it in the West Wing??

And that's a little more dangerous than some smarmy liberal smart alec, don't you think?

There's a difference between dick moves and dic moves. Some people like to do both.

I get it, Trump hasn't banned any nations from entering the US recently. In lieu of that, gotta hit that retweet quota with something, may as well be something to conform to the picture we've painted of Trump for the last year.

Agreed on the spirit of the second and literal third sentences. I still fail to see how this makes it worthy of reporting, other than it reinforces a worldview of the target audience (which is what news is all about, right?).

I'm pretty sure the picture paints itself. And it is the picture of a childish, petty, and vengeful wannabe dictator. You can hardly call documenting evidence of his glaring character flaws as they emerge from the oval office petty, especially when you realize that this same childish behavior of the president just caused him to fire the man responsie for investigating possible crimes he committed.

Also, this is not reporting, so much as people with access to information coming out of the white house goings-on pushing out damning tidbits on Twitter. In normal times we would tightly call this vacuous gossip, but when every little thing the president does seems to raise eyebrows of even the most patient observer, it becomes a little more relevant.

I'm not talking about the **** you see on HuffPo. This is all stuff I got from David Frum's Twitter feed.

I am happy that both David Frum and Try Yingst are doing the needful of documenting history on the third party cloud-based website Twitter and not trying to boost follower count/readership.

Tweets are the optimal source of news and best method of preserving history. Twitter is cool and good.

I mean, when it comes to broadcasting images like the one with the framed campaign picure that speak for themselves, its makes for a far better use of my time to check Frum's curated Twitter feed, that exists mostly on his own reputation, than to rely on some faceless HuffPo editor writing click bait titles and trumping up non-stories that really are only worthy of a 140 characters.

When I criticized Twitter earlier it had more to do with it being a poor medium for discussions, but I am talking here simply about the broadcasting tidbits of info by trusted curators, and for that it works pretty well.