I'm surprised that no one mentioned that twitter at least qualifies as bad hypertext whereas the web (and thus blogs) don't.
In particular twitter has (primitive) transclusions: by manually breaking up your writing into awkward ≤ 280 char chunks you basically allow other people to quote and comment or reply to them, recursively. Although tweets can and frequently do get deleted, that is the only form these transclusions break; they don't silently and unverifiably change content.
The web has absolutely no facility for quotation and commenting or even for pointing at some particular content in a way that ensures any continuity of content between the time of link creation and perusual. It is thus an abysmally bad medium for any form of discussion.
> In particular twitter has (primitive) transclusions: by manually breaking up your writing into awkward ≤ 280 char chunks you basically allow other people to quote and comment or reply to them, recursively. Although tweets can and frequently do get deleted, that is the only form these transclusions break; they don't silently and unverifiably change content.
Is what I'm doing right now not some kind of transclusion? It's even more primitive than Twitter. Plus you can delete or edit your comment but my reply retains context. Twitter would present it better, maybe structure it more semantically, but that's hardly a killer feature over traditional web text in my opinion. Maybe if you're a social researcher, sure, Twitter knocks your socks off. But otherwise, I think we can have a perfectly productive discussion in this manner no?
I argue it's even better because the person who replies (i.e., me in this instance) can break up the original text to reply to a specific point, include as much context as possible. Sure I can misquote you to benefit my argument but it's easy to call bad faith.
(As for verifiability especially of who typed what, I wouldn't argue on that front. Online it's basically a huge game of he said, she said. You can add barriers to make falsification difficult but that won't stop a determined and well-resourced fascist regime or two. Again, just my 2c.)
This. Twitter markup is so heavy I avoid clicking it for fear of my browser locking up.
If I really really really want to read an interesting-sound thread, I open it with Nitter.
Otherwise, I take a "medium is the message" approach to Twitter, and just assume I'm not missing much, just like with Medium or Reddit: If someone chooses Twitter as the medium, their message probably isn't worth my time either.
In particular twitter has (primitive) transclusions: by manually breaking up your writing into awkward ≤ 280 char chunks you basically allow other people to quote and comment or reply to them, recursively. Although tweets can and frequently do get deleted, that is the only form these transclusions break; they don't silently and unverifiably change content.
The web has absolutely no facility for quotation and commenting or even for pointing at some particular content in a way that ensures any continuity of content between the time of link creation and perusual. It is thus an abysmally bad medium for any form of discussion.