I'd rather have those posts just written long-form, where people didn't have to use weird-ly stilted language because of the post format.
> And then each tweet needs to be punchy enough in 240 characters to keep people reading which produces a particularly annoying writing style.
I also find this writing style insufferable (every sentence a punchline), but though it may seem obvious in hindsight, the explanation that otherwise people won't keep reading had escaped me. I thought that was just a "Twitter" thing.
Twitter revolutionized online discourse. However, for whatever progression it brought us, it also brought with it a degeneration of interpersonal communication. Everything is a punchline, one-upping, echo chambers, Twitter mobs, brigadiering, and the half-life of a lot of information deserving of thoughtful processing has been reduced to hours.
/2 Blogs, articles, and HN comments like this, can ramble on and make diversions that I don’t always care for.
/3 I would like a dynamic slider control where I could contract someone’s writing to their essential point (tl;dr) or expand it (longreads).
/4 Bonus boffin round: a control to vary depth/complexity. I mostly would use simplification à la ELI5 or simple.wikipedia.org.
The web interface was similar to a medium blog post, but the amount of work for both the writer and the reader was more than I think most folks are willing to invest.
I thought it was pretty neat. A huge pile of work to write all that, but neat.
Popular content will have a much larger ratio - if I am a popular writer I might spend a day or two on a fancy blog post like described above, but if 60,000 people spend 10 minutes reading it that's 600,000 minutes - 10,000 hours! Now spending a bit more time to make it more useful/enjoyable/readable seems worth it.
That's how the print media wrote their articles. They've already sold the paper/magazine to you, so now the goal was to make you feel like you have as much information as you would like with as little effort as possible, so you're willing to buy the next issue.
Nowadays, with the attention economy, the writing style has changed. The main objective is to keep the user reading for as long as possible.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
tl;dr: skim-read good articles, dummy.
Longer version: here’s a thoughtless snark ignoring that you said you wanted longreads and ignoring you wanted to dial complexity to 11. Society’s tuned to custard, get off my lawn.
Extended version: I really like to show I am the smartest, most condescending, person in the forum. Let me state the obvious. Nobody listens or uses their brains these days, because TikTok. Your idea of a slider is lame. Normally I would just ignore it, however I felt compelled to make a sweeping commentary on society and your inane comment was just the hook I needed. I really wanted to correct your spelling and grammar, and comment on your smell, but I did remember that is against the guidelines[1]. If would love to downvote you to oblivion, but even talking about voting is illegal on HN: long live 1A</sarcasm>. Ironic huh?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
PS: Hopefully this amuses you: I am being facetious, but I am also trying to give you the gist of how your comment comes across to me, in my opinion. I am not a bad guy, and normally I try to write higher quality comments.
I was trying for a playful positive tone. I will try harder, but it is difficult, eh?
I suspect the difference I have with the person I answered is that the primary interaction I have with Twitter is links from HN, which are often short, relevant and to the point. I don’t see the flames because I’m not involved with the fire.
-- Voltaire
Epigraph to Andrew Potter, On Decline.
I think you had it right the first time: the medium is the message. Twitter posts can only be 240 characters, and there is no explicit mechanism relating those "1/n" threads together; you can't even "link to a thread", you can only link to a post. Therefore, each independent thought must fit in 240 characters, which naturally leads to punchy tweets.
I learn a tremendous amount from Twitter and vastly prefer it to needing to buy a book that I then need to skim to get the same info, or read a news article. Blogs have some advantages, but you can't really find them anymore, and I find my Twitter feed is higher signal than my carefully curated RSS feed ever was.
Is this "learning"? You sure get entertained, quick-and-easy-to-digest facts, good for short attention spans, and 5-10 minutes later you go back to whatever else you were doing. Or hop on the next "educative" twitter thread or somesuch. But have you actually learned something?
