This is a special post for quick takes by jimrandomh. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.
Twitter is an unusually angry place. One reason is that the length limit makes people favor punchiness over tact. A less well-known reason is that in addition to notifying you when people like your own tweets, it gives a lot of notifications for people liking replies to you. So if someone replies to disagree, you will get a slow drip of reminders, which will make you feel indignant.
LessWrong is a relatively calm place, because we do the opposite: under default settings, we batch upvote/karma-change notifications together to only one notification per day, to avoid encouraging obsessive-refresh spirals.
I also thing there's less engagement on LW.* While it might depends on the part of twitter, there's a lot more replies going on. Sometimes it seems like there's a 100 replies to a tweet, in contrast to posts with zero comments. This necessarily means replies will overlap a lot more than they do on LW. Imagine getting 3 distinct comments to a short post on LW, versus a thread of tweets, with 30 responses that mostly boil down to the same 3 responses that are being sent because people are responding without seeing other responses. (And if ther... (read more)
This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.