[cvwright]

Just goes to show how the fundamental design decisions guide how the system as a whole will behave. Short messages and no coherent threading makes for a perfect breeding ground for snark and hot takes. It's hard to say something thoughtful in 280 characters, but it's easy to say something nasty.

You can spend tons of money on trust & safety, tweaks to the UI, whatever. But a bad system design is still a bad system design.

It's kind of like trying to make an old C codebase secure by throwing in lots of calls to strlen() and changing some sprintf()'s to snprintf(). It may help a little, but it's not enough to turn the ship.

[bluGill]

Facebook doesn't have the same 280 character limit, yet it suffers from similar problems.

[cvwright]

Good point. Another hypothesis then: The real problem is the ad-driven "curation" that selects for drama and outrage to keep users "engaged" so they stay on the site for longer to view more ads.

This would explain why "social media" like FB and Twitter are so much worse than their predecessors (blogs, forums, email, sms, ...). All of the previous media could be bad too, but this is different.