Posted this before (and it is a bad analogy I am sure) but I find moaning that something is in twitter is akin to moaning that someone told a story in a pub.
Pubs are noisy, and busy, and distracting, and I don't like them, and they aren't great for kids at night...
But it doesn't matter - the person was there, their friends were there, they had a story they wanted to tell and they told it in a way they enjoyed.
End of. Great if someone videoed it so others who don't like pubs could see it too, but mainly that doesn't happen. Just accept that some people like different things than you, and if it bothers you - take their content and blog about it, critique it and share it. But don't tell the story teller to change - especially if you want them to head somewhere where their friends are not... The point of a good story is to entertain an audience, wherever they may be.
Except twitter is a choice made explicitly. It's like you are planning to make a lecture to your friends about an important subject, and of all possible venues you choose the noisiest, most packed pub, so your friends have to go there even though otherwise they wouldn't.
Threads hack the algorithm by driving up interaction, though. It’d be like if you were in a pub with millions of other people and instead of being able to talk to anyone the owner started recommending people to talk to based on little submissions by enterprising CEO of Mes.
Hi welcome to Jack’s. Drinks? What? No, but see that group of people over there… that dude (he/him) has quite the story to tell about the pitfalls of using css transforms when rendering responsive content on a certain older version of webkit. And see that group over to the left… that person (they/them) is real angry about something I have no idea what but other people are listening so you better head over. Oh and please walk through the queue… mind my little sign spinners if their wares interest you do entertain their incredible offers. Off you go!
I think Discord (and possibly still IRC) is the digital pub.
> is akin to moaning that someone told a story in a pub.
There is a huge difference though. A person telling a story in a pub is basically trying mainly to have a good time with friends that are immediately there. There are no “pub influencers”. For the most part, news articles don’t go around quoting pub conversations. With Twitter, there is a more performative aspect. The use of Twitter is not just about sharing a good story with friends, but rather a desire to be known more broadly as a good story teller.
It is this aspect that turns a lot of people off to Twitter.
Thank you for this. I love many blogs, but as you know many blogs out there are trees falling in the forest with no one around to hear them. Great coherent (and interesting) thoughts are just hard to consolidate in the blogging form factor. Getting a following is even harder and in todays world linking to blog posts is less likely to get readership. That said, I have no qualms with twitter threads as a medium for disseminating knowledge. It works in the public square for better or worse.
I think this is a good analogy. But isn't it possible that some people really do not know that they should go on youtube and record their stories? It seems like the argument is trying to a priori settle the question of whether you should apply "Voice or exit" [1]
I don't think your personal reading comfort is the focus of whoever is writing threads on Twitter. Blogs are long form content, with structure and chapters and long sentences. Twitter threads are a collection of short, abbreviated thoughts that center around a subject.
These two rarely compete. I don't think I've ever seen a Twitter thread that would be better if it were a blog, and I don't think I've seen blogs that I'd rather see as a twitter thread.
If you're a blogger or website designer then you have entirely different goals than the people writing threads on Twitter. People here moan all the time about things being a Twitter thread instead of a blog but nobody cares about what you prefer. Twitter threads are the result of someone on social media deciding to talk for a bit more than one post, not some predetermined article someone wants to write. There's no long draft being queued one by one, posts are told separately.
Expecting people to set up a blog and link to it is like asking a friend who's telling you a story to stop and write the whole thing down because all of the unnecessary side details are distracting you. It's unnecessary, rude and if they went along it'd detract from the story being told. If you dislike the way content is brought out on Twitter, don't go to Twitter. You can block it in your Pihole, Adblocker, hosts file, you name it. Don't tell others how to tell their stories, that's not your call to make.
I'd prefer more people I follow to be on open alternatives such as Mastodon, but I'm not going to write blogs about advicing people why Twitter is bad and Mastodon is better.
> Blogs are long form content, with structure and chapters and long sentences.
They don't have to be. I read blog posts all the time that are three-to-ten paragraphs. Just someone reeling off about some particular thing that's on their mind, taking up exactly as much space as it takes, with no extra space for puffery. That's what the average text post on Facebook (not Facebook Pages) looks like. That's what the average text post on Tumblr looks like. Etc.
The long articles that get posted to Medium et al and shared on HN are the exception, not the rule. They're often not even "blog posts" per se, in any conventional sense; they're editorials or works of journalism, pieces by professional writers. Or they're single-page dives into a subject that go so deep that they could have been whole book. If it takes you multiple days to write, it's not a blog post.
> Twitter threads are the result of someone on social media deciding to talk for a bit more than one post, not some predetermined article someone wants to write.
I don't know about you, but personally, most of my own blog posts are the result of me starting to write an HN comment; realizing it's become too long; and then cutting the text out of the HN comment field and pasting it into my blog's post field, writing the rest of it, and hitting Post.
