Fwiw, I prefer chain of tweets like this to blog posts. It forces the author to compress as much information as possible into every paragraph and split up their thoughts.
A blog post can be equally "to the point" as a Twitter post, your SEO might suffer but I'd imagine 99% of bloggers really don't care. And FWIW, anyone can setup a WordPress in just a few minutes assuming you use a *.wordpress.com, to name just one of many free blogging platforms.
I had to scroll down ~75% of this page, passing what seemed like many dozens of posts all saying the same useless shit about the format and not talking at all about the content.
And that got me to the next top post, which... is someone just unrolling it.
Thankfully, soon after, someone asks a legitimate question about the content. Nearly at the bottom.
The twitter thread on the other hand is concise and easy to scroll through. A couple of memes because someone's having fun telling their story seems relatively benign compared to the average HN comments section drivel.
Note to Newbs: you can't dont vote until you hit 500 "points", and then an upside down arrow appears underneath the "up vote" arrow.
I appreciate the critiques, saves me the wasted time going to the twitter thread and then being annoyed in the same manner.
Critiquing the font is a technical conversation to a front-end designer :)
I don't necessarily like this kind of bent, but that's the way that it is. If you want consistent technical conversations, you should check out Lobste.rs.
Its like saying 'I wish he hadn't told they story down the pub, the pub is a terrible place to tell stories as it is too noisy and I find it hard to follow with everything else going on'. But hey, they were down the pub telling stories, that is where it happened and that is where they were happy to do it. They might not have wanted to sit on a stage at a conference or record a video for you.
By all means take their story and retell it like journalist and bloggers have done for years, but don't complain about someone's medium, just be glad they shared the story at all.
I just link to a better format from my twitter when I want to tell a longer story and it works great. I find writing longer stories in a string of tweets even more annoying than trying to read them.
More like 'I wish he hadn't told the story at the pub in small snippets over 4-6 drinks'
Twitter, unlike pubs, has intentional systems in place to interrupt medium to long-form communication. It was designed to be a bad medium for telling stories, so chaining a dozen tweets is a frustrating experience for both the author and the reader.
It's obvious why people still insist on using Twitter for telling stories: Twitter is a massively popular website, and the author will lose some percentage of readership if they link to an external blog. Ideally, Twitter would recognize that this is now a major use case and would add UI to support long-form communication. In the meantime, it'd be nice if people shared Twitter chains via threadreaderapp or authors used screenshots of the Notes app. Using a medium designed for telling stories would be even better.
But, again, if you're also annoyed that social story telling IRL happens with interruptions and digressions and background noise (and perhaps even four to six drinks!) then you are really asking for something other than what it is.
Really, this pub/Twitter comparison doesn't work. Yes, interruptions happen IRL, but they aren't systematically happening every other sentence. Also, you can use body language or talk louder to ensure you're understood IRL. Internet communication doesn't have the same luxury.
Disruption while consuming information in the browser is a different animal compared to person-to-person contact.
No, you usually have to go see Shakespeare for that.
Similarly, this fellow is telling an interesting anecdote. But what we see here is a man searching for a paragraph while living in the desert of a sentence.
Sending people away from your content on the social media site to view it somewhere else results in less interactions with the social media content -- there's not 20 tweets all of which can be replied to, liked, retweeted, etc, there's just one tweet (and a blog post that the social media site can't see).
Thus, giving people less things to interact with means that you'll receive less rewards. This is the "punishment".
It's "punished" in the sense that there's a relative negative consequence -- your post is raised up less by the algorithm than competing posts. This is colloquially valid.
It's funny, almost like I think everyone should have a website.
My opinion of course. Those who enjoy the twitter conversations, go for it.
This doesn't really make much sense. How are you getting lost in a single top-to-bottom thread? Memes are as obstructive as in blog post and banter.. well unless you're clicking into possible individual tweet replies they are just... not present at all.
What GP said doesn't seem condescending.
(This is a direct question, not sarcasm)
But I can see everything using Firefox (with lots of extensions). So not sure if it's browser or extension dependent. Annoying either way.
Was just curious since I (weirdly) only ever look at twitter in a browser
This is incredibly condescending.
