Tuesday: I'm obviously biased

Today we had an hour and a half full department meeting, and when it was over, I checked Twitter to discover that the entire world was freaking out because now some people can make tweets 280 characters long.  Things seemed to divide cleanly into three categories:

1. "Twitter is now even more the hell site."  First up, that's false.  Tumblr is the hell site.  Twitter functions, does not remove functionality, and does not require a third party extension to be usable.  This is the same complaint that happened when Twitter switched to circle icons, and when stars became hearts.  None of these changes matter.
2. "Twitter should fight bots and racists."  Yes, obviously.  And I'm sure they redirected the entire "fight bots and racists" team to make one column of the database twice as big.  That's how companies work.  Everybody works on one thing.
3. "Why even have Twitter if it's not short?"  It's still short, it just means people don't need to edit to make things fit.  I've not made tweets before because I couldn't figure out a way to abbreviate and truncate things enough to make it fit, and a stupid joke or pun isn't worth two tweets.  It sounds like that was a big part of the reasoning for the change.  I do like writing "perfect" 140 character tweets, and that's harder to do with twice the space, but whatever.

And yes, I'm certainly biased because I have a pleasant Twitter experience.  I follow people I find interesting, I block people I find offensive (and wish more people would just ignore assholes instead of retweeting their nonsense), I report as many accounts as I can if I see in a reply something that seems obviously reportable.  Based on a quick scrolling through my phone, I have 24 "we received your report" and 8 "there's an update on an account" notices.  If I understand how this works correctly, that suggests I have a 33% success rate.  Not awful.

I also understand that I have a small, private account, so I have to deal with less direct harassment.  I hope things will get better for everyone, but I suspect automatically suspending accounts would lead to a massive backlash.  I also would argue that asking a company to police the speech of the president of a country is completely missing where the real problem lies.

Again, I'm certainly biased.  I was so stunned, I didn't know what to put in my extra 140 characters.  I was going to add a picture and "look at this tweeter", but the jerk bird I was looking at flew away.

• Oh hey cool!  The drug I used to take is number three, and the one I take now is number one!  Hahaha!  I love how our healthcare system works!  That totally isn't extractive rent seeking by soulless monsters!
• This is kind of the line of thinking I've been trying to switch to.  I'm not going to say I always stick to it, but having a goal seems like a good thing.
• I should finish watch RWBY.
• This strikes me as the same humor as "Yard Sard", but maybe it's just me.
• I should probably be ashamed that I am thinking seriously about buying a $60 shower curtain now.  Perhaps Truth has something to say about that.