Beyond its 140-character limit, Twitter’s next most-prominent feature is its linearity, chronologically posting tweets that gradually sink into the memory hole. Twitter’s algorithms have tried to shake up its temporal structure, but as some have pointed out, this tends to drown out less-known authors.
Enter Moments. Moments are like eavesdropping on hundreds of conversations at precisely the most interesting point. As opposed to obtrusive tweetstorms based on searching a keyword (as I did in my early days, riffing off @youtopos), Moments provide a handy cubbyhole for tweets you want to return to later, whether 10 years old or 10 minutes. It’s the closest you can get to meta-tweeting.
I’m obviously what programmers call an ‘edge case’ here — someone who uses a software feature in a way the programmer never anticipated. Yet, an interesting mathematical fact is that in an n-dimensional hypercube, most of the volume occurs at the edges, unlike with 2 or 3 dimensions (h/t). This is precisely the ‘pataphysical space that programmers occupy, where the exception is the rule.
I’ve made 561 Moments, mostly on philosophy or math. My favorite aspect is how they encompass a mosaic of often contradictory perspectives on the same concept — heteroglossia. Scouring twitter is also a surprisingly effective way to get the core of an idea, shorn of all unneeded verbosity. Last, it’s a backstage pass to the lore of a (sub-sub-)discipline, like the deep grad school conversations that I never got to have, or the mysterious origins of zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms.
After Twitter’s last major upgrade, I used an app to keep the old layout, which had a simple button for adding tweets to a Moment. On June 1, Twitter removed support for this. In short, it’s an order of magnitude more difficult to make them, so I have little choice but to move on. Still, I deserved any flack I got for curating other people’s ideas instead of my own, and now plan to blog more instead.
Some of my favorites came from conferences, compiling reams of hyper-erudite thought-crystals. (Though I’m told these authors optimized precisely for pithy tweets — rather than, say, substance.)
For the rest, even the titles alone give an evocative bestiary of avant-garde ideas. I certainly can’t claim to have my own ‘take’ on each of these, but I’ve at least tried to understand them from many angles, like a Cubist painting. It’s fun and informative just to go through the list and see how many you can rattle through, and for someone hoping to learn, these provide digestable sound-bytes spanning the spectrum from gadfly-bites to perspective-changing insights.