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The core insight here comes from a friend of mine, but he made it in a protected Facebook post, so I can't link to it.
Twitter's essence: replies/comments are posts. Which are easily shareable.
(Or in programming language parlance, Twitter has "first class" comments.)
Let me explain. Consider this Dreamwidth post that you are reading right now. It is a Post. People may or may not leave Comments; if they do, those are very much comments on *this* post.
You can easily see all of my posts, but you cannot easily find the comments that I have made, on my own or on other people's posts.
Any comments on my post are in my power; I can delete them. This means I can curate discussion, and kick out trolls; but it also means I can destroy content. When various people left Livejournal and deleted their accounts, they also destroyed whole communities of insightful and creative discussion that they did not create.
If you want to share some insightful comment... well, to be fair, that's not much different than sharing a post on Dreamwidth: you'd grab the URL, and make a post of your own on your journal. This is also an aspect of the UI: Dreamwidth simply doesn't have easy options for 'sharing'.
Most other social media I'm familiar with are similar, with tweaks. Facebook makes it easy to share posts, but not comments, and unlike Dreamwidth, whether you can get a reliable URL to a nested comment is rather doubtful. Youtube comments can be equally hard to link to, and comments are *very* different in nature from the videos they're appended to. And in both cases, comments are in the power of the post owner. Independent blogs? Similar to Dreamwidth, but with a better excuse for destroying comments (since the blog owner is actually paying for the hosting.) And with all of those, you can't find all the comments someone has made.
Also, really nested discussions tend to get clunky, probably flattened by the software at some depth, and/or losing the ability to reply directly to comments.
But Twitter? Every reply to a Tweet is itself a Tweet, which can be shared just as easily as the original Tweet, and which belongs to the Tweeter (and, ultimately, to Twitter, of course.) If someone says something notably clever, insightful, or appallingly stupid, it can blow up socially, no matter how 'nested' it might be in the discussion. If someone deletes their Tweets or account, that doesn't erase anyone else's content (though it might erase their context.) Finding someone's comments is simply finding their Tweets from their profile (though Twitter does distinguish between 'Tweets' and 'Tweets and replies' views.) And discussions can flow on no matter how 'nested' they get. (Though there's a conservation of clunkiness: you can follow a deep branch pretty easily, but navigating the 'tree' of discussion is another matter.)
Blogs are one-to-many, where the many can talk back to the one and chat among each other in the one's space. Most social media are a linkable community of one-to-many, where the commenter here can be a poster there, but each space is still one-to-many. Twitter is kind of many-to-many, a sea of nearly equivalent post-comments.
The differences can be good and bad. Bad in the lack of curation, and easy spread of misinformation; good in 'owning' your comments, and in easy organization that can't be blocked or destroyed by one person changing their mind (other than Twitter itself.) The fluidity reminds me somewhat of Usenet and mailing lists, and email does have something of the same virality: if someone makes a comment I want to share, it's just as easy to forward that comment email as a 'post' email, even to other mailing lists. Though those don't have the same discoverability as Twitter tags and trends and profiles.
Twitter's essence: replies/comments are posts. Which are easily shareable.
(Or in programming language parlance, Twitter has "first class" comments.)
Let me explain. Consider this Dreamwidth post that you are reading right now. It is a Post. People may or may not leave Comments; if they do, those are very much comments on *this* post.
You can easily see all of my posts, but you cannot easily find the comments that I have made, on my own or on other people's posts.
Any comments on my post are in my power; I can delete them. This means I can curate discussion, and kick out trolls; but it also means I can destroy content. When various people left Livejournal and deleted their accounts, they also destroyed whole communities of insightful and creative discussion that they did not create.
If you want to share some insightful comment... well, to be fair, that's not much different than sharing a post on Dreamwidth: you'd grab the URL, and make a post of your own on your journal. This is also an aspect of the UI: Dreamwidth simply doesn't have easy options for 'sharing'.
Most other social media I'm familiar with are similar, with tweaks. Facebook makes it easy to share posts, but not comments, and unlike Dreamwidth, whether you can get a reliable URL to a nested comment is rather doubtful. Youtube comments can be equally hard to link to, and comments are *very* different in nature from the videos they're appended to. And in both cases, comments are in the power of the post owner. Independent blogs? Similar to Dreamwidth, but with a better excuse for destroying comments (since the blog owner is actually paying for the hosting.) And with all of those, you can't find all the comments someone has made.
