Here's the entire Twitter thread in one page: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428584131835748359.html

I hate that we seem to have come full circle:

1. Write coherent, long-form articles which require sustained attention to write and read, but unfortunately can't be easily discovered or nonverbally reacted to by people sitting on toilets.

2. Write intentionally length-limited microblog posts or "tweets" as a cute experiment in brevity by design and creativity under constraints. There's no room for nuance and multi-person conversations are abysmal, but at least your stream-of-consciousness musings have the potential to be "liked" by toilet-bound readers across the world jonesing for buttery-smooth exploding-heart animations.

3. Write coherent, long-form articles, but then break them up into snippets of at most 280 characters, tweet the first one, then reply to yourself dozens of times to reconstruct the original article, forcing readers to scroll past dozens of redundant copies of your profile pic (which of course doesn't depict you) and your clever-only-the-first-two-times pseudonym, truncated over and over, only to invoke a third-party article reconstruction service by replying "@threadreaderapp unroll please."

Part of the advantage to tweet threads like this is that other users can reply directly to any one of the n tweets in the thread, rather than commenting on the thread as a whole.

Agreed that it can be clunky to read depending on the platform, but there's a reason lots of prominent personalities and bloggers still use them.

> Part of the advantage to tweet threads like this is that other users can reply directly to any one of the n tweets in the thread, rather than commenting on the thread as a whole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_styl...

Too bad the inline reply style got lost in email culture, but it's good to know it's alive and well on Twitter!

Personally, I'm glad it's mostly dead, at least in a forum context.

To me, at least, the inline replies were always a signal that a conversation was about to degenerate into an interminable running battle over minutiae.

Blogs exist, but due to network effect any given blog post is less likely to be auto-surfaced by an algorithm into people's field of vision than a stream of dozens of individual Twitter posts.

Just more evidence that effective != better

Agreed. Throughout its history, the story demonstrated by Twitter is that network effect is more important than technical competence. From their scaling- pains failwhale era through to this week where they accidentally de-verified Danny DeVito, the site continues to be extremely popular in spite of, not because of, its technical design and competent implementation.

'Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful.'

The world has an alternative since the web was born. Just host HTML page somewhere. Those who use twitter just don't care about their readers convenience. That's why I generally avoid any twitter links.

These comments about Twitter are really getting tiring. See any Foone thread and you'll almost always realize it's getting derailed by a huge comment thread complaining about Twitter.

Literally any other website. Even a Youtube comment would be easier to read.

But Twitter gets you views, so we're stuck with this.

Like an article or blog post.