In other words, for me at least, blog posts are overgrown comments, where they start to seem to hold value out-of-context (though I do usually link the thing I'm replying to, because that's lazier than rewording the post to make it context-free.)
And usually, once I post the post to my blog, I paste the link to the post back into the comment field I was originally typing in. It still serves as a reply to the parent comment. You just have to click through to look at it.
Isn't this the original concept of Twitter? Microblogging, where Twitter acts as the index/"spine" of your blog, and external sites act as the meat on the bones?
> Don't tell others how to tell their stories, that's not your call to make.
Speech is communication. People talk/write/etc. because they want other people to listen to them, and take in what they're saying.
As such, telling someone that their chosen medium sucks for communication, isn't a slight against them; it's feedback about how well their stories are doing at their goal of achieving effective communication.
If a great band sets up an outdoor concert next to an open construction site with tons of workers using jackhammers, I imagine you'd have feedback about that choice for them, wouldn't you? It's certainly their choice... but if their goal is for people to be able to hear the music, then there might be a few things they're not realizing.
I agree that Twitter is a poor medium for writing. But Twitter gives you an audience (and retweets).
A recent discussion on Hacker News on Medium had a number of posters say that without a presence on Medium they would not have found exposure for their writing [1].
If the platform gives you an audience, you can't underestimate that appeal for authors of any topic.
I started writing a blog on a niche topic in 2007 and continued writing fairly regularly until 2013. Why did I stop? Simply because hardly anyone was reading the blog!
At first, I convinced myself I was writing for myself and an audience was not important. But over time, I came to realise that, although the size of the audience was not important to me, the interest and engagement of readers did matter (especially for a blog with a very niche topic). Hardly any readers commented on my blog posts (which was important to me).
Today, there are lots of blogs - mostly corporate blogs writing about their products, or single author bloggers trying to establish their "personal brand". The writing style is often inflated, formal, corporate-sounding: in short, simply bland. What's gone is the more personal voice of an author - more common when personal blogging was more prevalent. I think the heyday of personal blogging is mostly over. And that's a shame.
> But Twitter gives you an audience (and retweets).
It only gives you an audience and retweets if you already have an audience and they retweet you. If I posted a Twitter thread, it would be nothing but crickets. It's extremely difficult to build up a Twitter following of 10,000 that are willing to interact with you and retweet your stuff in 2021 unless lots of people know you outside of Twitter. For the most part, the days of Twitter interaction are over. These days, it's mostly about self-promotion and existing brands.
> I agree that Twitter is a poor medium for writing. But Twitter gives you an audience (and retweets).
Does it though? I have a blog and occasionally tweet. My blog gets about 30 hits on an average day, mainly through search engines.
If I tweet, I get maybe 20 impressions. And those impressions are all that I get, nobody goes back and reads 6 month old tweets and there is no way to search for them.
I also hesitated to write on medium or not. On the upside you get so much exposure but on the downside the platform itself is pretty crappy and it's not really "your own place". For now I continue on my personal blog but I recognise the advantage of Medium.
I hate Twitter as a company and a social institution, but
1. "People will share a random Tweet from a thread" <- this is a feature. You can't easily address bits of a blog post unless the blog uses headers with easily accessible links that one can copy. Also, getting the broader context from a Tweet in a thread is pretty easy.
2. Blogging is hard. Not just creating a blog, but actually framing the content. Tweeting in a thread feels easier. There are rails. I can respond articulately here or on Twitter, but for whatever reason I always feel like my every attempt at blogging is miserable. I'm envious that the author of TFA finds it so natural, because it's something I'd really like to be able to do well. In the meanwhile, I have Twitter threads and HN comments.
1. How this is a feature? You share one bit out of 200 tweets and expect the audience to understand what it is about and comprehend the proper context? That isn't happening. The only thing that happens is taking quotes out of context and misinterpreting them.
Blogging takes the same effort as twitter-threading, except it saves you annoying "1/"s and clicking "post" each time. Just do like a twitter thread, but instead of clicking "post" (or whatever it's called) press "enter". Once you're done, you've got a blog post. So easy.
I am one of those loonie cave dwellers who want nothing
to do with Twitter.
I find it to be a horrible UX in almost all ways.
The limit of how many characters you can type in a message
nearly guarantees clickbait, sensationalism, and idiocy.
Getting around this most fundamental part of Twitter,
with "threads", is a painful experience for the reader.
(In my opinion).
If Twitter included proper support for it, it would be better. Each post on a thread would appear directly after each other and stripped of unnecessary repeated parts.
Except now you have basically changed the main idea of Twitter and allow longer posts.
I like posting things on my blog.
I know I have only 3 readers, one of whom I pay
but you get a chance to build content in your own silo
and can be as long winded as you feel like.
I would have no interest in HN if it was not for the
thoughtful and high-quality long form discourse it has.
