[PopeOfNope]

The 140 character limit allows Twitter to be a reliable source of quick bits of information - you can dive deeper if you want, but it's a great cursory overview.

That quick bit of information lights up our dopamine receptors like nothing else. It's designed to be addictive. Diving in deeper is difficult and time consuming. For example, I find following conversation threads on twitter to be impossible. I suspect this is by design. It wouldn't be that difficult to design twitter so whole threads are easily readable. But reading and following whole threads isn't as addictive. The preferred method of consuming twitter seems to be following a large number of people and/or hashtags. This results in disjointed bits of somewhat related information being streamed to you at a high rate of fire. Like a news ticker on steroids.