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Nobody who needs to read this is going to have the patience to read it. If you make 10 screenshots of tweets that illustrate the various things you need to kno
by mbrock 11y ago
Nobody who needs to read this is going to have the patience to read it.
If you make 10 screenshots of tweets that illustrate the various things you need to know, with a brief one-paragraph explanation for each, that might do the trick.
People don't really want to know how the thing works. They really want to know how it's typically used, so they can make tweets that blend in and make it seems like they know what they're doing.
(And yes, it's pretty hard to figure out how to actually use Twitter correctly.)
- Uhhrrr 11y agoI think this actually makes it more fun!
- blakeyrat 11y agoI think the more interesting thing is that Twitter itself doesn't even try. Even if you dig through ALL their help pages, only about a third of the features/quirks the blog post mentions are actually documented
- macrael 11y agoThe point isn't to have an actual manual but to show how complex things have grown.
- recursive 11y agoI don't know. I'm getting a lot of value out of this as a manual. I've tried to get into twitter a few times, but I had trouble figuring out how you do anything. I was surprised to find (guess it's still the case) that most things aren't documented anywhere. I've bookmarked this, and will definitely refer to it next time I try to do anything with twitter.
- comex 11y agoI don't think most people 'need' to read this - it consists of a few important points which can generally be found elsewhere, plus a ton of esoterica that rarely matters. But as someone who spends a good amount of time on Twitter, I found it interesting, and wouldn't appreciate if the amount of content were reduced for accessibility's sake. One exception: I don't think the self-reply trick is well known, but it's useful in the very common case of splitting a message across multiple tweets. I suppose 10K extended messages will obviate it, if they ever actually show up...