7 ms·

Twitter is the worst choice for publishing. This involved so much more text-scrolling and photo-expanding than is necessary. Edit: If anyone would care to expl

Twitter is the worst choice for publishing. This involved so much more text-scrolling and photo-expanding than is necessary. Edit: If anyone would care to explain why they feel that chopping an article up into pieces of arbitrary size makes for a good user experience, please do so. I know Twitter gets a pass from HN in general but it is simply not suited to this type of content by design. This was a conscious choice by its creators.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1204428311553642496.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1204428311553642496.html
- sprite-1 7y ago
  Thanks! This is great, and even better coupled with Firefox's Reader View
decebalus1 7y ago
No, I learned it's the best choice for publishing [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684008
kick 7y ago
I'm sure if you offer to donate someone will put it in a blog format for you. Hint hint. Edit: Twitter is obviously the correct platform for this because of reach. Hacker News is reading it, his 33.3k twitter followers are reading it, reddit is probably reading it, everyone's reading it! So if the goal was to draw more donations, he's winning.
drdrey 7y ago
On Twitter you get built-in liking, sharing and commenting, people will also DM you with questions, it's all one tap away. If you just post a link to a blog post, almost nobody will click it and read it there.
- gatherhunterer 7y ago
  No one is disputing that Twitter is popular. Likes and retweets will not save the Internet Archive anymore than thoughts and prayers. People who are not willing to click a link will not be willing to make a donation.
  - drdrey 7y ago
    It's not about Twitter being popular, it's about your content having organic reach. The liking and retweeting puts the story in front a lot more eyeballs.
  - danso 7y ago
    Not to be overly pedantic, but tweets can contain links, including links that go directly to the fundraising call. The compact visual design for tweets make the URL and call to action very explicit and obvious. And people can choose to retweet/quote-tweet the tweet-with-a-fundraising-link for further emphasis. For example, here's the thread author quote-tweeting the beginning of his thread, which allows him to prepend both a tl;dr and a link to "archive.org/donate" https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1204431184069058560 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1204431184069058560 If he wrote a blog post that includes the fundraising URL (e.g. at the top and the bottom) and tweeted a link to that blog post, you believe that that call to action would be more visible and obvious to the average reader?
danso 7y ago
I do Twitter threads once in awhile and for the creator, it's a very nice yet informal interface (e.g. compared to blogging) for posting a stream of connected thoughts, especially ones regularly punctuated with multimedia, such as images and video. There's the obvious benefit of the immediate network effect – a tweet thread has potentially far more reach, faster, than any RSS feed. There's also the benefit that, unlike a typical blog post, it's very easy for people to engage directly with a single thought (roughly equivalent to a paragraph in blog prose) – either to retweet your most cogent point, or to reply to it. And it's easy as the author to engage specifically on that point. On a deeper level, content follows form. The limits of Twitter inherently force me to cut my wordiness and elaboration to a concise point. Of course whether this makes the overall thread better than a blog post is up to debate, but it most certainly makes composition easier on the creator. Once in awhile I'll read the ThreaderApp's rollup of a thread, and almost always find it less of an optimal experience than just scrolling through the thread on mobile, though that may be attributable to differences in visual design. I can think of a number of Twitter threads that I simply cannot imagine working well in a blog or article format. For example, here's a Twitter thread that was posted by a newspaper reporter, as she followed a mailman on his last day after 35 years: https://twitter.com/Jennifer__Brett/status/1131298044010483712 https://twitter.com/Jennifer__Brett/status/11312980440104837... (HN Thread is here: [0]) AFAIK, she never posted this as an article on her newspaper's site – which to me, as a former newspaper reporter, is very surprising given publishers' demand to feed the content/pageview beast. I don't know if she ever explained this decision, or if the thread eventually did make its way into native article format. But I think the thread format worked beautifully here. By necessity, it minimized whatever tendency the reporter had to insert superfluous prose. And the Twitter visual design places heavy emphasis on the photos and videos, which each exemplified the aphorism of "a picture is worth a 1,000 words" edit: the WaPo did do a recap of her thread [1]. Being a recap, of course, means it's inherently different than an original article about the mailman, but you still get a taste of the extra verbiage needed to connect scenes in traditional prose, which is not needed (maybe because people don't necessarily expect it) in a typical Twitter thread. And again, the visual design aspect is critical imho. Twitter's format integrates images and video much more seamlessly than a standard website design, partly because tweets have a strict container max-width of ~500px, which is far narrower than most modern sites. And I suspect knowing that you're recording media for a Twitter thread fundamentally affects how you do it – e.g. you may feel less restrained about context and quality. For example, one of the best tweets in the mailman thread imho is this one: https://twitter.com/Jennifer__Brett/status/1131920127157592064 https://twitter.com/Jennifer__Brett/status/11319201271575920... The text is very informal: It took forever to #MrFloyd to even get to his own party - people kept stopping him for photos and hugs! But the attached video tells the story better and more immediately than any prose could. I can't imagine that 49-second raw footage clip being inserted into a standard story without being a massive distraction from the reading. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20001559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20001559 [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/05/24/mail-carrier-georgia-retired-strangers-across-twitter-celebrated-theyre-sending-him-hawaii/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/05/24/mail-car...
nicky0 7y ago
I'm sure lots of people agree with your sentiment, it's just that this comment appears on every post of a Twitter thread so it starts to seem like noise.
jon-wood 7y ago
There really needs to be a new rule added to the posting guidelines about not complaining about the format when Twitter threads make it to the front page. No, it’s probably not the best possible format, but every single time the comments are inundated.
- stevehawk 7y ago
  maybe because it's such a bad idea that it's worth complaining every single time? I tried to read it. I have no idea what the "silent killer" is. And I have no idea what a lot of the images had to do with anything.
- decebalus1 7y ago
  There really needs to be a new rule added to the posting guidelines about not posting Twitter threads
Apocryphon 7y ago
Complaining about Twitter publishing on HN is like complaining about the WSJ paywall.
Hamuko 7y ago
Make a user script to provide an "unroll" link next to the post on HN if the link is for twitter.com.