If a story is a link to Twitter I just click right onto
the discussion.
I guess my blog is a barren wasteland and I might pull
in 1 reader from Twitter
It is a horrible UX that makes it close to impossible
to convey a story. (Unless its "This is my headline" click here
"Forget First Drafts; Write Perfect the First Time Instead"
or
"Forget The Way That Happens To Work For You; Write The Way You Failed To Do For Years Instead".
Blog posts are probably more readable than Twitter threads; I won't argue that. But if using Twitter is the thing that gets you to get ideas out of your head and into the written word, it's a hell of a lot better than just thinking about that awesome blog post and then never writing it—and, as siblings have noted, the "dump into Twitter, revise into a blog post" flow is both common and totally reasonable.
Funny how my experience is the complete opposite. I perceive twitter threads as a superior format of consuming reading content.
- it's chunked, which forces the writer to formulate more structured thought nuggets and keep the reader engaged
- it allows you to share specific portion of the content that you like instead of sharing a blog that people ignore because they never read past the intro
- instead of bashing publishing on twitter threads, I think we should focus on developing tools that allow to convert and reshare your (I don't mean your but you get the idea) long read blog that nobody reads into twitter threads
I have never skipped a thread on twitter. The longer the better and more engaging.
I strongly believe that format is superior to most other reading formats and it aligns really well with our biological focus rhythms
Really really few bits of content deserve a blog post. Most written content is ephemeral and uninteresting two weeks from now. It's perfect to be buried in Twitter never to be seen again. There is certainly content that deserves better layout, better archiving and so on. But most written content on twitter isn't like that (at least in my feed). Also, having to leave Twitter and click a browser link is usually to disruptive for me when scrolling twitter. Information that doesn't come on the spoon loses my attention to the information in the next tweet.
Strongly agree - a blog post usually gets padded with tons of filler for SEO; and is prepended with 3 paragraphs of some "backstory" from the author's life as to why XYZ is now relevant or useful.
Twitter forces succinct and disposable thoughts.
Similarly, I would sooner read Twitter the rest of my life than ever touch another business book which are all glued together compilations of blog posts and/or the author's re-hash of research of 100+ academic papers. I mean, it's sort of understandable things have went this way; any original business thought of substantial merit has already been written about probably pre-1995. Twitter is good for catching the few little new age nuggets without re-reading 300 page books of the same drivel.
Actually, I prefer to write a twitter thread first and then blog it. My 2c on this,
- Yes the ux sucks but people are used to reading threads.
- There are tools like thread reader app that unroll threads and store for future reference.
- tools like Dewey help manage threads.
- tools like chirr.app and typefully help create threads with nice heuristics that split your post into threads.
- You get distribution and get to grow an audience.
- specific tweets can be thought of as “highlights” that are retweeted vs liked
- it’s easier to
link other peoples tweets and threads, as well as your own to build a knowledge graph of sorts
- it forces you to think in small increments and build up your arguments in sequence. I’ve found it quite helpful in articulating thoughts.
- lastly, by publishing it on twitter and inviting debate, your audience could get you to rethink povs and also add more of them to your thinking. when you finally write a post, not only are they more likely to retweet and get you seen wider — they’ll feel an aspect of contribution to it which helps cement your relationship with them.
Many of these “fixes” suggests that your reader have a Twitter account.
People who use Twitter frequently assumes that most people use the platform, which isn’t really true.
Still, I can’t fault people for posting longer Twitter threads. Even if setting up a blog is pretty easy, they already have a platform, however flawed it might be. Also few people want to set up a blog for a single story, especially when the target audience was originally other Twitter user.
> As someone who has only really started using Twitter in the last few months
Seems like a little bit of a self-report right off the bad. The OP is not very familiar with Twitter and the ecosystem and user behaviors of the platform, and is coming with (admittedly biased) perspective as a blogger.
For example:
> someone that I follow re-tweeted Tweet number 47 in this ridiculously long thread.
This is actually highlighting one of the benefits of Twitter threads as a text - chunkable content. Blog posts are great for a long narrative that requires full context of the intro/supporting/conclusion, but Twitter threads excel in areas where the content is more a series statements/points that can stand alone. Think more like "bullet points" of a topic rather than a longer-form narrative.
But then, the OP transitions into the quick assumption that the problem is the difficulty in setting up a blog, which is a big assumption that I think misses the actual benefits of this format vs. traditional blogging.
I'm not going to try to debate the merits of Twitter threads vs blog posts, but I will note that I, like many others, have an abandoned blog [1] but manage to post plenty of Twitter threads. The activation energy needed is just way lower on Twitter, and (as an academic) if I need to write something much more serious it'll usually be a paper.
If you want people to blog more and tweet less, you probably have to find a way to make it easier than firing off a tweet thread.
