“Do you think the mean, dumb commenters come back to the site, read others’ commenting on how mean and dumb they are, and jerk off furiously? I’m guessing it’s some kind of nonconsensual public humiliation fetish, or why would they bother reading stuff they know they won’t like?”

from one AnathemaT.

I made a twitter using this URL:

http://www.erosblog.com/2009/12/05/vintage-nudes-restored/

Which was fine because it fit with what I had to say.

To my horror, the link got turned into a bt.ly link. Evil blind link, and it looks like I did it! Delete, delete, delete!

Then I went looking for the FAQ, which says: “if you paste in a link that is less than 30 characters, we’ll post it in its entirety. If it’s longer than 30 characters, we’ll convert it to a shorter URL.”

Huh. That’s odd. Two days ago, I posted this twitter:

http://twitter.com/ErosBlogBacchus/status/6306595076

Which contains this link:

http://www.erosblog.com/2009/12/03/sex-blog-posts-from-twitterland/

That one didn’t get eaten by the evil link eater and blindifier!

compare:

This sentence is 30 chars long
http://www.erosblog.com/2009/12/03/sex-blog-posts-from-twitterland/ (70 chars, not eaten)
http://www.erosblog.com/2009/12/05/vintage-nudes-restored/ (59 chars, eaten)

I hate to spam my twitter stream with experiments. Can anybody explain what’s going on?

Obviously, I now have to go off and do some research.

When I’m blogging, I’m swimming in an ocean of material, trying not to drown in it. There’s more published every minute than I could read in a month — and that’s just on the “open” internet, the part where the links work for everyone and there aren’t any passwords or secret knocks.

So, by policy, I don’t even try to read or look at anything that’s friendslocked or passworded or semi-private. Anything like that is symbolically flagged “this is not for the whole world to see.” And I’m a blogger who can’t even manage to skim all the public stuff that’s out there. Why would I waste my time getting permission to look at controlled stuff, and then actually looking at that stuff, when I don’t even have time to look at all the open stuff that I need to see every day?

So, I conceptualize anything that’s behind an access control as being dead information, not part of the live internet and thus not part of my conceptual realm. I don’t have time for it and I don’t have room for it in my head. It might as well not exist for me, because knowing stuff I can’t blog about is only going to make my blogging life more difficult, never richer or easier.

I hope that’s clearer than my twitter-length explanation.

Also, your comment regarding the private/locked Twitter accounts – most people do it to keep out the wrong people. Future employers, family, etc could possibly find your twitter account and man there’d be hell to pay! Since I tend to sometimes Tweet things that could get me in a bit of hot water…it’s better to lock. I approve anybody thats a blogger, and the rest I have to ponder.

After ten years of internet aversion training, I have a deep-seated aversion to clicking on a blind link. If I can’t see where it’s going, my instincts tell me it’s going to a Rickroll (at best) or a horrid Russian take-over-your-browser-with-hostile-javascript destination (more likely).

We always assume other people are like us. If I wouldn’t click a blind link on a bet, it’s hard for me to believe anybody else will. And short-form erosblog links (when I omit the www and use the ?p=#### format) are pretty short. (Although I’d like to know why Twitter html-izes the first part of the link only, ignoring the ?p=#### part.)

The other thing I hate about link shorteners is that they are more ephemeral than actual links — you’ve got to trust the link-shortening company to keep the translation software and database up and running. Again, probably not a rational objection in a Twitter universe, but still a deeply ingrained hatred in me after seven years of fighting link rot (and mostly, losing).

Finally, when I use the retweet button, the item I retweet publishes instantly. I don’t have a chance to edit or add something, making length irrelevant. Yet I’m assuming that your concern about link length is because you want to retweet with commentary. Is there something I’m doing wrong, or are you talking about a different thing from using the retweet button?

One small request. Would you please use a link shortener such as bit.ly (tinyurl is blocked by Zonealarm). It’d make it easier to retweet your Tweets.

Thanks, Pop! ;-D