2016 U.S. Presidential Elections: The Circus Is In Full Swing

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The problem is that twitter is a corporate utility website nowadays, not just a channel for harrassing celebrities like God intended. It's rapidly replacing email for customer services.

I am currently having problems with my tax return and the only way to feasibly contact the Home Office is via twitter. Plenty of services will only get a response if you tweet at them. And practically the entire journalistic establishment in the anglosphere has become reliant on twitter as a kind of news aggregate. It's too big to fail.
 
I honestly had no idea Twitter was that widespread and versatile.
I never use it, and it seems like it's just a bunch of people debating various topics with #hashtags that "live" for 1-7 days.
The platform itself has nothing substancial. It's all just tiny posts with links to 'actual' news articles and such.
A sort of mediator of content that could easily be ignored.
 
I honestly had no idea Twitter was that widespread and versatile.
I never use it, and it seems like it's just a bunch of people debating various topics with #hashtags that "live" for 1-7 days.
The platform itself has nothing substancial. It's all just tiny posts with links to 'actual' news articles and such.
A sort of mediator of content that could easily be ignored.
Twitter suits the on-going trend of shrinking attention spans, allowing people to trade slogans, jokes, headlines and insults without any depth.
 
I honestly had no idea Twitter was that widespread and versatile.
I never use it, and it seems like it's just a bunch of people debating various topics with #hashtags that "live" for 1-7 days.
The platform itself has nothing substancial. It's all just tiny posts with links to 'actual' news articles and such.
A sort of mediator of content that could easily be ignored.
It's not just news, it's all kinds of covfefe 24/7. People follow notable people and hashtags on any number of subjects and you can do it too. #onlyfans #malenursecosplay
 
God, I hope he runs it into the ground. It is far and away the worst of all social media. FB has the endearing boomerness to it, TikTok has its funny and creative moments, but Twitter is just smug GenXers and Millenials trading one-liners. I don't think I have laughed once when browsing Twitter, even if it was people I otherwise find out. It's so try hard and desperate.
 
... Twitter is just smug GenXers and Millenials trading one-liners...
That's what communication and debates is today: a battle, or contest, on who can express their opinion in the most clever, succinct and poignant way - preferably humorous too - in 2-3 sentences that can be quoted a million times, and in turn be the object of debates, i.e. a thousand more short tweets, discussing that exact quote, with no need to have knowledge of the entire line of reasoning and facts that lie behind it.
And Twitter as format, along with many others, is enabling that exact type of communication (literally limiting the amount of words used*).
Sometimes when people are bad at things it's the tool that's the problem. I say let it burn. Nothing of value will be lost.

*Although, you can make a series of tweets, as I understand it.
 
That's what communication and debates is today: a battle, or contest, on who can express their opinion in the most clever, succinct and poignant way - preferably humorous too - in 2-3 sentences that can be quoted a million times, and in turn be the object of debates, i.e. a thousand more short tweets, discussing that exact quote, with no need to have knowledge of the entire line of reasoning and facts that lie behind it.

That is something people have been saying about twitter since its inception, but I really don't think it's true. The tweet format is designed to make posts flow more like a conversation than a forum post, and I actually think it's a good idea for the most part. Forcing people to condense their ideas I think leads to more interesting and meaningful discussions, not less. On forums you're inclined to just spray out an unfiltered stream of consciousness like I'm doing here, but on twitter I find myself (and others) trying to write more like how you do in academia with more clarity.

The real problem with (political) twitter is that there aren't enough normal people on it. Facebook and R*ddit (increasingly less these days) have a critical mass of average people with jobs and families browsing them to shame everyone into behaving more or less like a human being. But practically every normal person I know stopped using it around 2014 when it was flooded with gore, nazis, child porn and ISIS videos. What remains is an asylum of dangerous lunatics who are only funny to observe from a distance.
 
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