Edit: Also, I have to say – if blogs are such an inherently superior readability experience, why is engagement so much higher for Twitter? Perhaps it's shallow engagement, but it seems like the height of nerd-think to say that a platform actively used by hundreds of millions is "unusable".
Threads are definitely a worse experience. However, I think you're overestimating the ability of one's audience to transfer to another platform. It's hard enough to get someone to read something on Twitter, let alone get them to click through to another site.
Threads capitalize on the momentum of writing a good tweet, without losing a reader by making them go to another site.
That's why Twitter should've bought Medium and integrate it with Twitter. And then Twitter could've offered you to convert and transfer Twitter threads to Medium blog posts. Think of it as Facebook/Instagram interoperability.
As usual Twitter was slow and without vision and then Substack emerged.
Do you really need a reader that is too lazy to click on your article? And from the reader point of view, I assume that whatever is written in twitter threads is not really that important, since the authors could not be bothered with writing in a proper and discoverable form.
I'm surprised that no one mentioned that twitter at least qualifies as bad hypertext whereas the web (and thus blogs) don't.
In particular twitter has (primitive) transclusions: by manually breaking up your writing into awkward ≤ 280 char chunks you basically allow other people to quote and comment or reply to them, recursively. Although tweets can and frequently do get deleted, that is the only form these transclusions break; they don't silently and unverifiably change content.
The web has absolutely no facility for quotation and commenting or even for pointing at some particular content in a way that ensures any continuity of content between the time of link creation and perusual. It is thus an abysmally bad medium for any form of discussion.
> In particular twitter has (primitive) transclusions: by manually breaking up your writing into awkward ≤ 280 char chunks you basically allow other people to quote and comment or reply to them, recursively. Although tweets can and frequently do get deleted, that is the only form these transclusions break; they don't silently and unverifiably change content.
Is what I'm doing right now not some kind of transclusion? It's even more primitive than Twitter. Plus you can delete or edit your comment but my reply retains context. Twitter would present it better, maybe structure it more semantically, but that's hardly a killer feature over traditional web text in my opinion. Maybe if you're a social researcher, sure, Twitter knocks your socks off. But otherwise, I think we can have a perfectly productive discussion in this manner no?
I argue it's even better because the person who replies (i.e., me in this instance) can break up the original text to reply to a specific point, include as much context as possible. Sure I can misquote you to benefit my argument but it's easy to call bad faith.
(As for verifiability especially of who typed what, I wouldn't argue on that front. Online it's basically a huge game of he said, she said. You can add barriers to make falsification difficult but that won't stop a determined and well-resourced fascist regime or two. Again, just my 2c.)
This. Twitter markup is so heavy I avoid clicking it for fear of my browser locking up.
If I really really really want to read an interesting-sound thread, I open it with Nitter.
Otherwise, I take a "medium is the message" approach to Twitter, and just assume I'm not missing much, just like with Medium or Reddit: If someone chooses Twitter as the medium, their message probably isn't worth my time either.
Write a blog-post, and have a brief summary + link on Twitter?
------
The main benefits to the blog-post is that you get writings in exactly the format you want. Sure, Twitter does images and videos now, but there's still MathML, DotViz / Javascript graphs / etc. etc. that I can run on a blog that will never be allowed on Twitter. All possible with static-sites or low-dynamic sites (ex: low-CPU usage PHP).
Lets say you're a Chess blogger. Would you really want to be making .png files (images) of chess positions and talking about them? Or would you rather have a FEN/PGN-interpreter in Javascript on a blog-post? (First one on my search engine: https://mliebelt.github.io/PgnViewerJS/examples.html#1102)
No. You load up your favorite PGN-editor. You document the positions you think were interesting. You download the best PGN-interpreter you can find on Github onto your blog and let it rip.
The main benefit of Twitter is that the audience is there. Have your toxic comments spew out over Twitter, but your content remains on your site specifically.
------------
The reason why the HTML format is so powerful is because the writers can invent new formats specific to their communities (thanks to the magic of Javascript). Chess players have invented PGN to describe games. Tetris players have invented Fumen (a Javascript play-by-play of Tetris strategies). The Math community has LaTeX / MathML / MathJAX. Etc. etc.
From the stuff that gets pumped into my feed the purpose of most “threads” isn’t so much about sharing information as building an audience and gaining followers. Heck a lot of them just rehash blog posts written by someone else.
Anyway if gaining twitter followers is your real goal then taking them off platform isn’t the way to do it.
I find creating a Twitter thread has a lower barrier of entry in comparison to writing a blog post. Sometimes I have contents which I'd like to get out, but then I can't motivate myself to write a full post (where I'd also want to explore the topic in more depth to achieve a certain level of quality). Doing a quick thread is a nice way out then.
For instance, in this case [1] I felt it's not worth spending the energy and time on a post, but it was still an interesting bit to share. Plus, tweet threads allow for their own kind of fun experiments like this one [2], which you couldn't reproduce with a blog post. I.e. both have their place in my opinion.