If I ask you a week later to summarize your new insights, will you be able to? Will you even remember that you read about this? I sometimes find an old tab in a browser window that I had forgotten to close a while back. I skim through the contents, oh right! That thing! That was interesting! Turns out, a twitter thread, barely a week old, about something interesting, "I really learned something!", but I had already forgotten about it again, and if somebody had asked, I'd mainly have answered "Oh yeah there was this thing, don't remember the details, or the conclusion, or anything really, but I think I read something the other day", which is just hot air.
We should not treat such twitter threads as educational content. They are short-term entertainment, and good at that, but in essence not very different from a tiktok clip of some girl dancing on the beach.
If you really want to learn something, you need to invest time. By reading a book, by discussing with knowledgeable people, by trying something out yourself and/or trying to put your own words down. This takes energy, patience, time and can be frustrating at times. But twitter threads can't solve this for you.
hmm...
1. (somewhat rare) Conciseness, brevity or terseness.
2. A form of media censorship where discussions are limited in topics on the basis of broadcast time allotments.
[...]
huh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_(media_studies)
I think there are places for both. However, reading up on a lot of business case studies, I noticed that a major tipping point for a company is often when they decide to step out of their niche.
Diversifying can handicap a company if they aren't careful, because it reduces resources to the core product.
However, it can also be a real boon (see: Microsoft + Azure, which now makes most of their revenue)
For all the horrible UX that Twitter, is, one thing I really appreciate is that the thought-leader (or anyone, really) was forced to sit down and write Pascal's shorter letter; i.e. to take their time and think hard how to convey just the essential ideas they want to express, without fluff or narrative detours (which, if preferred, can be found in other longer form media)
Does Twitter change this setting against your will?
source https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-use-twitter-timeline-algorit...
No thanks.
Real question. What even is a twitter thought-leader? An expert of twitter or an expert using twitter, or something else? If it’s an expert using twitter I would assume the way they use it would vary, so this must be something else?
Brevity is the soul of wit.
> Hobbits delighted in such things, if they were accurate: they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.
You can go to twitter for confirmation on what you already think, and amusements, but things that go against your worldview are basically impossible to do in short tweets, so you begin to filter them into a self-reinforcing bubble. And the algorithm notices and reaffirms.
And the self-confirming problem is less about the 280char thing and more about allowing people to create filter bubbles, which is intrinsic to social media.
Point-by-point rebuttals are extremely ineffective, because by the time you move on to the next point, they've already duct-taped the previous one back together. Nobody is keeping score, nobody goes "aha, I counted and he rebutted 7/9 of your points, so I don't believe you anymore!"
At this point, one must assume that Twitter will do nearly anything it can to disincentivize clicking out to a 3rd party site.
At least it's better than Instagram, which doesn't let you post clickable links at all in your posts.
I haven't had issues with link previews on my own content, but that very well could be the case for other sites.
This seems like it might be a somewhat good thing, for privacy. User generated trackers could be included in topical tweets.
Even if I direct link an image on discord, it essentially just rehosts that image on their CDN and displays it from there. Discord even allows that cached image to be hotlinked on any site. I have seen people use it like an image host for things like their "signature" on forums.
Attempts to make things decentralized all seem to be aggregating into central controls, i.e. "Web3/crypto" -> coinbase, kraken, etc
Why aren't older decentralized "services" protocols being looked at, or developed further - i.e. UUnet/newsgroups, torrent, etc?
Coinbase and Kraken are not "central controls" as you not only can use either and they are exactly fully interchangeable, but you can use any number of other similar services--or even deal directly with another user and keep your credentials locally--all of which are exactly fully interchangeable.
Keep in mind, in this walled garden, all the walls do is make you log in, everything else is still free.
Decentralization still requires someone to pay for keeping these services alive. You could argue every user somehow be able to own and run their own platform, but in reality most of the users will not opt for the overhead when you can get it for "free" from a provider. And in a semi decentralized world where a few separate providers keep the lights on, the providers would still need to be compensated for the time and resources they invest, which again brings you back to a different kind of a walled garden.
