• they/them

located in Toronto, on Dish With One Spoon land. sovereignty was never ceded.
https://linktr.ee/larkannex


this is not a new idea, i'm not a social media design expert, and there are so, so many things to criticize about twitter — but i think just at a basic level, the character limit is responsible for so much that goes wrong on there. it pushes people toward every statement being axiomatic. when you're trying to fit a thought into a character limit, it's the concessions or detours that get cut.

I mean fundamentally, I believe it's material conditions, not design, that are determinative here, (ie in this case what are the material interests of twitter's shareholders?), but design still pushes toward certain outcomes within a set of material constraints, and it's interesting to try and specify what that looks like


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in reply to @larkannex's post:

I really did find it fun to try to edit tweets to 140. I liked the challenge of cutting jokes to their absolute core but yeah I am sure it also help lead to a culture of intentional bad reading and racing to make takes.

The new 280 is bad because it gets rid of the former and has not changed the latter

yeah! I wasn't on twitter in the 140 days but I agree 280 really feels like the devil's ratio of just long enough to hide the constraint, just limiting enough to still deform what people are saying. enough runway to crash the plane or whatever