6 ms·

Nice Threads

88 points by davidbarker 9y ago

jdpedrie 9y ago
Next they should address the nightmare of navigating conversations had via quote tweets. It's like going down the rabbit hole, trying to find the beginning of an exchange. Never know how deep it is. Then once you've found the beginning, it's a long trek of hitting the back button in the browser or app to follow the conversation in context. Quote tweets were a good addition, but the current implementation does not work with the way people use them.
- paulgb 9y ago
  A free-time project of mine has been building a browser extension[1] for navigating conversations. Quote-tweets are hard because they turn the conversation into a DAG instead of a tree. Would love to know if you have any thoughts on solving this. [1] https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse
  - joelrunyon 9y ago
    I was actually thinking that there should be something that "mind-maps" different branches of a tweet thread. The normal UI gets confusing fast. The problem in general is a bit tough - since it's a little "choose-your-own-adventurey", but this is an interesting concept. Nice.
eyelidlessness 9y ago
In which Twitter acknowledges that the entire concept of their product is fundamentally incompatible with the way a large portion of their user base uses their product.
- mark212 9y ago
  and yet, mysteriously, many millions of people are absolutely addicted to this product. I say that without snark, just wonderment at how resilient it is even thought it's so totally ill-suited for the actual use.
  - tomjen3 9y ago
    Twitter is very useful to broadcast to the world your thoughts and it forces you to take the extra time to make it short (lots of people disagree here, but my opinion is that if you cannot put your thoughts in a tweet or 2, you need to spend more time thinking about it). There is a time and a place for long-form text, but that should never be because the writer has not taken the time to make the text short.
    - eyelidlessness 9y ago
      Your comment here would not fit in a 280 character tweet (or 2 original 140 character tweets). There's a nugget of wisdom in what you're saying, and it animates a lot of the backlash on Twitter for expanding to 280 in the first place. But I think the value isn't concision but clarity. Concision forces clarity in some contexts, for some people, but destroys it in many other circumstances.
- Ganz7 9y ago
  That's too harsh. People don't go to twitter for lengthy paragraphs or op-eds. They go there for concise humor, news and generally just to find out what is happening with the world. You're ignoring the real-time connectivity that twitter offers to the entire world. No other platform comes close. And sometimes, this concise thought platform is not enough to share an in-depth thought. Hence, this. My only complaint here is that this took way too long. Things must move really slow at twitter.
  - minikites 9y ago
    >People don't go to twitter for lengthy paragraphs or op-eds. If this was true, don't you think people would stop posting tweetstorms that are 50-100 (sometimes more) tweets long?
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      Both can be true. It's entirely possible that the majority of traffic is people that never read tweetstorms and also that tweetstorms are very effective for some users.
    - tomjen3 9y ago
      I am a daily Twitter user (the key is to find interesting people, and to block annoying people), and I doubt I have seen more than a handful of tweetstorms over 20 and certainly not more than 50.
      - karlshea 9y ago
        I've started following @SethAbramson for his analysis of the Muller investigation and a recent thread of his was over 130. To be fair, even he hates it: https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/940658870808186881 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/940658870808186881 > 1. I hate Twitter. > 2. No one should be on Twitter. > 3. I can't wait to no longer be on Twitter. But using it gets him the reach he wants shrug.
      - libertyEQ 9y ago
        I quit Twitter in '10 b/c of the 'social media consultants.' I recently started simply bookmarking specific accounts related to politics and propaganda. When certain Tweets get lots of comments, I read them all (up X,000s; yes, this is problem). I'd be curious about your thoughts WRT to this thread, and the resulting 'threaded cache.' https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/939432544008921088 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/939432544008921088 And this was turned into: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/939432544008921088 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/939432544008921088 Edit: I should add that I don't have a Twitter account anymore, just a lurker.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  At least they are finally coming to grips with this fact that has been obvious to every sentient person on Earth who does not work at Twitter for at least five years now.
jawns 9y ago
