To each their own, but I feel like the discoverability of the 'whole story' seriously suffers. Any time I try to follow a Twitter thread I can usually find 2/3 of the posts pretty easily while the rest tend to be buried somewhere in the memes and pointless banter.

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.

That's funny. I find HN far more annoying because of conversations like this. Instead of having good technical conversations it's almost always people critiquing things like the font that someone's using on their site, and for some insane reason it's voted up to the top. And here I am contributing to the problem by extending this stupid thread further.

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.

No idea if you know this or not, but I use the thread collapse button judiciously to skip these long sidethreads (after reading the first few subcomments...)

Side note: I used to think I was down voting when I was collapsing the thread and I felt REALLY bad for doing it.

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.

Thank you, I had the same idea about collapsing threads. This is really helpful!

Yeah, and normally I don't bother commenting, I just downvote and move on, but given that the comments section was already (in my mind) a disaster and the irony of the parent post I made an exception.

>That's funny. I find HN far more annoying because of conversations like this.

I appreciate the critiques, saves me the wasted time going to the twitter thread and then being annoyed in the same manner.

> good technical conversations [...] critiquing things like the font that someone's using on their site

Critiquing the font is a technical conversation to a front-end designer :)

As far as I can tell, HN isn't designed or intended for "good technical conversations", nor "on-topic conversations". It's intended for "interesting conversations in general" (or some variant) based on the guidelines, behavior of the moderator(s?), and content.

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.

I wonder if HN should offer two sections: Opinion and Insight. You decide where to post, but others can disagree through reports. If someone answers a question with an insightful comment, the thread is moved over.

Yeah, but that is where their friends, followers, audience, comfort is.

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.

> Yeah, but that is where their friends, followers, audience, comfort is.

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.

> 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'.

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.

Screenshots of text are inaccessible to assistive technologies without alt text. Twitter's alt text limit is 1000 characters.

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.

> But, again, if you're also annoyed that social story telling IRL happens with interruptions and digressions and background noise

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.

>Yes, interruptions happen IRL, but they aren't systematically happening every other sentence.

No, you usually have to go see Shakespeare for that.

The pub is a great place to tell stories though, so your analogy is an appropriate action in an appropriate place. This is like staging a play at a pub - great gimmick once in a while, certainly not a bad thing, but it just isn't practical to do a full stage production at an average pub. The lighting isn't there, the stage isn't big enough and the patrons are busy eating and drinking. It would be better to go to a theatre.

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.

You do realise that that reduces “engagement”, so most social media sites punish their users for doing that?

Can you explain how they're punished?

Because social media site algorithms feed on "engagement", people interacting with your content rewards you in the form of your content becoming more visible to others, which results in more engagement, which spreads it further, etc etc etc. This is how something "goes viral".

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".

You're speculating on "why" they're punished. I ask for "how". How is someone posting a link punished?

I told you how. Maybe you're being too literal?

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.

Sure, but would you actually create a new blog just to tell a story? I would feel pretentious, like my story is so good that I need to create a new blog for it. No, I would just use what's available to me.

Every blog started with “just” a story

Well if all you ever intend to tell is the one story then I concede, use whatever medium is familiar.

It's funny, almost like I think everyone should have a website.

I never enjoyed reading anything on Twitter.

That sounds more like a content problem, not a formatting issue

To me it is both. The UI and UX makes for terrible content, perfect for drama, but hard for clear exchange.

My opinion of course. Those who enjoy the twitter conversations, go for it.

The content is shaped by the medium it is presented in.

> .. buried somewhere in the memes and pointless banter.

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.

It’s not a single top-to-bottom thread. Twitter shows the first two posts from the thread and then abruptly cuts to infinite scrolling of suggested third-party content.

There's a button "see full thread".

…which is a trick that just prompts you to sign up for Twitter.

I just tried it logged out and I did not get any prompt.

Screen recording: https://imgur.com/a/hjiNrfE

Fair enough, that kind of sucks (I tried it on my laptop).

I honestly wonder if this is just due to different people getting different UIs. I just click the “see full thread” button on the last visible post of the thread, and I’m taken to the full thread.

This button forces you to login if you aren’t logged in. Inconvenient for us dinosaurs without Twitter accounts.

Not too mention, my ADD usually takes over, and half way through I am all of a sudden looking at cat memes.