Threads are similar to slideshows - you can put a few bullet points that sound reasonably correct, but lacking in detail and context and you mostly forget about it after you read it, it's disposable.
A long-form narrative that is convincing and made to last and read repeatedly is much harder to write.
the explosion of threads is because of twitter's algo...
to view a thread, you have to interact with a tweet. this interaction drives metrics that results in the tweet showing up more frequently in the algo-feed. the multi-post nature of a thread means there are more opportunities to "like/retweet" - which also drive the algo-feed.
all this increases follower count... and an audience (that's soon to be easily monetisable on twitter) is far more valuable than a blog... unfortunately
I'll take Twitter threads over YouTube every single time.. I don't want to spend 10+ minutes listening to some guy explain something that should take less than two minutes, but they have to prolong it to get that ad revenue
The main reason to do a Twitter thread (which the author alludes to but doesn’t look at enough) is audience. Good thoughts can go viral quickly on social media. The same cannot be said for blog posts (even when shared). This could be speaking to a larger issue but still the case.
As an example, I published this blog post [1] in November of 2019. It was probably read by hundreds to low thousands in about a year.
I then made a twitter thread out of the same content a year or so later [2], it was seen by over half a million people.
This is not to say audience is the only consideration but a combination of a blog post turned thread might be the best way to get audience and an archive.
[+] [-] ljf|4 years ago|reply
Pubs are noisy, and busy, and distracting, and I don't like them, and they aren't great for kids at night...
But it doesn't matter - the person was there, their friends were there, they had a story they wanted to tell and they told it in a way they enjoyed.
End of. Great if someone videoed it so others who don't like pubs could see it too, but mainly that doesn't happen. Just accept that some people like different things than you, and if it bothers you - take their content and blog about it, critique it and share it. But don't tell the story teller to change - especially if you want them to head somewhere where their friends are not... The point of a good story is to entertain an audience, wherever they may be.
[+] [-] smsm42|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevq|4 years ago|reply
I really like this analogy as it gives a different perspective. Thanks for that.
In fairness to me though, I never told anyone to change - I simply gave my opinion then questioned why people find it useful and get value from it.
[+] [-] dcow|4 years ago|reply
Hi welcome to Jack’s. Drinks? What? No, but see that group of people over there… that dude (he/him) has quite the story to tell about the pitfalls of using css transforms when rendering responsive content on a certain older version of webkit. And see that group over to the left… that person (they/them) is real angry about something I have no idea what but other people are listening so you better head over. Oh and please walk through the queue… mind my little sign spinners if their wares interest you do entertain their incredible offers. Off you go!
I think Discord (and possibly still IRC) is the digital pub.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|4 years ago|reply
There is a huge difference though. A person telling a story in a pub is basically trying mainly to have a good time with friends that are immediately there. There are no “pub influencers”. For the most part, news articles don’t go around quoting pub conversations. With Twitter, there is a more performative aspect. The use of Twitter is not just about sharing a good story with friends, but rather a desire to be known more broadly as a good story teller.
It is this aspect that turns a lot of people off to Twitter.
[+] [-] dkobia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epivosism|4 years ago|reply
1 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
[+] [-] jeroenhd|4 years ago|reply
These two rarely compete. I don't think I've ever seen a Twitter thread that would be better if it were a blog, and I don't think I've seen blogs that I'd rather see as a twitter thread.
If you're a blogger or website designer then you have entirely different goals than the people writing threads on Twitter. People here moan all the time about things being a Twitter thread instead of a blog but nobody cares about what you prefer. Twitter threads are the result of someone on social media deciding to talk for a bit more than one post, not some predetermined article someone wants to write. There's no long draft being queued one by one, posts are told separately.
Expecting people to set up a blog and link to it is like asking a friend who's telling you a story to stop and write the whole thing down because all of the unnecessary side details are distracting you. It's unnecessary, rude and if they went along it'd detract from the story being told. If you dislike the way content is brought out on Twitter, don't go to Twitter. You can block it in your Pihole, Adblocker, hosts file, you name it. Don't tell others how to tell their stories, that's not your call to make.
I'd prefer more people I follow to be on open alternatives such as Mastodon, but I'm not going to write blogs about advicing people why Twitter is bad and Mastodon is better.
[+] [-] derefr|4 years ago|reply
They don't have to be. I read blog posts all the time that are three-to-ten paragraphs. Just someone reeling off about some particular thing that's on their mind, taking up exactly as much space as it takes, with no extra space for puffery. That's what the average text post on Facebook (not Facebook Pages) looks like. That's what the average text post on Tumblr looks like. Etc.