> "We saw this approach (which we call 'threading') as an innovative way to present a train of thought, made up of connected but individual elements." An innovative way to present a train of thought? (1/8) Publishing multiple tweets because the character limit prevents you from keeping the "connected" elements (i.e. sentences in a paragraph) in a single tweet? (2/8) Trust me, nobody who uses threading wants to be using threading. They want to be able to write a paragraph. (3/8) The limitations of the platform prevent them from doing so, but the reach of the platform prevents them from publishing elsewhere. (4/8) Sentences in tweets tend to be about the same length, so there's a distinctly wooden cadence to the writing as a whole. (5/8) The Twitter format makes editing your work laborious, especially when the edits go beyond just fixing a typo. (6/8) For the reader of multi-tweet writings, the Twitter format is like having to open and read a series of telegrams STOP. (7/8) And yet, here we are at the end of 2017, where a tweetstorm has the potential to get more eyeballs than a blog post. (8/8)
- skybrian 9y ago
  You say "limitations" like it was a bad thing. But Twitter has a history of turning arbitrary limitiations into interesting social media experiments. Breaking it up allows each sentence to be reshared more easily, which seems like it has interesting possibilities. (A simple variation on Ted Nelson's "transclusion" back in the day.) Anyone wanting to write an essay in the traditional way could post somewhere else (perhaps Medium) and share the link. They don't do it, suggesting that maybe that's not what they wanted to do?
  - jlg23 9y ago
    The limitations are not arbitrary but an artifact of its original purpose and design. A lot of those "interesting social media experiments" have been conducted before, with the same outcomes - at a time when SMS was still free and SMS-boards were thriving.
  - edmccard 9y ago
    > Breaking it up allows each sentence to be reshared more easily, which seems like it has interesting possibilities. That's not a result of the length restriction; it's how quoting works -- right here in this very comment, I've chosen to only "reshare" one sentence from your comment. As for the interesting possiibilities that could arise from mixing and matching transcluded tweets: either the mixing and matching are going to be done manually by someone assembling a series of quotes (a process not unique to twitter) or it's going to be the result of whatever order they show up in your timeline -- I think the results of that could be interesting if it was a random process, or if there were any way to influence the order apart from whatever twitter thinks will maximize user engagement.
bluthru 9y ago
No one wants to see text interrupted. Just allow a long character limit text "attachment" that starts out collapsed, like a photo. Eliminating the need for people to screenshot text and post it is long overdue. The bandwidth savings alone would be worth it.
- jonknee 9y ago
  It depends on the author and topic I suppose, but I like having chunks. It's interesting to see what resonates with people, each chunk has its own like/retweet count.
  - minikites 9y ago
    But that's not how (good) writing works. You need transitions to connect, compare, or contrast ideas and that doesn't mesh well with a tweetstorm.
    - jonknee 9y ago
      Twitter isn't a venue for writing and tweetstorms are more akin to outlines than essays.
      - bluthru 9y ago
        And yet people still attach pictures of text. PICTURES OF TEXT!
- minikites 9y ago
  It would also help for accessibility reasons, photos of text are impossible for a screen reader to read.
  - bluthru 9y ago
    Great point, along with dynamic text sizing and bandwidth for low-bandwidth parts of the world. It's weird how twitter considers this inclusion a very low priority while almost being self-parody with judging employees based on their identity: https://careers.twitter.com/en/diversity.html https://careers.twitter.com/en/diversity.html
joelrunyon 9y ago
Lots of hate in this thread. I think tweetstorms are 1) actually useful, 2) obviously something people are using twitter for and 3) better improvement than the character expansion. The character limit combined with the threading, made people really think when writing, rather than blathering on - in other words, it forced people to edit themselves. It's strange they made this change AFTER they made the character limit change (and it seems maybe less useful now), but it's still long-overdue.
username223 9y ago
Yeesh! Does anyone remember Usenet? It was an efficient way to have a public conversation online, it had "threads," and people could use any of a number of clients to read it. I don't do Twitter, but its main value seemed to be limiting participants to 140 characters, i.e. a single sentence. It would be far easier and cheaper to do this by hosting a free NNTP server with analytics and ads.
Whitespace 9y ago
Could have named this post: Pat yourself on the backpedal
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rgrove 9y ago
Will third-party clients be able to use this feature via the Twitter API?
- Splendor 9y ago
  I'm guessing the answer is no. Even though they just made an announcement about their new "premium" api[0]. [0]: https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/introducing-twitter-premium-apis.html https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/i...
- jandrese 9y ago
  Seems like the kind of thing third party clients could have already provided pretty easily. It's just breaking the message up into small chunks and adding a counter to the post. Posting them all at the same time in the right order should be trivial for an API user.
sAbakumoff 9y ago
To me twitter was always a nice way to read a short concise joke /idea/thought or just click on an interesting link. The max number of characters was too short for BS. Now they have decided to remove all the BS filters all together instead of doing the single simple thing that users have been asked for years. WTF.

