Twitter is an unusually angry place. One reason is that the length limit makes people favor punchiness over tact. A less well-known reason is that in addition to notifying you when people like your own tweets, it gives a lot of notifications for people liking replies to you. So if someone replies to disagree, you will get a slow drip of reminders, which will make you feel indignant.
LessWrong is a relatively calm place, because we do the opposite: under default settings, we batch upvote/karma-change notifications together to only one notification per day, to avoid encouraging obsessive-refresh spirals.
I also thing there’s less engagement on LW.* While it might depends on the part of twitter, there’s a lot more replies going on. Sometimes it seems like there’s a 100 replies to a tweet, in contrast to posts with zero comments. This necessarily means replies will overlap a lot more than they do on LW. Imagine getting 3 distinct comments to a short post on LW, versus a thread of tweets, with 30 responses that mostly boil down to the same 3 responses that are being sent because people are responding without seeing other responses. (And if there’s hundreds of very similar responses, asking people to read responses is asking people to read a very boring epic.)
And getting one critical reply, versus the same critical reply from 10 people, even when it’s the same fraction of responses, probably affects people differently—if only because it’s annoying to see the same message over and over again.
*This could be the case (the medium probably helps) even if that engagement was all positive.
Twitter is an unusually angry place. One reason is that the length limit makes people favor punchiness over tact. A less well-known reason is that in addition to notifying you when people like your own tweets, it gives a lot of notifications for people liking replies to you. So if someone replies to disagree, you will get a slow drip of reminders, which will make you feel indignant.
LessWrong is a relatively calm place, because we do the opposite: under default settings, we batch upvote/karma-change notifications together to only one notification per day, to avoid encouraging obsessive-refresh spirals.
I also thing there’s less engagement on LW.* While it might depends on the part of twitter, there’s a lot more replies going on. Sometimes it seems like there’s a 100 replies to a tweet, in contrast to posts with zero comments. This necessarily means replies will overlap a lot more than they do on LW. Imagine getting 3 distinct comments to a short post on LW, versus a thread of tweets, with 30 responses that mostly boil down to the same 3 responses that are being sent because people are responding without seeing other responses. (And if there’s hundreds of very similar responses, asking people to read responses is asking people to read a very boring epic.)
And getting one critical reply, versus the same critical reply from 10 people, even when it’s the same fraction of responses, probably affects people differently—if only because it’s annoying to see the same message over and over again.
*This could be the case (the medium probably helps) even if that engagement was all positive.