It's a trade-off that folks are willing to make, and for the "average user" (definition can vary depending on service/area) that is a very straightforward choice. I just hope that more folks understand what rights they give up by becoming attached to one platform as their publishing medium.
Where will the money come from? The only reason there's any investment in software at all is so that a monetizable product can be built on top of it. And nothing monetizes better than vendor lock-in.
That's how we did it the first time.
But some of those become popular and famous, and then there's little incentive to move elsewhere, as their "fans" are on the platform and so it continues to grow.
How can a company shit the bed so bad?!
Now it loads the SPA, you get a spinner, 1/5 times the API fails to load the actual tweet data. If you're not logged in you get bombarded with signup popups. Cookie banners come up from time to time even if logged int. Instead of the replies to the tweet, you get other supposedly related tweets as in replies, you have to click "Show more replies" over and over to load more of the fucking thread you opened.
And you never know when years of hard work will simply disappear.
I'm not even talking about being kicked out for expressing opinions that aren't trendy.
I once wrote for a large blog That just disappeared one day. It was after Google took over Blogger, and searching for help with the problem turned up hundreds of other people whose blogs disappeared. Some managed to get Blogger to admit it was a technical problem. A few for their content back. Most didn't.
If you're going to trust someone else's platform for your livelihood, make sure you have a Plan B ready to go at all times.
My guess is that this is an attempt to replace long threads (1/n), but those have their own place and mechanics and I don't see how getting people to write Twitter Notes is in any way a 1:1 replacement or improvement for that.
Time will tell.
It seems like they've maybe shifted prices down a bit, it used to be more than $10/mo, and measured based on page views. Now they're really pushing their content creator angle.
One small nitpick: Twitter says there will not be a login wall for reading Notes[1]. "Additionally, Notes will have unique URLs that people can navigate to from outside of the Twitter platform, whether or not they are logged in to Twitter, and even if they do not have a Twitter account."
So that's nice and somewhat unexpected. However, I don't see any signs of an RSS feed, which is table stakes if you care about interoperability at all.
is this better than a screenshot of the notes app? IMHO the answer is a pretty obvious yes. how it compares to various other blogging platforms isn't super relevant. it's not a blog, it's a feature for people who are already on twitter and already using twitter to publish longer-form content in suboptimal ways.
and if you don't personally use twitter, i'm not sure how qualified you are to judge whether or not something defeats the purpose of twitter.
I stand by the statement that Twitter moving into publishing long-form content puts it on the same pedestal with Medium and defeats the purpose of the platform. Which is OK - strategy evolves, and someone did the math that this is going to be more beneficial.
My other comments reflect my stance on their decision, but I am neither a product manager at Twitter, nor do I have any knowledge of the "whys" so take this with a boulder of salt.
Exactly and no Medium seems to be dying, I haven't read anything on that site in a few years since they added popups asking you to login before you can read.
Is your blog making you money?
> By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating).
I disagree. I think this is mostly meant to steal market share from other walled-gardens such as Medium. People who write on self-hosted blogs and the like will continue to do so.
The problem is when you try to be all things to all people you fail. I'd so much like someone like Elon Musk to take over Twitter. In the case of Musk I trust his judgement over the team running Twitter now. Can you imagine a group of two dozen people working a year trying to reinvent blogging? Knowing Twitter, sadly I can.
Nothing, except that no one will click on your link.
If your argument is that no-one will click on the card then twitter notes will fare no better because it's literally the same presentation.
Recall the story with Medium - yes, you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your content.
I know that I am talking with an overly developer-focused lens (a-la "you can reimplement Dropbox in a weekend"), but self-hosting blogs outside the "walled gardens" is not super complicated even for non-power users. Ghost has existed for years and is a very user-friendly experience. Want to be a bit more technical - go the static site route.
It might be a lost battle to convince the majority of the social media audience of this (after all, can't beat the convenience and the cost of $0), but I really do not see this as beneficial to those that deeply care about their long-form writing accessibility and sustainability.
Twitter already has login walls to just read tweets, so I'd imagine the same is likely to apply to long-form content as well.