5 ms·

> "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 innov

by 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.
  - skybrian 9y ago
    Yes, cut-and-paste is a traditional way of quoting. Resharing a Tweet is easier, particularly when not using a mouse or keyboard. It also automatically cites the source. Resharing part of a series is somewhat interesting since the author controls how their series gets cut up, instead of leaving it up to the reader. None of this is anything you couldn't do before, but changing what's easy to do in a UI also changes what's common on the network.
- taeric 9y ago
  I'd argue it isn't Twitter with this history, so much as society. Good thing about extreme limitations is it also makes exploitation harder. Though, there is money in exploiting social channels, so I'd expect that to follow quickly.
berberous 9y ago
You make valid points, but I have to say that tweetstorms do have interesting benefits: 1. Each sentence is its own tweet, and thus can be starred or retweeted on its own. This lets certain 'key ideas' or 'best lines' in a tweetstorm go viral, and brings interested readers to the full tweetstorm that otherwise wouldn't have bothered if they weren't hooked by the best part of it and had to see a full paragraph or blog post. When scrolling, you can also see the parts of the tweetstorm that got the most likes. 2. People can reply to different parts of the tweetstorm, creating subthreads, allowing useful discussions to branch off of different parts of the tweetstorm. 3. By forcing people through a clunky UX, you still force them to condense their ideas. Most writing is much longer than it needs to be. For example, I think most books I've read would improve by being 10-50% shorter. Twitter for sure has downsides, but it is nice to have at least one writing platform that errs on forcing people to the side of 'too short' rather than 'too long'.
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  Sort of Tumblr meets Genius :-)
  - md224 9y ago
    I've been saying this for a while: Twitter is essentially an annotation platform in reverse.
- BinaryIdiot 9y ago
  So, arguably, you could achieve the same effect with better UX around quotation, no? Hmm
- IIIUwe299 9y ago
  > People can reply to different parts of the tweetstorm You mean like this?
  - md224 9y ago
    Yet with a tweet, you can see all the reactions to a given fragment in one place.
1123581321 9y ago
You forgot that your first tweet should be: "So, I'd like to talk today about threading."
rayalez 9y ago
Sounds like you don't like twitter's limitations and want to express your thoughts in a longer format. I think that has been invented before(you may have heard of blogging, news websites, articles, books). > but the reach of the platform prevents them from publishing elsewhere. No it doesn't. Twitter's limitations are it's main advantage and value prop. Many people enjoy using it for what it is, if you don't - you can always write a medium article. You can automatically share it on twitter, which looks great and gives you the same advantages of exposure as a longer tweet would.
mmanfrin 9y ago
Trust me, nobody who uses threading wants to be using threading. They want to be able to write a paragraph. (3/8) Did you not see the backlash that came from them upping the limit to 280 chars?
- SquidLord 9y ago
  The backlash that involved the requisite "three days of hate because something changed on the Internet" and then moved on to "everyone is using it and pretending that it was always that way"? Yeah, I saw that.
nhangen 9y ago
They should have just called it a Tweet Storm and let the crowd win. Instead, they tried to pioneer a new term and act as if it was in their heads all along. As for the topic itself, I do find "threads" interesting, but on the whole, would much rather read longer format text. I love the 240 character limit. I do not love having to sort through a thread, or seeing a single thread item retweeted. There's a reason athletes and entertainers are using notepad to author longer form content, and there's a reason "threads" are interesting, and it's not because of the format. It's the content. There are so many times that I read a tweet, and because of its length, have zero context to use in understanding its meaning. This is one of the reasons I've stopped using Twitter, and why my businesses are planning to do the same. It's a pool of nonsense.
Angostura 9y ago
I can think of one valid use of the Tweetstorm, which you haven't identified, and that's to associate Tweets on a single subject spread across time. So, when live Tweeting from a conference or other event, using the plus button to add another tweet and group them together seems rather useful, and not necessarily driven by length limitations.

