That's too harsh. People don't go to twitter for lengthy paragraphs or op-eds. They go there for concise humor, news and generally just to find out what is happening with the world.

You're ignoring the real-time connectivity that twitter offers to the entire world. No other platform comes close.

And sometimes, this concise thought platform is not enough to share an in-depth thought. Hence, this.

My only complaint here is that this took way too long. Things must move really slow at twitter.

>People don't go to twitter for lengthy paragraphs or op-eds.

If this was true, don't you think people would stop posting tweetstorms that are 50-100 (sometimes more) tweets long?

Both can be true. It's entirely possible that the majority of traffic is people that never read tweetstorms and also that tweetstorms are very effective for some users.

I am a daily Twitter user (the key is to find interesting people, and to block annoying people), and I doubt I have seen more than a handful of tweetstorms over 20 and certainly not more than 50.

I've started following @SethAbramson for his analysis of the Muller investigation and a recent thread of his was over 130.

To be fair, even he hates it: https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/940658870808186881

> 1. I hate Twitter.

> 2. No one should be on Twitter.

> 3. I can't wait to no longer be on Twitter.

But using it gets him the reach he wants shrug.

I quit Twitter in '10 b/c of the 'social media consultants.' I recently started simply bookmarking specific accounts related to politics and propaganda. When certain Tweets get lots of comments, I read them all (up X,000s; yes, this is problem).

I'd be curious about your thoughts WRT to this thread, and the resulting 'threaded cache.'

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/939432544008921088

And this was turned into:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/939432544008921088

Edit: I should add that I don't have a Twitter account anymore, just a lurker.

and yet, mysteriously, many millions of people are absolutely addicted to this product.

I say that without snark, just wonderment at how resilient it is even thought it's so totally ill-suited for the actual use.

Twitter is very useful to broadcast to the world your thoughts and it forces you to take the extra time to make it short (lots of people disagree here, but my opinion is that if you cannot put your thoughts in a tweet or 2, you need to spend more time thinking about it).

There is a time and a place for long-form text, but that should never be because the writer has not taken the time to make the text short.

Your comment here would not fit in a 280 character tweet (or 2 original 140 character tweets).

There's a nugget of wisdom in what you're saying, and it animates a lot of the backlash on Twitter for expanding to 280 in the first place. But I think the value isn't concision but clarity. Concision forces clarity in some contexts, for some people, but destroys it in many other circumstances.

At least they are finally coming to grips with this fact that has been obvious to every sentient person on Earth who does not work at Twitter for at least five years now.