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Thank you for summarizing that. As others have commented, I wish Snowden would simply blog about this sort of thing. Twitter is frustrating to digest for any in
by eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y ago
Thank you for summarizing that. As others have commented, I wish Snowden would simply blog about this sort of thing. Twitter is frustrating to digest for any insightful commentary that is on the longer side.
- imglorp 10y agoYeah I don't understand why people don't just blog and be done with it, without all the formatting gredue. Then, you can just post a link on your twitter and say "hey, see my new blog post".
- Declanomous 10y agoIf HN and Reddit are any indication, if you post a link to a blog post, people will respond without reading it. People don't like switching domains, especially if they are browsing from an app. (Myself included)
- cloverich 10y agoSure but that's not just being lazy, its also a learned habit. There's a great deal of blog posts (like most writing in general) that is 5% information and 95% fluff. Sometimes you want the art, sometimes (esp. the engineering mindset) you just want the information. Skipping to comments frequently yields this, often with bonus comments like "I'm an actual expert and that post is very innaccurate".
- majewsky 10y agoThis. I frequently find myself skimming over HN comments on a submission before reading the article, because it provides a hint at whether reading the submission is actually worth my time.
- josephb 10y agoOr in this case, the HN comments actually provide a more complete article/summary :-)
- digi_owl 10y agoAlso blogs often mean fancy HTML etc, something that rarely produce a good reading experience on mobile devices.
- ge0rg 10y agoIn my experience, twitter is one of the worst offenders here, with an exorbitant amount of HTML, Javascript and pop-ups just to prevent me from reading 140 characters.
- Declanomous 10y agoIronically, I find Facebook's webpage way better on mobile than their actual app. I believe their app may originally have been designed for cellphone battery endurance testing. After a bit of hacking, someone figured out it could access Facebook and they decided to release it as an app.
- wepple 10y agoif we're lucky, twitter will do what they did with the hashtag and other things when they realised their users needs were 'inventing' new features. The 1/n 2/n n/n tweets is a huge indicator of a feature need. Of course, that's going to dilute their original value proposition of short direct messages.
- digi_owl 10y agoTwitter started out as an SMS repeater. SMS has for ages, thanks to Nokia, had the capability of merging multiple messages into a single large one. Twitter could just make use of this and save themselves a whole lot of grief.
- vanzard 10y agoLet's be serious. No one reads twitter over sms anymore. This isn't at all the reason twitter continues to limit to 140 characters. (Before some smartass replies "I do read over sms", well even without sms merging, twitter could still split a tweet into multiple sms. 99.9999% of their userbase wouldn't care.)
- dmix 10y agoThat's not relevant to the OPs point. The point is that even SMS clients were capable of merging multiple messages together, yet Twitter has still failed to do so. So whether or not they were SMS doesn't matter.
- mattmanser 10y agoNo one read twitter over sms in the first place. It was a quirk of a pivot.
- nl 10y agoI've said it before: Amazing that it was Instagram that copied the idea of Snapchat stories. Facebook has a complete "Post" blogging mechanism. Twitter is soon going to stop counting urls in the 140 characters. One of these things is not like the others...
- Blackthorn 10y agoIn this case Twitter at least provides a single authoritative source, which is valuable.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y agoTrue, but there are ways you can do something similar on a blog. If you link to the blog post from Twitter, I think that becomes a simple confirmation that the person wrote it. Or, given this is Snowden, he could GPG sign his blog posts and post his fingerprint to Twitter or something to verify identity.
- zaruvi 10y agoI agree, but twitter does simplify the spread of certain "quotes". I doubt the same amount of people would take to social media to share a blog entry as opposed to tweets.
- samwyse 10y agoGiven the way that people like to pull quotes out of context, writing something as a series of tweets forces you to look at each piece and see if it can stand alone.