On: Ask HN: Please review our web app - User Interface Throwdowns

I actually have a twitter account that I set up when I had some potential work involving the twitter API. I refuse to actually use it though. I see twitter as contributing to degeneration in the quality of human communication. It mandates the very sort of short, low-quality messages that are discouraged here on news.yc.

Twitter is like the HN story titles, not the comments. It'll never be better than true communication.

But as a quick exercise, I tried to get your message down to 140 characters:

I have an account that I set up to use the API, but I refuse to use it out of wrk. Its just full of low-quality msgs that r discouraged @ HN

Generally I think people spend more time trying to fit what they want to say in those 140 characters, that it defeats the point of the length anyway (well the real reason is due to the SMS length, but the main idea of twitter was short messages, regardless of the limitations)

Perhaps human communication is evolving toward the use of highly compressed protocols. I won't pass judgement on that at this point.

Your compression of my message is probably as good as it's going to get, but it's lossy and takes longer for me to parse than the original.