Twitter is designed for writing things off the top of your head, and things that others will share or reply to. There are almost no mechanisms to reward good ideas, to punish bad ones, nor for incentivizing the consistency of your views, nor any mechanism for even seeing whether someone updates their beliefs, or whether a comment pointed out that they’re wrong.
(The fact that there are comments is really really good, and it’s part of what makes Twitter so much better than mainstream media. Community Notes is great too.)
The solution to Twitter sucking, is not to follow different people, and DEFINITELY not to correct every wrong statement (oops), it’s to just leave. Even smart people, people who are way smarter and more interesting and knowledgeable and funny than me, simply don’t care that much about their posts. If a post is thought-provoking, you can’t even do anything with that fact, because nothing about the website is designed for deeper conversations. Though I’ve had a couple of nice moments where I went deep into a topic with someone in the replies.
Shortforms are better
The above thing is also a danger with Shortforms, but to a lesser extent, because things are easier to find, and it’s much more likely that I’ll see something I’ve written, see that I’m wrong, and delete it or edit it. Posts on Twitter or not editable, they’re harder to find, there’s no preview-on-hover, there is no hyperlinked text.
Twitter doesn’t incentivize truth-seeking
Twitter is designed for writing things off the top of your head, and things that others will share or reply to. There are almost no mechanisms to reward good ideas, to punish bad ones, nor for incentivizing the consistency of your views, nor any mechanism for even seeing whether someone updates their beliefs, or whether a comment pointed out that they’re wrong.
(The fact that there are comments is really really good, and it’s part of what makes Twitter so much better than mainstream media. Community Notes is great too.)
The solution to Twitter sucking, is not to follow different people, and DEFINITELY not to correct every wrong statement (oops), it’s to just leave. Even smart people, people who are way smarter and more interesting and knowledgeable and funny than me, simply don’t care that much about their posts. If a post is thought-provoking, you can’t even do anything with that fact, because nothing about the website is designed for deeper conversations. Though I’ve had a couple of nice moments where I went deep into a topic with someone in the replies.
Shortforms are better
The above thing is also a danger with Shortforms, but to a lesser extent, because things are easier to find, and it’s much more likely that I’ll see something I’ve written, see that I’m wrong, and delete it or edit it. Posts on Twitter or not editable, they’re harder to find, there’s no preview-on-hover, there is no hyperlinked text.