The long articles that get posted to Medium et al and shared on HN are the exception, not the rule. They're often not even "blog posts" per se, in any conventional sense; they're editorials or works of journalism, pieces by professional writers. Or they're single-page dives into a subject that go so deep that they could have been whole book. If it takes you multiple days to write, it's not a blog post.
> Twitter threads are the result of someone on social media deciding to talk for a bit more than one post, not some predetermined article someone wants to write.
I don't know about you, but personally, most of my own blog posts are the result of me starting to write an HN comment; realizing it's become too long; and then cutting the text out of the HN comment field and pasting it into my blog's post field, writing the rest of it, and hitting Post.
In other words, for me at least, blog posts are overgrown comments, where they start to seem to hold value out-of-context (though I do usually link the thing I'm replying to, because that's lazier than rewording the post to make it context-free.)
And usually, once I post the post to my blog, I paste the link to the post back into the comment field I was originally typing in. It still serves as a reply to the parent comment. You just have to click through to look at it.
Isn't this the original concept of Twitter? Microblogging, where Twitter acts as the index/"spine" of your blog, and external sites act as the meat on the bones?
> Don't tell others how to tell their stories, that's not your call to make.
Speech is communication. People talk/write/etc. because they want other people to listen to them, and take in what they're saying.
As such, telling someone that their chosen medium sucks for communication, isn't a slight against them; it's feedback about how well their stories are doing at their goal of achieving effective communication.
If a great band sets up an outdoor concert next to an open construction site with tons of workers using jackhammers, I imagine you'd have feedback about that choice for them, wouldn't you? It's certainly their choice... but if their goal is for people to be able to hear the music, then there might be a few things they're not realizing.
[+] [-] kevq|4 years ago|reply
Link if anyone is interested - https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/
[+] [-] design-of-homes|4 years ago|reply
A recent discussion on Hacker News on Medium had a number of posters say that without a presence on Medium they would not have found exposure for their writing [1].
If the platform gives you an audience, you can't underestimate that appeal for authors of any topic.
I started writing a blog on a niche topic in 2007 and continued writing fairly regularly until 2013. Why did I stop? Simply because hardly anyone was reading the blog!
At first, I convinced myself I was writing for myself and an audience was not important. But over time, I came to realise that, although the size of the audience was not important to me, the interest and engagement of readers did matter (especially for a blog with a very niche topic). Hardly any readers commented on my blog posts (which was important to me).
Today, there are lots of blogs - mostly corporate blogs writing about their products, or single author bloggers trying to establish their "personal brand". The writing style is often inflated, formal, corporate-sounding: in short, simply bland. What's gone is the more personal voice of an author - more common when personal blogging was more prevalent. I think the heyday of personal blogging is mostly over. And that's a shame.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28493431
[+] [-] bachmeier|4 years ago|reply
It only gives you an audience and retweets if you already have an audience and they retweet you. If I posted a Twitter thread, it would be nothing but crickets. It's extremely difficult to build up a Twitter following of 10,000 that are willing to interact with you and retweet your stuff in 2021 unless lots of people know you outside of Twitter. For the most part, the days of Twitter interaction are over. These days, it's mostly about self-promotion and existing brands.
[+] [-] AndrewStephens|4 years ago|reply
Does it though? I have a blog and occasionally tweet. My blog gets about 30 hits on an average day, mainly through search engines.
If I tweet, I get maybe 20 impressions. And those impressions are all that I get, nobody goes back and reads 6 month old tweets and there is no way to search for them.
[+] [-] realusername|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevq|4 years ago|reply
Couldn’t agree more, and I also agree that it’s a real shame.
[+] [-] throwaway894345|4 years ago|reply
1. "People will share a random Tweet from a thread" <- this is a feature. You can't easily address bits of a blog post unless the blog uses headers with easily accessible links that one can copy. Also, getting the broader context from a Tweet in a thread is pretty easy.
2. Blogging is hard. Not just creating a blog, but actually framing the content. Tweeting in a thread feels easier. There are rails. I can respond articulately here or on Twitter, but for whatever reason I always feel like my every attempt at blogging is miserable. I'm envious that the author of TFA finds it so natural, because it's something I'd really like to be able to do well. In the meanwhile, I have Twitter threads and HN comments.
[+] [-] smsm42|4 years ago|reply
Blogging takes the same effort as twitter-threading, except it saves you annoying "1/"s and clicking "post" each time. Just do like a twitter thread, but instead of clicking "post" (or whatever it's called) press "enter". Once you're done, you've got a blog post. So easy.
[+] [-] baud147258|4 years ago|reply
you can by just quoting the part you want to address
[+] [-] mathnmusic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThinkBeat|4 years ago|reply
I find it to be a horrible UX in almost all ways.
The limit of how many characters you can type in a message nearly guarantees clickbait, sensationalism, and idiocy.
Getting around this most fundamental part of Twitter, with "threads", is a painful experience for the reader. (In my opinion).
