8 ms·

No idea why you are so condescending. Maybe he doesn't have a blog and he's just using the platform where his following is. Fwiw, I prefer chain of tweets like

• wayneftw 5y ago
  You can't even read a thread on Twitter without working around their constant badgering for you to sign up. The web interface is absolutely horrendous on desktop and on my phone.
• FractalParadigm 5y ago
  To each their own, but I feel like the discoverability of the 'whole story' seriously suffers. Any time I try to follow a Twitter thread I can usually find 2/3 of the posts pretty easily while the rest tend to be buried somewhere in the memes and pointless banter. A blog post can be equally "to the point" as a Twitter post, your SEO might suffer but I'd imagine 99% of bloggers really don't care. And FWIW, anyone can setup a WordPress in just a few minutes assuming you use a *.wordpress.com, to name just one of many free blogging platforms.
  • hutzlibu 5y ago
    I never enjoyed reading anything on Twitter.
    • bottled_poe 5y ago
      That sounds more like a content problem, not a formatting issue
      • hutzlibu 5y ago
        To me it is both. The UI and UX makes for terrible content, perfect for drama, but hard for clear exchange. My opinion of course. Those who enjoy the twitter conversations, go for it.
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        The content is shaped by the medium it is presented in.
  • Kiro 5y ago
    Sure, but would you actually create a new blog just to tell a story? I would feel pretentious, like my story is so good that I need to create a new blog for it. No, I would just use what's available to me.
    • skhr0680 5y ago
      Every blog started with “just” a story
    • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      Well if all you ever intend to tell is the one story then I concede, use whatever medium is familiar. It's funny, almost like I think everyone should have a website.
  • wingerlang 5y ago
    > .. buried somewhere in the memes and pointless banter. This doesn't really make much sense. How are you getting lost in a single top-to-bottom thread? Memes are as obstructive as in blog post and banter.. well unless you're clicking into possible individual tweet replies they are just... not present at all.
    • aendruk 5y ago
      It’s not a single top-to-bottom thread. Twitter shows the first two posts from the thread and then abruptly cuts to infinite scrolling of suggested third-party content.
      • wingerlang 5y ago
        There's a button "see full thread".
        • aendruk 5y ago
          …which is a trick that just prompts you to sign up for Twitter.
          • wingerlang 5y ago
            I just tried it logged out and I did not get any prompt.
            • aendruk 5y ago
              Screen recording: https://imgur.com/a/hjiNrfE https://imgur.com/a/hjiNrfE
              • wingerlang 5y ago
                Fair enough, that kind of sucks (I tried it on my laptop).
  • ljf 5y ago
    Yeah, but that is where their friends, followers, audience, comfort is. Its like saying 'I wish he hadn't told they story down the pub, the pub is a terrible place to tell stories as it is too noisy and I find it hard to follow with everything else going on'. But hey, they were down the pub telling stories, that is where it happened and that is where they were happy to do it. They might not have wanted to sit on a stage at a conference or record a video for you. By all means take their story and retell it like journalist and bloggers have done for years, but don't complain about someone's medium, just be glad they shared the story at all.
    • OGWhales 5y ago
      > Yeah, but that is where their friends, followers, audience, comfort is. I just link to a better format from my twitter when I want to tell a longer story and it works great. I find writing longer stories in a string of tweets even more annoying than trying to read them.
    • oauea 5y ago
      You do realize that the internet has this thing called hyperlinks that you can use to send people to another website? Just in case, let me show you: https://twitter.com https://twitter.com Boom! You were on HN, now if you click that link you're on twitter! Magic!
      • wizzwizz4 5y ago
        You do realise that that reduces “engagement”, so most social media sites punish their users for doing that?
        • oauea 5y ago
          Can you explain how they're punished?
