I don't see why internet strangers think their walls of text are owed eyeballs. Time is short, the amount of content on the internet is near-infinite, much of t

I don't see why internet strangers think their walls of text are owed eyeballs. Time is short, the amount of content on the internet is near-infinite, much of that content is just noise, and without a very serious assumption that a source is both trustworthy and informative you'd be better off discarding it and moving on. Reading things thoroughly takes time, and time is money. Scientists are paid to read the current literature on their field. Government and corporate analysts are paid to collect data and provide synthetic memos to executives. Journalists are paid to read sources as a background to their story. If you want me to read your wall of text, you either have to convince me that you are worth reading (through your reputation) or pay me to do it. HN is indeed an exception in that I find the site to be a kind of guarantee that most of users are well-versed in tech topics and thus have something interesting to say. In that sense the whole website provides a reputation to its users. Twitter has no such guarantee.