If Twitter included proper support for it, it would be better. Each post on a thread would appear directly after each other and stripped of unnecessary repeated parts. Except now you have basically changed the main idea of Twitter and allow longer posts.
I like posting things on my blog. I know I have only 3 readers, one of whom I pay but you get a chance to build content in your own silo and can be as long winded as you feel like.
I would have no interest in HN if it was not for the thoughtful and high-quality long form discourse it has.
If a story is a link to Twitter I just click right onto the discussion.
I guess my blog is a barren wasteland and I might pull in 1 reader from Twitter
It is a horrible UX that makes it close to impossible to convey a story. (Unless its "This is my headline" click here
[+] [-] Arubis|4 years ago|reply
Blog posts are probably more readable than Twitter threads; I won't argue that. But if using Twitter is the thing that gets you to get ideas out of your head and into the written word, it's a hell of a lot better than just thinking about that awesome blog post and then never writing it—and, as siblings have noted, the "dump into Twitter, revise into a blog post" flow is both common and totally reasonable.
[+] [-] kapral18|4 years ago|reply
- it's chunked, which forces the writer to formulate more structured thought nuggets and keep the reader engaged
- it allows you to share specific portion of the content that you like instead of sharing a blog that people ignore because they never read past the intro
- instead of bashing publishing on twitter threads, I think we should focus on developing tools that allow to convert and reshare your (I don't mean your but you get the idea) long read blog that nobody reads into twitter threads
I have never skipped a thread on twitter. The longer the better and more engaging.
I strongly believe that format is superior to most other reading formats and it aligns really well with our biological focus rhythms
[+] [-] Pxtl|4 years ago|reply
This. Wadsworth constant applies to prose and Twitter makes long preambles too awkward to use and so they don't.
[+] [-] alkonaut|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gompertz|4 years ago|reply
Twitter forces succinct and disposable thoughts.
Similarly, I would sooner read Twitter the rest of my life than ever touch another business book which are all glued together compilations of blog posts and/or the author's re-hash of research of 100+ academic papers. I mean, it's sort of understandable things have went this way; any original business thought of substantial merit has already been written about probably pre-1995. Twitter is good for catching the few little new age nuggets without re-reading 300 page books of the same drivel.
[+] [-] alehlopeh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viksit|4 years ago|reply
- Yes the ux sucks but people are used to reading threads.
- There are tools like thread reader app that unroll threads and store for future reference.
- tools like Dewey help manage threads.
- tools like chirr.app and typefully help create threads with nice heuristics that split your post into threads.
- You get distribution and get to grow an audience.
- specific tweets can be thought of as “highlights” that are retweeted vs liked
- it’s easier to link other peoples tweets and threads, as well as your own to build a knowledge graph of sorts
- it forces you to think in small increments and build up your arguments in sequence. I’ve found it quite helpful in articulating thoughts.
- lastly, by publishing it on twitter and inviting debate, your audience could get you to rethink povs and also add more of them to your thinking. when you finally write a post, not only are they more likely to retweet and get you seen wider — they’ll feel an aspect of contribution to it which helps cement your relationship with them.
[+] [-] mrweasel|4 years ago|reply
People who use Twitter frequently assumes that most people use the platform, which isn’t really true.
Still, I can’t fault people for posting longer Twitter threads. Even if setting up a blog is pretty easy, they already have a platform, however flawed it might be. Also few people want to set up a blog for a single story, especially when the target audience was originally other Twitter user.
[+] [-] advrs|4 years ago|reply
Seems like a little bit of a self-report right off the bad. The OP is not very familiar with Twitter and the ecosystem and user behaviors of the platform, and is coming with (admittedly biased) perspective as a blogger.
For example:
> someone that I follow re-tweeted Tweet number 47 in this ridiculously long thread.
This is actually highlighting one of the benefits of Twitter threads as a text - chunkable content. Blog posts are great for a long narrative that requires full context of the intro/supporting/conclusion, but Twitter threads excel in areas where the content is more a series statements/points that can stand alone. Think more like "bullet points" of a topic rather than a longer-form narrative.
But then, the OP transitions into the quick assumption that the problem is the difficulty in setting up a blog, which is a big assumption that I think misses the actual benefits of this format vs. traditional blogging.
[+] [-] kevq|4 years ago|reply
Probably should have been more accurate in the post, sorry about that.
[+] [-] moyix|4 years ago|reply
If you want people to blog more and tweet less, you probably have to find a way to make it easier than firing off a tweet thread.
Edit: Also, I have to say – if blogs are such an inherently superior readability experience, why is engagement so much higher for Twitter? Perhaps it's shallow engagement, but it seems like the height of nerd-think to say that a platform actively used by hundreds of millions is "unusable".
[1] https://moyix.blogspot.com/
[+] [-] antasvara|4 years ago|reply
Threads capitalize on the momentum of writing a good tweet, without losing a reader by making them go to another site.