toomuchtodo 7y ago

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1204428311553642496.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1204428311553642496.html

sprite-1 7y ago
Thanks! This is great, and even better coupled with Firefox's Reader View

decebalus1 7y ago

No, I learned it's the best choice for publishing [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684008

kick 7y ago

I'm sure if you offer to donate someone will put it in a blog format for you. Hint hint. Edit: Twitter is obviously the correct platform for this because of reach. Hacker News is reading it, his 33.3k twitter followers are reading it, reddit is probably reading it, everyone's reading it! So if the goal was to draw more donations, he's winning.

drdrey 7y ago

On Twitter you get built-in liking, sharing and commenting, people will also DM you with questions, it's all one tap away. If you just post a link to a blog post, almost nobody will click it and read it there.

gatherhunterer 7y ago
No one is disputing that Twitter is popular. Likes and retweets will not save the Internet Archive anymore than thoughts and prayers. People who are not willing to click a link will not be willing to make a donation.
- drdrey 7y ago
  It's not about Twitter being popular, it's about your content having organic reach. The liking and retweeting puts the story in front a lot more eyeballs.
- danso 7y ago
  Not to be overly pedantic, but tweets can contain links, including links that go directly to the fundraising call. The compact visual design for tweets make the URL and call to action very explicit and obvious. And people can choose to retweet/quote-tweet the tweet-with-a-fundraising-link for further emphasis. For example, here's the thread author quote-tweeting the beginning of his thread, which allows him to prepend both a tl;dr and a link to "archive.org/donate" https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1204431184069058560 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1204431184069058560 If he wrote a blog post that includes the fundraising URL (e.g. at the top and the bottom) and tweeted a link to that blog post, you believe that that call to action would be more visible and obvious to the average reader?

