[annamarie]

I think they are people problems.

Everyone likes being right + feeling important. Everyone is lazy. No one wants to be called out on it.

If you are forced to keep it <140 char then no one can fault you for being lazy with your replies and critiques. Of course people are going to jump in and offer their brilliant opinions. Think about the low-cost high they can get.

[dangerlibrary]

This is a bit of a false dichotomy, I think. Of course there are good (and valid!) psychological explanations for the behavior patterns exhibited on Twitter.

When I say something is a "Twitter problem," I mean that these patterns are less prevalent on other platforms. I mean that Twitter has created a scaffold for communication that encourages certain bad behaviors.

One example: If I were to pluck the middle sentence from your response and criticize you for saying that "Everyone is lazy" here on HN, I'd be down voted into oblivion because I am obviously being a jackass. Twitter's structure can make it very hard to see when someone is being misquoted or their views misrepresented. It's the Fox News Soundbite version of online discussions.

[notacoward]

I don't deny that Twitter constrains conversation in a way that can be negative, but is that what's going on in this case? Consider: antirez's blog post represents exactly the kind of one-sided un-nuanced polemic that he blames on Twitter, even though he has infinite space in his chosen medium to do better. What more could he have done to prove that the medium isn't the problem?

The problem is desire for control of the message. People who want that sort of control should just issue press releases. People who try to use the Twitter megaphone to promote their ideas, their projects, or themselves have to understand that others are doing exactly the same thing and sometimes the messages will conflict. The community into which antirez dropped this particular comment is one full of people running their own data-storage projects, academics promoting their own ideas, and others with more abstract (but no less passionate) beliefs about things like data protection or 99th percentile latency. I'm part of that community, and I've certainly had to endure pot shots against me or my project because of my presence on Twitter. It's part of the territory - just as it is on sites like this, or has been since forever on Usenet and BBSes and all the way back to the first town square. Among a thousand competing voices, yours might not be heard or understood perfectly.

[annamarie]

Yeah, I can see your point, to say that it's a "twitter problem" for leaving that door open.