I’m loving the higher character limits on cohost and mastodon (if you couldn’t tell by my massive Muni screed yesterday :p). No one reads even small threads on twitter. I understand it was a major source of news and community for lots of people, but twitter sucked ass as a communication tool
- He/Him
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in reply to @BridgeUnit's post:
I mean I dunno what to tell you. I posted threads on twitter many times and literally had zero interaction on anything other than the first tweet, and many of the pages I followed had only one interaction on their mid-thread tweets: me lol
I should clarify that I'm not blaming twitter's users for this, I'm blaming twitter itself. The whole "thread" idea is inherently hostile towards longer posts, by design, most likely. Twitter is ardently committed to the character limit thing and it always felt like the thread functionality was a case of malicious compliance rather than a genuine attempt to improve the site.
Counterpoint: short posts and threads are incredibly, uniquely powerful structures for one-to-many communication. That most people without large accounts are generally not heard or seen by anyone is a separate issue, and certainly one of Twitter's failings.
Even large accounts get a fraction of the engagement on mid-thread tweets that their first posts do. As for character limit itself, I fail to see how that makes anything more “powerful”. You always have brevity as an option with sites like this, but here you also have the option to make a single longer post rather than a bunch of fractured statements that people have to click through and scroll forever to read.
In short, it's the granularity, that each tweet—and each reply—is structurally a first-class citizen that can be replied, reposted or quoted on its own.