88 points by davidbarker 9y ago

Next they should address the nightmare of navigating conversations had via quote tweets. It's like going down the rabbit hole, trying to find the beginning of an exchange. Never know how deep it is. Then once you've found the beginning, it's a long trek of hitting the back button in the browser or app to follow the conversation in context. Quote tweets were a good addition, but the current implementation does not work with the way people use them.

paulgb 9y ago
A free-time project of mine has been building a browser extension[1] for navigating conversations. Quote-tweets are hard because they turn the conversation into a DAG instead of a tree. Would love to know if you have any thoughts on solving this. [1] https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse
- joelrunyon 9y ago
  I was actually thinking that there should be something that "mind-maps" different branches of a tweet thread. The normal UI gets confusing fast. The problem in general is a bit tough - since it's a little "choose-your-own-adventurey", but this is an interesting concept. Nice.

eyelidlessness 9y ago

In which Twitter acknowledges that the entire concept of their product is fundamentally incompatible with the way a large portion of their user base uses their product.

mark212 9y ago
and yet, mysteriously, many millions of people are absolutely addicted to this product. I say that without snark, just wonderment at how resilient it is even thought it's so totally ill-suited for the actual use.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  Twitter is very useful to broadcast to the world your thoughts and it forces you to take the extra time to make it short (lots of people disagree here, but my opinion is that if you cannot put your thoughts in a tweet or 2, you need to spend more time thinking about it). There is a time and a place for long-form text, but that should never be because the writer has not taken the time to make the text short.
  - eyelidlessness 9y ago
    Your comment here would not fit in a 280 character tweet (or 2 original 140 character tweets). There's a nugget of wisdom in what you're saying, and it animates a lot of the backlash on Twitter for expanding to 280 in the first place. But I think the value isn't concision but clarity. Concision forces clarity in some contexts, for some people, but destroys it in many other circumstances.
Ganz7 9y ago
That's too harsh. People don't go to twitter for lengthy paragraphs or op-eds. They go there for concise humor, news and generally just to find out what is happening with the world. You're ignoring the real-time connectivity that twitter offers to the entire world. No other platform comes close. And sometimes, this concise thought platform is not enough to share an in-depth thought. Hence, this. My only complaint here is that this took way too long. Things must move really slow at twitter.
- minikites 9y ago
  >People don't go to twitter for lengthy paragraphs or op-eds. If this was true, don't you think people would stop posting tweetstorms that are 50-100 (sometimes more) tweets long?
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Both can be true. It's entirely possible that the majority of traffic is people that never read tweetstorms and also that tweetstorms are very effective for some users.
  - tomjen3 9y ago
    I am a daily Twitter user (the key is to find interesting people, and to block annoying people), and I doubt I have seen more than a handful of tweetstorms over 20 and certainly not more than 50.
    - karlshea 9y ago
      I've started following @SethAbramson for his analysis of the Muller investigation and a recent thread of his was over 130. To be fair, even he hates it: https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/940658870808186881 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/940658870808186881 > 1. I hate Twitter. > 2. No one should be on Twitter. > 3. I can't wait to no longer be on Twitter. But using it gets him the reach he wants shrug.
    - libertyEQ 9y ago
      I quit Twitter in '10 b/c of the 'social media consultants.' I recently started simply bookmarking specific accounts related to politics and propaganda. When certain Tweets get lots of comments, I read them all (up X,000s; yes, this is problem). I'd be curious about your thoughts WRT to this thread, and the resulting 'threaded cache.' https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/939432544008921088 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/939432544008921088 And this was turned into: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/939432544008921088 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/939432544008921088 Edit: I should add that I don't have a Twitter account anymore, just a lurker.
smacktoward 9y ago
At least they are finally coming to grips with this fact that has been obvious to every sentient person on Earth who does not work at Twitter for at least five years now.