I, not having a twitter account, literally can't navigate through the tweets to read them.

What GP said doesn't seem condescending.

I too am without a Twitter account. I am using Chrome on a laptop and had 0 difficulty reading this thread. What specifically is your issue?

(This is a direct question, not sarcasm)

This might be a mobile-only issue, but when clicking the post to see the rest of the thread, a full screen modal pops up forcing a sign-in. Twitter now requires a phone number to create an account, meaning that to read the whole thread I need to give Twitter my mobile number which feels a little weird.

For now, it looks like blocking all cookies on Twitter solves this problem.

A modal that pops up on any action taken that prompts me to loging, where dismissing it navigates me back to where I was before opening it.

Using Edge without any extensions, I also can't see the thread without logging in. Only the first two tweets.

But I can see everything using Firefox (with lots of extensions). So not sure if it's browser or extension dependent. Annoying either way.

I think this is hitting it. I do have ad-blockers extensions on, so that could be what's helping in this case. Also other people pointed out that it sucks on mobile (which I can confirm is an issue).

Was just curious since I (weirdly) only ever look at twitter in a browser

> but I guess that's too 1999 for the author

This is incredibly condescending.

If you’re made out of paper tissue

Twitter blocks the page with a pop-up that can't be closed, so a blog post would be a huge improvement.

Yes. I’m literally unable to read it without logging in to Twitter.

I don’t get this. There is no reason for anyone to have a Twitter account. It is awfully arrogant of Twitter to assume that anyone would want to sign up for an account just to read their users’ posts.

Is this sarcasm? This is their entire business model and how they get paid. I don't see it as any more arrogant than having to pay for a paper newspaper, digital article, or attending a conference

It is also awfully arrogant for stores to assume anyone would want to give them money for the things they are offering.

In what browser? I tried Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on Windows, and Chrome and Firefox on Android, all without being logged in, all without issue. I was able to view the full thread in each of those 5 situations.

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.

Depends on the platform. Medium does the same.

I think it makes a big difference if you have a twitter account or not. Without one navigating through the thread is much harder, on the edge of being a dark pattern, and you can't use unrolling bots.

There is a website called Nitter provides a clean front end to Twitter: https://nitter.net/ and mirrors at https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

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.

I wouldn't say that a modal popup that sends you back to the first tweet if you dismiss it is "on the edge" of being a dark pattern.

It's a hard login wall.

One very recent[1] problem for me is that Twitter has started hiding threads behind a login-wall. As a non-user that makes it impossible for me to read beyond the first few posts.

Very few blogs puts such a requirement on their readers.

[1] It started happening last week.

Try Fritter.

> It forces the author to compress as much information as possible into every paragraph and split up their thoughts.

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.

> The author just split his text whenever he ran out of characters.

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.

It's a sad world if we have all this technology and yet have to contend with either Twitter blogposting or a blog post with ads, 1.600 extra words and 50Mb of scripts you don't need.

I understand the lack of a blog, but even many blogs of late I have seen have adopted the frequent "meme interlude" style that I find ... unprofessional.

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.

You can't even read a thread on Twitter without working around their constant badgering for you to sign up.

The web interface is absolutely horrendous on desktop and on my phone.

I didn't bother reading it because Twitter wanted me to sign in. I came here for the synopsis.

Same. Ridiculous.

Level of perceived versus implied condesension is a function of cultural communication style. People in some countries just talk like that.

I think I'm considered condescending even among my cultural peers. I am autistic though.

If you can make an infinite tweet chain then compressing information cannot be an argument since it isn't something necessary. And if you cannot, you may potentially be unable to provide all the information you want or worse needed for the topic at hand. In any case a blog post isn't required to be big in size with very condensed text.

It’s literally unreadable to me.

  Part 1
  Part 2
  “Show this thread”
  Spam
  Spam
  Spam

“Show this thread” just opens a full page Twitter sign-up modal. Being subject to such games is degrading enough that I refuse to play along.

if you don't have a twitter account the thread is actually impossible to read FWIW.

I opened the thread in incognito both on desktop and mobile and could read the whole thing. I'm wondering if there's some kind of A/B testing going.

i deleted my account two months ago so it might be that. They accidentally still think I have an account to log into.

I'M HELPING! - cried the bug.