Particularly when it comes to dealing with whatever the Left’s freaking out this week. 140 characters gives you a surprising amount of space with [which] to express yourself, but the platform is not really designed to permit long, complicated, drawn-out debates. What it is good for is providing information (particularly links) for people that – and this is important – the Other Side cannot jam. Unless you let them*.
Which is not to say that you shouldn’t do things on Twitter (or any other communications platform) that amuses you. Merely that there’s a difference between ‘entertaining’ and ‘effective,’ and ‘indulging idiots’ rarely falls under the latter category.
Moe Lane
*This, by the way, is why I generally don’t RT hate speech and deliberately break replies when I backhand/block somebody getting stroppy. Most of those people are desperately trying to waste my time, or waste the time of people on my side who have demonstrated that they can succeed at Twitter. I find it useful to make it clear that there’s no point to it.
I tweet to send out information. When a lot of people start writing about the same thing, I tend to tie all I send out together. I also tend to use the hastags a lot.