[+] [-] mrkramer|4 years ago|reply
As usual Twitter was slow and without vision and then Substack emerged.
[+] [-] matusp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrec|4 years ago|reply
In particular twitter has (primitive) transclusions: by manually breaking up your writing into awkward ≤ 280 char chunks you basically allow other people to quote and comment or reply to them, recursively. Although tweets can and frequently do get deleted, that is the only form these transclusions break; they don't silently and unverifiably change content.
The web has absolutely no facility for quotation and commenting or even for pointing at some particular content in a way that ensures any continuity of content between the time of link creation and perusual. It is thus an abysmally bad medium for any form of discussion.
[+] [-] skytreader|4 years ago|reply
Is what I'm doing right now not some kind of transclusion? It's even more primitive than Twitter. Plus you can delete or edit your comment but my reply retains context. Twitter would present it better, maybe structure it more semantically, but that's hardly a killer feature over traditional web text in my opinion. Maybe if you're a social researcher, sure, Twitter knocks your socks off. But otherwise, I think we can have a perfectly productive discussion in this manner no?
I argue it's even better because the person who replies (i.e., me in this instance) can break up the original text to reply to a specific point, include as much context as possible. Sure I can misquote you to benefit my argument but it's easy to call bad faith.
(As for verifiability especially of who typed what, I wouldn't argue on that front. Online it's basically a huge game of he said, she said. You can add barriers to make falsification difficult but that won't stop a determined and well-resourced fascist regime or two. Again, just my 2c.)
[+] [-] forgotmypw17|4 years ago|reply
If I really really really want to read an interesting-sound thread, I open it with Nitter.
Otherwise, I take a "medium is the message" approach to Twitter, and just assume I'm not missing much, just like with Medium or Reddit: If someone chooses Twitter as the medium, their message probably isn't worth my time either.
[+] [-] dragontamer|4 years ago|reply
Write a blog-post, and have a brief summary + link on Twitter?
------
The main benefits to the blog-post is that you get writings in exactly the format you want. Sure, Twitter does images and videos now, but there's still MathML, DotViz / Javascript graphs / etc. etc. that I can run on a blog that will never be allowed on Twitter. All possible with static-sites or low-dynamic sites (ex: low-CPU usage PHP).
Lets say you're a Chess blogger. Would you really want to be making .png files (images) of chess positions and talking about them? Or would you rather have a FEN/PGN-interpreter in Javascript on a blog-post? (First one on my search engine: https://mliebelt.github.io/PgnViewerJS/examples.html#1102)
No. You load up your favorite PGN-editor. You document the positions you think were interesting. You download the best PGN-interpreter you can find on Github onto your blog and let it rip.
The main benefit of Twitter is that the audience is there. Have your toxic comments spew out over Twitter, but your content remains on your site specifically.
------------
The reason why the HTML format is so powerful is because the writers can invent new formats specific to their communities (thanks to the magic of Javascript). Chess players have invented PGN to describe games. Tetris players have invented Fumen (a Javascript play-by-play of Tetris strategies). The Math community has LaTeX / MathML / MathJAX. Etc. etc.
[+] [-] mikeryan|4 years ago|reply
Anyway if gaining twitter followers is your real goal then taking them off platform isn’t the way to do it.
[+] [-] kevincox|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gunnarmorling|4 years ago|reply
For instance, in this case [1] I felt it's not worth spending the energy and time on a post, but it was still an interesting bit to share. Plus, tweet threads allow for their own kind of fun experiments like this one [2], which you couldn't reproduce with a blog post. I.e. both have their place in my opinion.
[1] https://twitter.com/gunnarmorling/status/1271745125920759808 [2] https://twitter.com/nipafx/status/1438022721066123266
[+] [-] cangencer|4 years ago|reply
A long-form narrative that is convincing and made to last and read repeatedly is much harder to write.
[+] [-] ts330|4 years ago|reply
to view a thread, you have to interact with a tweet. this interaction drives metrics that results in the tweet showing up more frequently in the algo-feed. the multi-post nature of a thread means there are more opportunities to "like/retweet" - which also drive the algo-feed.
all this increases follower count... and an audience (that's soon to be easily monetisable on twitter) is far more valuable than a blog... unfortunately
[+] [-] martin8412|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] posharma|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaffoneh|4 years ago|reply
As an example, I published this blog post [1] in November of 2019. It was probably read by hundreds to low thousands in about a year.
I then made a twitter thread out of the same content a year or so later [2], it was seen by over half a million people.
This is not to say audience is the only consideration but a combination of a blog post turned thread might be the best way to get audience and an archive.
[1] https://www.mynameisjehad.com/making-the-case-to-decision-ma...
[2] https://twitter.com/jaffoneh/status/1376945166771056641?s=21