idk man

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

This is great! It’s like modern poetry. I think the research suggests less words per line make it faster reading too.

are you reading on the computer? maybe thats the disconnect. for me each tweet has around 4 lines of text.

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.

The amount of UI noise around each tweet and how much you have to scroll, coupled with the need to trigger new loads once Twitter has truncated the number of replies and also HOW MUCH YOU HAVE TO SCROLL makes this a terrible experience

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

Like re-inventing Bukowski's writing style with terrible UX

You gotta understand their angle

I think this is important enough to highlight. Tweets are very different from other forms of communication on the internet. You can see it even here on HN in the comments section.

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