[pdinny]

I find the frequent invocation of a town square a bit perplexing. It evokes the idea of a place where strangers may gather to have an exchange of ideas, which sounds quite pleasant at face value.

However this is not something that I've ever done IRL and I rather doubt that most of those who invoke this idea do this regularly either.

The kinds of discussions that you might imagine having in public with strangers who might have different values and backgrounds would be wildly different from the same discussions online. The metaphor is quite a broken one and at this point about as useful as pretending that the screen I'm looking at is an analog to my actual desktop (which mostly one exists to hold the screen).

While this may come across as mere pedantry I think it is actually quite important to ensure that when we discuss platforms that are going to be nothing at all like a town square that we are more realistic about what kinds of conversation and interactions we might want to encourage or discourage.

[somethingreen]

Town square is invoked because it is what worked for spreading new ideas before. It is spreading the new ideas part that is important in this context, not the particular historical vehicle for it.

The point of the public square proponents is that it would be nice if one of public platforms would step up to perform the function in a way suitable for it.

[bell-cot]

The old "town square" worked fairly well...for a bunch of people who already had a lot of other social ties, shared social norms, and were (socially) pretty heavily invested in their communities. When those other conditions were not met (say, Saturday night and a crowd of cowboys from a cattle drive, or laborers from a nearby RR construction project, or ...), then the old town square absolutely did NOT work for the good, long-term locals.

On the internet, enforcing the preconditions needed for the town square to work well is difficult at best.

[pdinny]

I agree that it would be nice if more platforms facilitated this kind of exchange . I don't see Twitter doing this at all. The majority of my observations suggest ideas being lobbed at high speed, attached to a heavy object.

Besides that I'm unconvinced that this kind of platform for spreading new ideas is what most users on Twitter want from Twitter. The metaphor has become repeated so often that it almost sounds like it is Twitter's reason to be but I rather doubt that it was designed with that in mind.