After this comment I went back to read the rest.
The saving grace may be that both small enough volume and sufficiently interesting to his audience to be just below the threshold.
This thread in particular is really bad.
Agreed, though, Twitter threads are a really poor communications medium.
Just NOT in twitter. I gave up on twitter and signed out of it years ago and refuse to sign back in.
I spent a good hour of my life looking for ways to read this thread. I personally know Yishan and value the opinions he cares to share so I new this would be interesting if I could just manage to read it.
Replacing the url to nitter.net helped but honestly it was most cohesive in threadreaderapp although it missed some of the referenced sidebar discussions (like the appeal to Elon to not waste his mental energy on things that aren’t real atom problems).
Maybe
we could put more
Words in a single
Please visit my new website and subscribe to my podcast
Line so it would be
More readable
random user comment: yes you're right mark that would be better
and much more user friendly
_ insert latest Musk schizophrenic rant_
Ah and I forgot the "sign up to read the rest" pop up that seemingly appears at random interval
so it reads more like the post you are reading now. where each tweet is a decent chunk of text.
making the reading experience only marginally worse than reading something on hacker news.
I understand why people tweet rather than write blogs. Twitter gives more visibility and is a far lower barrier of entry than sitting down and writing an article or a blog. That Twitter hasn't solved this problem after years of people making long threads and this being a big way that people consume content on the platform is a failure on their part. Things like ThreadReader should be in-built and much easier to use. I think they acquired one of these thread reader apps too
Twitter railroads the discussion into a particular type by the form of discourse. Each tweet, whether it's meant to or not, is more akin to a self contained atomic statement then a paragraph relating to a whole. This steers tweets into short statements of opinion masquerading as humble, genuine statements of fact. Often times each tweet is a simple idea that's given more weight because it's presented in tweet form. An extreme example is the joke thread of listing out each letter of the alphabet [0] [1].
When tweets are responding to another tweet, it comes off as one of the two extreme choices of being a shallow affirmation or a combative "hot take".
Compare this with the comments section here. Responses are, for the most part, respectful. Comments tend to address multiple points at once, often interweaving them together. When text is quoted, it's not meant as a hot take but a refresher on the specific point that they're addressing.
The HN comments section has its problems but, to me, it's night and day from Twitter.
I basically completely avoid responding to most everything on Twitter for this reason. Anything other than a superficial "good job" or "wow" is taken as a challenge and usually gets a nasty response. I also have to actively ignore many tweets, even from people I like and respect, because the format over emphasizes trivial observations or opinions.
[0] https://twitter.com/dancerghoul/status/1327361236686811143
[1] https://twitter.com/ChaikaGaming/status/1270330453053132800
The positive of that is:
a) possibility to like () just one post, or 2, 3… depending of who good the thread is
b) the fine granular way to like () gives the algorithm way better possibilities to whom to show a thread and even better, to first show just one intereting post out of that thread (also people can mores easily quote or retweet individual parts of a thread)
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
If we're going to pedantically point out rules, why don't we add one that says "No unrolled Twitter threads."?
Right now, I could make a comment on either your first or second paragraph, or on your entire comment. However, there is no way to determine which category my reply falls into until you have read it entirely. On a platform like Twitter, where there can be up to 100,000 comments on a given piece of content, this is very useful.
Better yet, it allows the author himself to dig down into tangent. In theory, someone could create an account and then have all of their interactions stay on the same tree without ever cutting off. Essentially turning their account into an interconnected "wiki" where everyone can add information.
With enough time your brain no longer registers the metadata around the tweet. If you ignore it and read it as an entire text it is not very different from a regular article or long form comment: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html
The truth is people can't focus for more than 15 seconds so instead of reading a well researched and deep article or book that might offer sources, nuances, &c. they'll click "like" and "retweet" whoever vomited something that remotely goes their way while ignoring the rest
> If you ignore it and read it as an entire text it is not very different from a regular article or long form comment
It is extremely different as each piece is written as a independent 10s thought ready to be consumed and retweeted. Reading it on threadreaderapp makes it even more obvious, your brain need to work 300% harder to process the semi incoherent flow, some blogs written by 15 years old are more coherent and pleasant to read than this
btw this is what I see on your link, more ads: https://i.imgur.com/rhaXStj.png
Not at all, in my opinion being able to interact with every piece of an exchange allows to dig down into specific points of a debate.