          • kemayo 5y ago
            Because social media site algorithms feed on "engagement", people interacting with your content rewards you in the form of your content becoming more visible to others, which results in more engagement, which spreads it further, etc etc etc. This is how something "goes viral". Sending people away from your content on the social media site to view it somewhere else results in less interactions with the social media content -- there's not 20 tweets all of which can be replied to, liked, retweeted, etc, there's just one tweet (and a blog post that the social media site can't see). Thus, giving people less things to interact with means that you'll receive less rewards. This is the "punishment".
  • umanwizard 5y ago
    I honestly wonder if this is just due to different people getting different UIs. I just click the “see full thread” button on the last visible post of the thread, and I’m taken to the full thread.
    • cced 5y ago
      This button forces you to login if you aren’t logged in. Inconvenient for us dinosaurs without Twitter accounts.
  • staticassertion 5y ago
    That's funny. I find HN far more annoying because of conversations like this. Instead of having good technical conversations it's almost always people critiquing things like the font that someone's using on their site, and for some insane reason it's voted up to the top. And here I am contributing to the problem by extending this stupid thread further. I had to scroll down ~75% of this page, passing what seemed like many dozens of posts all saying the same useless shit about the format and not talking at all about the content. And that got me to the next top post, which... is someone just unrolling it. Thankfully, soon after, someone asks a legitimate question about the content. Nearly at the bottom. The twitter thread on the other hand is concise and easy to scroll through. A couple of memes because someone's having fun telling their story seems relatively benign compared to the average HN comments section drivel.
    • RobertRoberts 5y ago
      >That's funny. I find HN far more annoying because of conversations like this. I appreciate the critiques, saves me the wasted time going to the twitter thread and then being annoyed in the same manner.
    • Cogito 5y ago
      No idea if you know this or not, but I use the thread collapse button judiciously to skip these long sidethreads (after reading the first few subcomments...)
      • geoduck14 5y ago
        Side note: I used to think I was down voting when I was collapsing the thread and I felt REALLY bad for doing it. Note to Newbs: you can't dont vote until you hit 500 "points", and then an upside down arrow appears underneath the "up vote" arrow.
        • ajyotirmay 5y ago
          Thank you, I had the same idea about collapsing threads. This is really helpful!
  • bwship 5y ago
    Not too mention, my ADD usually takes over, and half way through I am all of a sudden looking at cat memes.
• Quarrelsome 5y ago
  if you don't have a twitter account the thread is actually impossible to read FWIW.
  • Kiro 5y ago
    I opened the thread in incognito both on desktop and mobile and could read the whole thing. I'm wondering if there's some kind of A/B testing going.
    • Quarrelsome 5y ago
      i deleted my account two months ago so it might be that. They accidentally still think I have an account to log into. I'M HELPING! - cried the bug.
• dandellion 5y ago
  Twitter blocks the page with a pop-up that can't be closed, so a blog post would be a huge improvement.
  • gennarro 5y ago
    Yes. I’m literally unable to read it without logging in to Twitter.
    • gnu8 5y ago
      I don’t get this. There is no reason for anyone to have a Twitter account. It is awfully arrogant of Twitter to assume that anyone would want to sign up for an account just to read their users’ posts.
      • user-the-name 5y ago
        It is also awfully arrogant for stores to assume anyone would want to give them money for the things they are offering.
      • s1artibartfast 5y ago
        Is this sarcasm? This is their entire business model and how they get paid. I don't see it as any more arrogant than having to pay for a paper newspaper, digital article, or attending a conference
  • delecti 5y ago
    In what browser? I tried Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on Windows, and Chrome and Firefox on Android, all without being logged in, all without issue. I was able to view the full thread in each of those 5 situations. I also tried Internet Explorer 11, but that genuinely froze my entire computer in its attempt to force me to load the page in Edge. I blame that more on IE than Twitter though.
  • forgotpwd16 5y ago
    Depends on the platform. Medium does the same.