I also tried Internet Explorer 11, but that genuinely froze my entire computer in its attempt to force me to load the page in Edge. I blame that more on IE than Twitter though.
The domain name in Twitter URLs can be replaced with that of Nitter or its mirrors to view the same tweet and threads using the Nitter front end.
It's a hard login wall.
Very few blogs puts such a requirement on their readers.
[1] It started happening last week.
But it doesn't. GP's summary fits in a tweet.
The author just split his text whenever he ran out of characters. He didn't compress any information.
I didn't get that feeling. If he truly did that the tweets would end in the middle of a sentence.
I also don't think the summary covered all of the interesting things in this story. No, I think the tweets told it in a good way, split up in bite-sized chunks.
Okay, so I'm a snob.
I do have to laugh though when I open the HN comments and the top comment is not about the content of the link at all but is some orthogonal gripe.
The web interface is absolutely horrendous on desktop and on my phone.
Part 1
Part 2
“Show this thread”
Spam
Spam
Spam
I'M HELPING! - cried the bug.
I was going to do neither things.
I an currently on twitters shit list: if I click on anything, it opens the install-app block screen
1. It answers the clickbait like title question and in that way saved me a click.
2. It’s very clear, concise, easy to read and understand.
This is a cool and fun story. Just let it be that.
GP's comment was fun and cool, every time someone posts something like this, you have to come in and throw your 2 cents in. We all know how you feel about it by now, if you hate it that much don't click on the HN comments. just let it be!
Even if it had been in a blog, if it was interrupted with memes and meanders,it would be a bad article.
I'm glad you enjoyed it, GP's comment should have nothing to do with whether you liked the article or not.
Twitter is garbage, its format is garbage. I certainly appreciate GP cutting through the cruft.
I wouldn't have bothered wading through all that to get to the simple little factoid. I appreciate the post, therefore.
I'd like to thank the bean counters at Twitter, because I'm not going to sign in, so this new feature means I'm going to spend a lot less time on Twitter.
https://nitter.nixnet.services/joelburgess/status/1428008043...
P.S. Nitter also puts RSS links at the top of everyone's timeline, which is handy if you would rather use an RSS reader than a Twitter app.
> Among Skyrim players, you'll occasionally see this tip: if you see a wild fox, follow it and you'll be led to treasure. Sometime shortly after shipping, we saw this going around online, and an informal investigation started. Who made foxes do this?!
> Skyrim uses something called 'navmesh' for AI navigation. For non-dev folks, this is an invisible 3D sheet of polygons that is laid over the world, telling AI where it can and cannot go.
> In most situations, you're seeing AI decide what do to (run at player, hide in cover, etc), use navmesh to make a path, and navigate along that path. Foxes are no different. But their AI is very simplified: they basically can only run away.
> So foxes flee. Why would they flee towards treasure? This is where it gets interesting. If you're close to an AI, it's in "High Process", or the most fancy, cpu-intensive pathfinding. It uses the full navmesh and will do things like line of sight and distance checks.
> To contrast, there's also "Low Process" - used for stuff like NPCs walking a trade route across the world. These are only updated every several minutes, and position is tracked very loosely.
> There is a sort of "Medium Process" for characters nearby, but who didn't need the complex pathing of combat. Because of the way the fox's AI worked (always be fleeing!) it's basically ONLY using this process.
> This is where understanding of how Skyrim uses navmesh comes in. Swaths of the outdoor world have simple navmesh. You don't need to add lots of detail in a space with basic topography, little clutter, or a low chance of combat. So wilderness = small number of big triangles.
> When you stumble across something like a camp, however, navmesh gets way more detailed. Added visual detail means added navmesh detail, and if we're placing NPCs of any kind, we also tend to add even more detail. So Points of Interest = big number of small triangles.
> You see where this is going? The Fox isn't trying to get 100 meters away - it's trying to get 100 triangles away. You know where it's easy to find 100 triangles? The camps/ruins/etc that we littered the world with, and filled with treasure to reward your exploration.
> So foxes aren't leading you to treasure - but the way they behave is leading them to areas that tend to HAVE treasure, because POIs w/loot have other attributes (lots of small navmesh triangles) that the foxes ARE pursuing.
