I don't think this is due to the limit of 140 characters (even if it doesn't help) but much more due to the audience of fanboys and crow cheered during a fight.
There is the same problem on Google+ where there is not 140 characters limit. Any discussions with Linus or any other "celebrity" in it and the comments thread will be full of : "+1", "M. Linus you are so smart, you are my hero", "Well said, ripe him a new one" etc... Which drown any constructed argument and render any constructed debate impossible.
It's really unfortunate though there there are people who can't resist the urge to shame others and enlighten the world with their sharp & intelligent wit, such as the person who wrote:
"You have clearly not understood how the math works or why tail latencies matter in dist sys. I think we're done here."
> It's really unfortunate though there there are people who can't resist the urge to shame others and enlighten the world with their sharp & intelligent wit
Amusingly this has now happened in another thread in these comments.
The meaning of a post has been overshadowed by a conversation on how the author used word A when they really should have used word B, and then they were berated for trying to explain why they thought word A was acceptable in the context.
There's also the problem of "dot-@ing", where instead of starting a tweet with "@staz", people start it with ".@staz", meaning that the tweet appears in the timeline of everyone who follows you.
I rarely see this used in situations that aren't passive aggressive attempts to get followers to pile onto someone you disagree with. Totally ruins any chance of good debate.
I agree that this is not a problem that only affects Twitter.
Most of the current discussion platforms are way behind what was standard in Usenet or in your average Usenet client.
No threaded discussions, no filtering (not for the one who comments and doesn't want to read those +1 post and most often also not for the OP), not even blocking of people you don't want to read.
Oh I don't know, I remember plenty of people on usenet who would quote a fragment--deliberately eliminating relevant context--to create a straw man that they could tear into. Some people just like to argue, and the only way to deal with them in an unmoderated forum is to ignore them. Kill files were useful for persistent offenders.
Of course this did also happen on usenet. Call me old but a good flamewar beats a good shitstorm any time (and the names might even be an indicator why).
But one design element of twitter might make it easier to stumble into the realm of people who will wildly disagree with a poster's opinion.
Just replying to some tweet you can not know what kind of domain you are entering. With usenet groups the name has always been a strong indicator what people you will encounter.
If you post "Ruby sucks and is dead slow, Perl rulez!!1eleven" into comp.lang.ruby, you shouldn't be surprised if you get flamed. With twitter accounts, this is not that obvious.
Of course, this is a core design element of twitter that it is concerned with accounts and not thematical groups and both have their advantages and disadvantages but I think this is one of the reason that you can much more easily and unintentionally anger the wrong people on twitter.
Mailing lists can be ok with proper client but it's a step back. I found some subreddits useful (with RES) but even then it's hard to track new replies in threads that you are interested in.
HN has quality discussions but these are just about some links and it's hard to get back to some thread to see new replies (and preferably prioritize those from people who I value).
Every reddit thread has a separate RSS feed so you can drop it into your favorite RSS reader. I'm using a IRC bot with an RSS plugin to not spam my normal RSS feed aggregator.
But this doesn't solve the issue of being notified of replies to subthreads. Reddit threads up to 100 messages tops are manageable that way but anything larger isn't.
Compare that to usenet threads were you could easily handle thousands of messages in one threads, this is really a shame.
There is the same problem on Google+ where there is not 140 characters limit. Any discussions with Linus or any other "celebrity" in it and the comments thread will be full of : "+1", "M. Linus you are so smart, you are my hero", "Well said, ripe him a new one" etc... Which drown any constructed argument and render any constructed debate impossible.