Notes
Twitter is the comments without all the stuff.
Maybe. On the whole, they look pretty similar. Thing is, Twitter has so much more value to me than comments on websites because of how I use Twitter.
Twitter is nuanced, comments are binary.
On Twitter, you control whose stuff you see. If you don’t like what someone has to say, you can stop following them. With comments, it’s all or nothing — you either don’t look at comments or you look and see all of them. To combat the trolls, spammers and internet douchebags, some sites (Digg, /., HN, etc) have introduced a points mechanism for comments so readers can vote comments up or down. Those kinds of systems help, but I don’t think the end result is anything like the kind of experience you get from Twitter. Besides, even with a voting system, the control over what you see isn’t in your hands — it’s in the community’s.
TL;DR: Twitter gives you a curated list of people you like hearing from; comments are a firehose of opinions you’re not in control of.
Of course, Mr. L already knows all of this. I’m pretty sure he was just making a funny. I’ll stop taking things so seriously from now on. Promise.