danso 7y ago

I do Twitter threads once in awhile and for the creator, it's a very nice yet informal interface (e.g. compared to blogging) for posting a stream of connected thoughts, especially ones regularly punctuated with multimedia, such as images and video. There's the obvious benefit of the immediate network effect – a tweet thread has potentially far more reach, faster, than any RSS feed. There's also the benefit that, unlike a typical blog post, it's very easy for people to engage directly with a single thought (roughly equivalent to a paragraph in blog prose) – either to retweet your most cogent point, or to reply to it. And it's easy as the author to engage specifically on that point. On a deeper level, content follows form. The limits of Twitter inherently force me to cut my wordiness and elaboration to a concise point. Of course whether this makes the overall thread better than a blog post is up to debate, but it most certainly makes composition easier on the creator. Once in awhile I'll read the ThreaderApp's rollup of a thread, and almost always find it less of an optimal experience than just scrolling through the thread on mobile, though that may be attributable to differences in visual design. I can think of a number of Twitter threads that I simply cannot imagine working well in a blog or article format. For example, here's a Twitter thread that was posted by a newspaper reporter, as she followed a mailman on his last day after 35 years: https://twitter.com/Jennifer__Brett/status/1131298044010483712 https://twitter.com/Jennifer__Brett/status/11312980440104837... (HN Thread is here: [0]) AFAIK, she never posted this as an article on her newspaper's site – which to me, as a former newspaper reporter, is very surprising given publishers' demand to feed the content/pageview beast. I don't know if she ever explained this decision, or if the thread eventually did make its way into native article format. But I think the thread format worked beautifully here. By necessity, it minimized whatever tendency the reporter had to insert superfluous prose. And the Twitter visual design places heavy emphasis on the photos and videos, which each exemplified the aphorism of "a picture is worth a 1,000 words" edit: the WaPo did do a recap of her thread [1]. Being a recap, of course, means it's inherently different than an original article about the mailman, but you still get a taste of the extra verbiage needed to connect scenes in traditional prose, which is not needed (maybe because people don't necessarily expect it) in a typical Twitter thread. And again, the visual design aspect is critical imho. Twitter's format integrates images and video much more seamlessly than a standard website design, partly because tweets have a strict container max-width of ~500px, which is far narrower than most modern sites. And I suspect knowing that you're recording media for a Twitter thread fundamentally affects how you do it – e.g. you may feel less restrained about context and quality. For example, one of the best tweets in the mailman thread imho is this one: https://twitter.com/Jennifer__Brett/status/1131920127157592064 https://twitter.com/Jennifer__Brett/status/11319201271575920... The text is very informal: It took forever to #MrFloyd to even get to his own party - people kept stopping him for photos and hugs! But the attached video tells the story better and more immediately than any prose could. I can't imagine that 49-second raw footage clip being inserted into a standard story without being a massive distraction from the reading. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20001559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20001559 [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/05/24/mail-carrier-georgia-retired-strangers-across-twitter-celebrated-theyre-sending-him-hawaii/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/05/24/mail-car...

nicky0 7y ago

I'm sure lots of people agree with your sentiment, it's just that this comment appears on every post of a Twitter thread so it starts to seem like noise.

jon-wood 7y ago

There really needs to be a new rule added to the posting guidelines about not complaining about the format when Twitter threads make it to the front page. No, it’s probably not the best possible format, but every single time the comments are inundated.

stevehawk 7y ago
maybe because it's such a bad idea that it's worth complaining every single time? I tried to read it. I have no idea what the "silent killer" is. And I have no idea what a lot of the images had to do with anything.
decebalus1 7y ago
There really needs to be a new rule added to the posting guidelines about not posting Twitter threads

Apocryphon 7y ago

Complaining about Twitter publishing on HN is like complaining about the WSJ paywall.

Hamuko 7y ago

Make a user script to provide an "unroll" link next to the post on HN if the link is for twitter.com.