• csomar 5y ago
  It's a sad world if we have all this technology and yet have to contend with either Twitter blogposting or a blog post with ads, 1.600 extra words and 50Mb of scripts you don't need.
• Errancer 5y ago
  I think it makes a big difference if you have a twitter account or not. Without one navigating through the thread is much harder, on the edge of being a dark pattern, and you can't use unrolling bots.
  • joshuaissac 5y ago
    There is a website called Nitter provides a clean front end to Twitter: https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/ and mirrors at https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances The domain name in Twitter URLs can be replaced with that of Nitter or its mirrors to view the same tweet and threads using the Nitter front end.
  • tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    I wouldn't say that a modal popup that sends you back to the first tweet if you dismiss it is "on the edge" of being a dark pattern. It's a hard login wall.
• xdennis 5y ago
  > It forces the author to compress as much information as possible into every paragraph and split up their thoughts. But it doesn't. GP's summary fits in a tweet. The author just split his text whenever he ran out of characters. He didn't compress any information.
  • Kiro 5y ago
    > The author just split his text whenever he ran out of characters. I didn't get that feeling. If he truly did that the tweets would end in the middle of a sentence. I also don't think the summary covered all of the interesting things in this story. No, I think the tweets told it in a good way, split up in bite-sized chunks.
• eCa 5y ago
  One very recent[1] problem for me is that Twitter has started hiding threads behind a login-wall. As a non-user that makes it impossible for me to read beyond the first few posts. Very few blogs puts such a requirement on their readers. [1] It started happening last week.
  • lrvick 5y ago
    Try Fritter.
• Akronymus 5y ago
  I, not having a twitter account, literally can't navigate through the tweets to read them. What GP said doesn't seem condescending.
  • moate 5y ago
    I too am without a Twitter account. I am using Chrome on a laptop and had 0 difficulty reading this thread. What specifically is your issue? (This is a direct question, not sarcasm)
    • sndean 5y ago
      Using Edge without any extensions, I also can't see the thread without logging in. Only the first two tweets. But I can see everything using Firefox (with lots of extensions). So not sure if it's browser or extension dependent. Annoying either way.
      • moate 5y ago
        I think this is hitting it. I do have ad-blockers extensions on, so that could be what's helping in this case. Also other people pointed out that it sucks on mobile (which I can confirm is an issue). Was just curious since I (weirdly) only ever look at twitter in a browser
    • Akronymus 5y ago
      A modal that pops up on any action taken that prompts me to loging, where dismissing it navigates me back to where I was before opening it.
    • enumjorge 5y ago
      This might be a mobile-only issue, but when clicking the post to see the rest of the thread, a full screen modal pops up forcing a sign-in. Twitter now requires a phone number to create an account, meaning that to read the whole thread I need to give Twitter my mobile number which feels a little weird.
• gibba999 5y ago
  Level of perceived versus implied condesension is a function of cultural communication style. People in some countries just talk like that.
  • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    I think I'm considered condescending even among my cultural peers. I am autistic though.
• JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I understand the lack of a blog, but even many blogs of late I have seen have adopted the frequent "meme interlude" style that I find ... unprofessional. Okay, so I'm a snob. I do have to laugh though when I open the HN comments and the top comment is not about the content of the link at all but is some orthogonal gripe.
• aendruk 5y ago
  It’s literally unreadable to me. Part 1 Part 2 “Show this thread” Spam Spam Spam “Show this thread” just opens a full page Twitter sign-up modal. Being subject to such games is degrading enough that I refuse to play along.
• forgotpwd16 5y ago
  If you can make an infinite tweet chain then compressing information cannot be an argument since it isn't something necessary. And if you cannot, you may potentially be unable to provide all the information you want or worse needed for the topic at hand. In any case a blog post isn't required to be big in size with very condensed text.
• loco5niner 5y ago
  I didn't bother reading it because Twitter wanted me to sign in. I came here for the synopsis.
  • orf 5y ago
    Same. Ridiculous.