There is a soft stop at the end of every tweet because it's a conversation and not a presentation. It's an interactive piece of information and not a printed newspaper. You can interact during the thread and it might change its outcome.
When you are the person interacting, it's similar to a real life conversation. You can cut someone and talk about something else at any time. The focus conversation will shift for a short moment and then come back to the main topic.
For someone arriving after the fact, you have a time machine of the entire conversation.
---
About the link, it is only the first result on Google because I don't use those services and not me vetting for this specific one. I also use ad blockers at all levels (from pi-hole to browser extension to VPN level blocking), so I don't see ads online.
If I go meta for a second, this is the perfect example of how breaking ideas into different tweets can be useful.
Were I to share your comment on its own, it contains that information about a link that is not useful to anyone but you and I.
For someone reading our comments, they have to go through this interaction on the ads and this product. If instead this were two tweets it would have allowed us to comment on this in parallel. If it was HN, imagine if you had made two replies under my comments and we could have commented under each. However, that's the wrong way on this platform.
That is exactly what quoting does, and is older than the web itself.
Oh, look, I have managed to reply to your second paragraph without having to use twatter, how quaint!
If this thread and self-referential Tweeting was written in Loren Ipsum, it would definitely look like spam to me.
So I guess I disagree with one of the main points. For me, the content matters much more than the behavior. Pretty sure that’s how the Supreme Court interprets 1A rights as well. The frequency and intensity of the speech hasn’t played a part in any 1A cases that I can remember, it’s exclusively if the content of the speech violates someone’s rights and then deciding which outcome leads to bigger problems, allowing the speech or not.
You would have way less media "journalists" making a fuss about what someone said on that social network and would have problems just getting it to be popular, let alone displace any of the big ones. It would maybe be possible with existing one but that's a ton of work and someone needs to pay for that work.
And it's entirely possible for smaller community to have that, but the advantage with this is small community about X will also have moderators that care about X so
* any on-topic bollocks can be spotted by mods and it is no longer "unknown language"
* any off-topic bollocks can be just dismissed with "this is a forum about X, if you don't like it go somewhere else
That's not a solution though since every for profit business is generally seeking to maximize profit, and furthermore we already knew this to be the case - nothing he is saying is novel. I guess that's where I'm confused.
There are courses teaching people how to game the Twitter algo. One of those took off significantly in the past 18 months. You can tell by the number of amateurs creating threads on topics far beyond their reach. The purpose of these threads is for it to show up on people's feeds under the "Topic" section.
For example, I often see see random posts from "topics" Twitter thinks I like (webdev, UI/UX, cats, old newspaper headlines). I had to unsubscribe from 'webdev' and "UI/UX" because the recommended posts were all growth hackers. It wasn't always that way.
I'm not the only one, others have commented on it as well, including a well known JS developer:
You mean this is the reason folks respond differently to the form of twitter thread? This is one that is definitely not from a growth hacker but folks here still seem to hate it.
> https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1586956650455265281
"Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam. We ban spam for purely outcome-based reasons:
It affects the quality of experience for users we care about, and users having a good time on the platform makes it successful."
And also this Chinese Room argument: "once again, I challenge you to think about it this way: could you make your content moderation decisions even if you didnʻt understand the language they were being spoken in?""
In other words, there are certain kinds of post which trigger escalating pathological behavior - more posts - which destroy the usability platform for bystanders by flooding it. He argues that it doesn't matter what these posts mean or whose responsibility is it for the escalation, just the simple physics of "if you don't remove these posts and stop more arriving, your forum will die".
I read long twitter threads often, you get used to it
Please write a book, or at the very least an article... posting on twitter is like writing something on a piece of paper, showing it to your best friend and worst enemy before throwing it in the trash