Also, really nested discussions tend to get clunky, probably flattened by the software at some depth, and/or losing the ability to reply directly to comments.
But Twitter? Every reply to a Tweet is itself a Tweet, which can be shared just as easily as the original Tweet, and which belongs to the Tweeter (and, ultimately, to Twitter, of course.) If someone says something notably clever, insightful, or appallingly stupid, it can blow up socially, no matter how 'nested' it might be in the discussion. If someone deletes their Tweets or account, that doesn't erase anyone else's content (though it might erase their context.) Finding someone's comments is simply finding their Tweets from their profile (though Twitter does distinguish between 'Tweets' and 'Tweets and replies' views.) And discussions can flow on no matter how 'nested' they get. (Though there's a conservation of clunkiness: you can follow a deep branch pretty easily, but navigating the 'tree' of discussion is another matter.)
Blogs are one-to-many, where the many can talk back to the one and chat among each other in the one's space. Most social media are a linkable community of one-to-many, where the commenter here can be a poster there, but each space is still one-to-many. Twitter is kind of many-to-many, a sea of nearly equivalent post-comments.
The differences can be good and bad. Bad in the lack of curation, and easy spread of misinformation; good in 'owning' your comments, and in easy organization that can't be blocked or destroyed by one person changing their mind (other than Twitter itself.) The fluidity reminds me somewhat of Usenet and mailing lists, and email does have something of the same virality: if someone makes a comment I want to share, it's just as easy to forward that comment email as a 'post' email, even to other mailing lists. Though those don't have the same discoverability as Twitter tags and trends and profiles.
no subject
Date: 2022-11-08 15:20 (UTC)From:Commenters-as-first-class-citizens, being able (if you want!) to smoothly shift towards writing more OPs as you gain more comfort with writing and more readers to appreciate it, being able to say, as a fundamental action, "this person has interesting things to say and good taste in things to say them about, I want to be shown every thread where she comments".
But better, in that it doesn't strangle you: you couldn't write the above OP on Twitter--at best, you could contort it into a "thread"--but you could on Tumblr. Better, in that it has hypertext, and this makes context easier because you can include as many links as you like (and not just however many URLs will fit in the minuscule space). Better, in that it is more four-dimensional: it is much easier to find (and link to!) an old Tumblr post than an old tweet. (Not as easy as I would like, but still far easier than Twitter.)
After all this time, I still don't understand why Twitter sold for 44 billion dollars--and even the people who think that was overpriced value it in the tens of billions--while Tumblr, infamously, sold for three million. I don't understand why--if you believe the rumours--Twitter had enough weight to throw around to coerce its app stores and payment processors into letting it continue to host pornography, while Tumblr was too small to fight back. I don't understand why Tumblr's current husk, in its attempts to revivify itself, is moving *away* from four-dimensional stability. (Did you know that Tumblr blogs are now, by default, visible only to logged-in people? You can still opt out, for now, but you do have to opt out. Otherwise, no linking a post to just anyone off-site, and no putting it in the Wayback Machine. I'm glad I started making backup hosting plans after the porn purge: it does, in fact, look like I am going to need them in the future.)
((And yes, "is this website Wayback-compatible" is something I always consider. Dreamwidth is archivable by default with individual per-post opt-outs, which is Correct. Pillowfort forbids archiving altogether, and that's why I don't use it. As for Twitter, it's in-between: only directly archivable on short threads, but there are third-party interfaces that are somewhat better (but still require some coaxing to get the archival copy navigable: see here for an example).))
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I do like Dreamwidth, and in particular it *is* nice how the fear of going viral doesn't constantly weigh on one here. But--with significant effort--I make Dreamwidth show the comments I write elsewhere to readers of my own blog, and I miss being able to follow the comments of others.
no subject
Date: 2022-11-09 02:15 (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2022-11-09 13:55 (UTC)From:(Fediverse microblogging such as Mastodon is very, very similar to Twitter, at least in the ways you describe.)