> It's a nerdy little story, but I love it. Emergent Gameplay is often used to describe designed randomness, but this is a case of actual gameplay that NOBODY designed emerging from the bubbling cauldron of overlapping systems. And I think that's beautiful.
(I’m in the millennial bucket in case the ageism comments come in).
Yes, he could have told the story in one paragraph. Would it be as entertaining? Debatable. Would it be as accessible to the non-tech crowd? Definitely not. I can send these tweets to my non-techie girlfriend, and she'll understand and enjoy them. Your paragraph wouldn't cut it.
This smacks of the whole "A monad is just an endofunctor in the category of monoids, what's the problem?" joke, but instead of category theorists being condescending, it's just developers being condescending.
That they also summarized it in one paragraph for the audience here on hn is separate from that point
My opinion is, that the author, the one putting the work in decides the format and platform to use, but people are also free to dislike the format.
I think he just meant the overall narrative was hard to read, I think it was too.
I don't know what 'non-tech crowd' has to do with it. They can read blogs and paragraphs and other formats too...
What I'm arguing is that adding pictures/memes/space/cadence to information can be helpful to readers who aren't familiar with the subject area. Twitter makes that easy, and also has a broad reach.
Anyway, datapoint, works for me.
Glorious webtech future.
I won’t be signing up for Twitter, so I guess I can’t read it.
When I see a link to a Twitter thread, I know immediately what to expect. I know that the formatting will be consistent. I know that the site will be accessible and at least somewhat readable. I can see the reactions of other people to the content immediately. I can interact with the author in a uniform and easy way, if I want to. I know that the content likely won’t be too long.
This without even mentioning the benefits to the writer of the post. Twitter is free. It’s widely used, so you can get way more impressions that you’d ever get on a blog. It allows you to immediately see and interact with people reading your posts - it’s incredibly painful to do that with a blog that you host. It gives you decent analytics. It’s obviously way easier than hosting a blog.
Of course, blogs have many advantages too. Blog posts and Tweet threads solve two different problems.
I don't think Twitter is the wrong format to tell this story: probably more people read it as a result, and that's to the good. But I will note that one thing about blog posts is that the format encourages editing and revision, while Twitter encourages spontaneity. In this case, the story could have benefited from a second draft for the sake of clarity.
2021: HN: That fact the world still doesn't conform to what we want after 14 years means the world is still wrong.
Why not create a offline thread and link that for those who want it? Like this user did - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28231699
That's not necessarily arrogance. Look at Windows 11. Sometimes the world just has perverse incentives to make everything suck.
I don't see that as arrogance.
It's complaining about a cool thing someone did on Windows 11 while the world uses Windows 11 and offering the same alternative to Windows 11 as in 1999.
OP could have re-blogged it, rather than their not quite correct summary if blogging is where it's at.
And I also liked the meme's, I literally wondered where he got them from and how much time it would take. They were artistically well chosen and helped drive a good story.
Besides that, the context matters here. This post is riding off of the attention that another Skyrim WTF bug got recently, which was posted on Twitter. Continuing the conversation there seems like the lowest barrier to entry to me, considering that the author already has a Twitter account and a following there, especially if you actually want to reach people that might find it interesting.
> Continuing the conversation there seems like the lowest barrier to entry to me
You can also link it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28231129
there's a lot of gaslighting of people because twitter is changing their ui. (ie oh no? you can't see it? must be something weird, it works for me. But in fact, twitter is the one changing the ui for difference classes of users so nothing really works consistently from one user to the next)
We even have a tag just for this <p>
When I was reading that twitter-thread I was enjoying the style and the story. I don't like these pictures, yes, but it's just a miserably small part of the whole thing.
And when I was reading your comment I was regretting I’ve opened HN today. Are you so old to be so grumpy or so young to be so toxic? Not cool.
So why do foxes lead you to treasure? Answer: They pathfind away from player not by euclidian "distance", but simply by number of navmesh polygons. The game world has uneven navmesh density, with points of interest (locations often housing treasure) having a higher number of polygons, so the foxes tend to pathfind their escape path into them.