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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
by 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 agoI never enjoyed reading anything on Twitter.
- bottled_poe 5y agoThat sounds more like a content problem, not a formatting issue
- hutzlibu 5y agoTo 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 agoThe content is shaped by the medium it is presented in.
- Kiro 5y agoSure, 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 agoEvery blog started with “just” a story
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoWell 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 agoIt’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 agoThere's a button "see full thread".
- aendruk 5y ago…which is a trick that just prompts you to sign up for Twitter.
- wingerlang 5y agoI just tried it logged out and I did not get any prompt.
- aendruk 5y agoScreen recording: https://imgur.com/a/hjiNrfE https://imgur.com/a/hjiNrfE
- wingerlang 5y agoFair enough, that kind of sucks (I tried it on my laptop).
- ljf 5y agoYeah, 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 agoYou 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 agoYou do realise that that reduces “engagement”, so most social media sites punish their users for doing that?
- oauea 5y agoCan you explain how they're punished?
- kemayo 5y agoBecause 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 agoI 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 agoThis button forces you to login if you aren’t logged in. Inconvenient for us dinosaurs without Twitter accounts.
- staticassertion 5y agoThat'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 agoNo 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 agoSide 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 agoThank you, I had the same idea about collapsing threads. This is really helpful!
- bwship 5y agoNot too mention, my ADD usually takes over, and half way through I am all of a sudden looking at cat memes.