jawns 9y ago

> "We saw this approach (which we call 'threading') as an innovative way to present a train of thought, made up of connected but individual elements." An innovative way to present a train of thought? (1/8) Publishing multiple tweets because the character limit prevents you from keeping the "connected" elements (i.e. sentences in a paragraph) in a single tweet? (2/8) Trust me, nobody who uses threading wants to be using threading. They want to be able to write a paragraph. (3/8) The limitations of the platform prevent them from doing so, but the reach of the platform prevents them from publishing elsewhere. (4/8) Sentences in tweets tend to be about the same length, so there's a distinctly wooden cadence to the writing as a whole. (5/8) The Twitter format makes editing your work laborious, especially when the edits go beyond just fixing a typo. (6/8) For the reader of multi-tweet writings, the Twitter format is like having to open and read a series of telegrams STOP. (7/8) And yet, here we are at the end of 2017, where a tweetstorm has the potential to get more eyeballs than a blog post. (8/8)

skybrian 9y ago
You say "limitations" like it was a bad thing. But Twitter has a history of turning arbitrary limitiations into interesting social media experiments. Breaking it up allows each sentence to be reshared more easily, which seems like it has interesting possibilities. (A simple variation on Ted Nelson's "transclusion" back in the day.) Anyone wanting to write an essay in the traditional way could post somewhere else (perhaps Medium) and share the link. They don't do it, suggesting that maybe that's not what they wanted to do?
- jlg23 9y ago
  The limitations are not arbitrary but an artifact of its original purpose and design. A lot of those "interesting social media experiments" have been conducted before, with the same outcomes - at a time when SMS was still free and SMS-boards were thriving.
- edmccard 9y ago
  > Breaking it up allows each sentence to be reshared more easily, which seems like it has interesting possibilities. That's not a result of the length restriction; it's how quoting works -- right here in this very comment, I've chosen to only "reshare" one sentence from your comment. As for the interesting possiibilities that could arise from mixing and matching transcluded tweets: either the mixing and matching are going to be done manually by someone assembling a series of quotes (a process not unique to twitter) or it's going to be the result of whatever order they show up in your timeline -- I think the results of that could be interesting if it was a random process, or if there were any way to influence the order apart from whatever twitter thinks will maximize user engagement.

bluthru 9y ago

No one wants to see text interrupted. Just allow a long character limit text "attachment" that starts out collapsed, like a photo. Eliminating the need for people to screenshot text and post it is long overdue. The bandwidth savings alone would be worth it.

jonknee 9y ago
It depends on the author and topic I suppose, but I like having chunks. It's interesting to see what resonates with people, each chunk has its own like/retweet count.
- minikites 9y ago
  But that's not how (good) writing works. You need transitions to connect, compare, or contrast ideas and that doesn't mesh well with a tweetstorm.
  - jonknee 9y ago
    Twitter isn't a venue for writing and tweetstorms are more akin to outlines than essays.
    - bluthru 9y ago
      And yet people still attach pictures of text. PICTURES OF TEXT!
minikites 9y ago
It would also help for accessibility reasons, photos of text are impossible for a screen reader to read.
- bluthru 9y ago
  Great point, along with dynamic text sizing and bandwidth for low-bandwidth parts of the world. It's weird how twitter considers this inclusion a very low priority while almost being self-parody with judging employees based on their identity: https://careers.twitter.com/en/diversity.html https://careers.twitter.com/en/diversity.html

joelrunyon 9y ago

Lots of hate in this thread. I think tweetstorms are 1) actually useful, 2) obviously something people are using twitter for and 3) better improvement than the character expansion. The character limit combined with the threading, made people really think when writing, rather than blathering on - in other words, it forced people to edit themselves. It's strange they made this change AFTER they made the character limit change (and it seems maybe less useful now), but it's still long-overdue.

username223 9y ago

Yeesh! Does anyone remember Usenet? It was an efficient way to have a public conversation online, it had "threads," and people could use any of a number of clients to read it. I don't do Twitter, but its main value seemed to be limiting participants to 140 characters, i.e. a single sentence. It would be far easier and cheaper to do this by hosting a free NNTP server with analytics and ads.

Whitespace 9y ago

Could have named this post: Pat yourself on the backpedal

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rgrove 9y ago

Will third-party clients be able to use this feature via the Twitter API?

Splendor 9y ago
I'm guessing the answer is no. Even though they just made an announcement about their new "premium" api[0]. [0]: https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/introducing-twitter-premium-apis.html https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/i...
jandrese 9y ago
Seems like the kind of thing third party clients could have already provided pretty easily. It's just breaking the message up into small chunks and adding a counter to the post. Posting them all at the same time in the right order should be trivial for an API user.

sAbakumoff 9y ago

To me twitter was always a nice way to read a short concise joke /idea/thought or just click on an interesting link. The max number of characters was too short for BS. Now they have decided to remove all the BS filters all together instead of doing the single simple thing that users have been asked for years. WTF.