by jawns 9y ago

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.
- skybrian 9y ago
  Yes, cut-and-paste is a traditional way of quoting. Resharing a Tweet is easier, particularly when not using a mouse or keyboard. It also automatically cites the source. Resharing part of a series is somewhat interesting since the author controls how their series gets cut up, instead of leaving it up to the reader. None of this is anything you couldn't do before, but changing what's easy to do in a UI also changes what's common on the network.
taeric 9y ago
I'd argue it isn't Twitter with this history, so much as society. Good thing about extreme limitations is it also makes exploitation harder. Though, there is money in exploiting social channels, so I'd expect that to follow quickly.

berberous 9y ago

You make valid points, but I have to say that tweetstorms do have interesting benefits: 1. Each sentence is its own tweet, and thus can be starred or retweeted on its own. This lets certain 'key ideas' or 'best lines' in a tweetstorm go viral, and brings interested readers to the full tweetstorm that otherwise wouldn't have bothered if they weren't hooked by the best part of it and had to see a full paragraph or blog post. When scrolling, you can also see the parts of the tweetstorm that got the most likes. 2. People can reply to different parts of the tweetstorm, creating subthreads, allowing useful discussions to branch off of different parts of the tweetstorm. 3. By forcing people through a clunky UX, you still force them to condense their ideas. Most writing is much longer than it needs to be. For example, I think most books I've read would improve by being 10-50% shorter. Twitter for sure has downsides, but it is nice to have at least one writing platform that errs on forcing people to the side of 'too short' rather than 'too long'.

ChuckMcM 9y ago
Sort of Tumblr meets Genius :-)
- md224 9y ago
  I've been saying this for a while: Twitter is essentially an annotation platform in reverse.
BinaryIdiot 9y ago
So, arguably, you could achieve the same effect with better UX around quotation, no? Hmm
IIIUwe299 9y ago
> People can reply to different parts of the tweetstorm You mean like this?
- md224 9y ago
  Yet with a tweet, you can see all the reactions to a given fragment in one place.

1123581321 9y ago

You forgot that your first tweet should be: "So, I'd like to talk today about threading."

rayalez 9y ago

Sounds like you don't like twitter's limitations and want to express your thoughts in a longer format. I think that has been invented before(you may have heard of blogging, news websites, articles, books). > but the reach of the platform prevents them from publishing elsewhere. No it doesn't. Twitter's limitations are it's main advantage and value prop. Many people enjoy using it for what it is, if you don't - you can always write a medium article. You can automatically share it on twitter, which looks great and gives you the same advantages of exposure as a longer tweet would.

mmanfrin 9y ago

Trust me, nobody who uses threading wants to be using threading. They want to be able to write a paragraph. (3/8) Did you not see the backlash that came from them upping the limit to 280 chars?

SquidLord 9y ago
The backlash that involved the requisite "three days of hate because something changed on the Internet" and then moved on to "everyone is using it and pretending that it was always that way"? Yeah, I saw that.

nhangen 9y ago

They should have just called it a Tweet Storm and let the crowd win. Instead, they tried to pioneer a new term and act as if it was in their heads all along. As for the topic itself, I do find "threads" interesting, but on the whole, would much rather read longer format text. I love the 240 character limit. I do not love having to sort through a thread, or seeing a single thread item retweeted. There's a reason athletes and entertainers are using notepad to author longer form content, and there's a reason "threads" are interesting, and it's not because of the format. It's the content. There are so many times that I read a tweet, and because of its length, have zero context to use in understanding its meaning. This is one of the reasons I've stopped using Twitter, and why my businesses are planning to do the same. It's a pool of nonsense.

Angostura 9y ago

I can think of one valid use of the Tweetstorm, which you haven't identified, and that's to associate Tweets on a single subject spread across time. So, when live Tweeting from a conference or other event, using the plus button to add another tweet and group them together seems rather useful, and not necessarily driven by length limitations.