5 ms·

This is so hard to follow on twitter; I might recommend a blog post for this sort of thing.

gennarro 5y ago
As soon as a tweet thread appears, I’m out. Especially when potentially interesting tweet starts with “let’s go back to 2009…”
- leetbulb 5y ago
  That was my first thought. Instantly closed the tab.
  - Zandikar 5y ago
    Agreed. if its like 2-5 posts maybe, but a multi-page thread that bouncing around in time frame? Nah. Just wrote a blog and tweat a highlight from it and link to the blog post.
underyx 5y ago
I normally am fine with Twitter threads, but this one was just impossible to follow, I also dropped off after the first page.
klodolph 5y ago
Out of curiosity, what makes this hard to follow? When I click on the link, I get taken to a page on twitter.com that shows me a post, in normal linear order. It reads to me like ordinary English text, in the order you ordinarily read or write it in. The text is not interrupted, except by the little "replies / retweets / likes / share" bar that appears after every tweet.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  I’m just not used to reading multiple paragraphs of text with large gaps populated with junk between each sentence.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    Isn’t that what the HN comment section is like, though? Or maybe I’m just used to reading things like design documents at work (with tons of comments), or standards documents (with footnotes that take up more space than the page body).
    - notreallyserio 5y ago
      HN threads are more likely to have multiple sentence paragraphs in a single comment and replies are nested N levels deep. The UI between each reply is minimal (aka not tuned for “engagement” KPIs) and is almost too subtle. Also, replies to tweets within one of these multiple-tweet posts are hard to even get to, and I genuinely cannot figure out why Twitter used that design. It can’t help engagement.
- nightski 5y ago
  For me it is the same, very easy to follow. But then I remembered you can hit the "star" icon in the top to change your feed to chronological - which I had already done. Maybe that is why it is easier for us?
  - klodolph 5y ago
    This is a link to the thread, so it should present the material in ordinary "threaded" order, no matter how you view it (there shouldn't be any buttons to change the order).
- abdulmuhaimin 5y ago
  let me rephrase your word, but negatively. The text is interrupted by the space-wasting "replies / retweets / likes / share" bar that appears after every tweet. Not to mention that on the desktop, the text is literally only quarter of the screen. Add that to the very frequent interrption bars, you are in for a very long scroll while reading
  - klodolph 5y ago
    > Not to mention that on the desktop, the text is literally only quarter of the screen. A quarter of the width? Well, naturally! The optimal line length for readability is somewhere in the 50-100 character range. This is one of those things that is actually backed by empirical research (lots of research... experiments in readability are cheap and easy to conduct, and people have been doing these experiments for a long time). The width of lines of text in tweets is on the shorter end of that range. Hacker News, for example, is an example of a site with poor readability. The text is as wide as the window. To address this deficiency, I open Hacker News in a narrower window. It's still harder to read.
    - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
      Now assume your and Twitter's research is wrong. How do I make it readable? Not with CSS, their markup is impenetrable. You have to have another site scrape and reformat the content. Shameful.
      - klodolph 5y ago
        Why would I assume that the research is wrong? We’re talking about a century’s worth of readability research, here. Cheap, easy-to-replicate studies which have been done over and over again over the decades. Backed by simple-to-explain theories that explain why. Seems like a completely unreasonable assumption, to be frank.
        kbenson 5y ago
        > Why would I assume that the research is wrong? Because it's highly that even if it's correct in aggregate, there will be outliers that the opposite is true, and they'll benefit from different formatting. That is, even if it's right, it might still be wrong for them. So the question being asked is, why is it made so hard to change?
- lostlogin 5y ago
  > what makes this hard to follow? Short of interspaced adverts or popovers, what could be done to make it worse?
  - klodolph 5y ago
    What a wonderful non-answer. “I think the answer to your question is obvious, so I will not answer it, and just give a sarcastic reply.” But, I’ll still answer your question about what could make it worse… It could have super-wide text, like Hacker News. That would make it worse. The line length is a fairly comfortable length, unlike Hacker News’s dizzying long lines. It could have unusual scrolling behavior, like those Apple product announcements. That would make it worse. You’ve mentioned the biggest thing that makes websites worse—interspaced adverts and popups, which are downright ubiquitous now. Nearly every site I visit has those. Honestly, it seems very easy to read for me.
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      Apologies - there was no sarcasm intended. I am dismissive of the twitter format for this content as I don’t like that something that seems suited to a blog post is split into dozens of short snippets with reactions, likes etc beneath. It is rare I make it though them as the format seems designed to be skimmed and skipped and I vastly prefer the HN format with more text, longer lines and a limited amount of cruft. I primarily use HN on mobile.
bitwize 5y ago
In 2021, l33t hax0rs express themselves in 140-character niblets. Long form gives them migraines.
- 1_player 5y ago
  And then make fun of people who prefer long form content without distracting crap, login screens and ads in between. Fucking nerds, am i right?

As soon as a tweet thread appears, I’m out. Especially when potentially interesting tweet starts with “let’s go back to 2009…”

leetbulb 5y ago
That was my first thought. Instantly closed the tab.
- Zandikar 5y ago
  Agreed. if its like 2-5 posts maybe, but a multi-page thread that bouncing around in time frame? Nah. Just wrote a blog and tweat a highlight from it and link to the blog post.

underyx 5y ago

I normally am fine with Twitter threads, but this one was just impossible to follow, I also dropped off after the first page.

klodolph 5y ago

Out of curiosity, what makes this hard to follow? When I click on the link, I get taken to a page on twitter.com that shows me a post, in normal linear order. It reads to me like ordinary English text, in the order you ordinarily read or write it in. The text is not interrupted, except by the little "replies / retweets / likes / share" bar that appears after every tweet.

notreallyserio 5y ago
I’m just not used to reading multiple paragraphs of text with large gaps populated with junk between each sentence.
- klodolph 5y ago
  Isn’t that what the HN comment section is like, though? Or maybe I’m just used to reading things like design documents at work (with tons of comments), or standards documents (with footnotes that take up more space than the page body).
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    HN threads are more likely to have multiple sentence paragraphs in a single comment and replies are nested N levels deep. The UI between each reply is minimal (aka not tuned for “engagement” KPIs) and is almost too subtle. Also, replies to tweets within one of these multiple-tweet posts are hard to even get to, and I genuinely cannot figure out why Twitter used that design. It can’t help engagement.
nightski 5y ago
For me it is the same, very easy to follow. But then I remembered you can hit the "star" icon in the top to change your feed to chronological - which I had already done. Maybe that is why it is easier for us?
- klodolph 5y ago
  This is a link to the thread, so it should present the material in ordinary "threaded" order, no matter how you view it (there shouldn't be any buttons to change the order).
abdulmuhaimin 5y ago
let me rephrase your word, but negatively. The text is interrupted by the space-wasting "replies / retweets / likes / share" bar that appears after every tweet. Not to mention that on the desktop, the text is literally only quarter of the screen. Add that to the very frequent interrption bars, you are in for a very long scroll while reading
- klodolph 5y ago
  > Not to mention that on the desktop, the text is literally only quarter of the screen. A quarter of the width? Well, naturally! The optimal line length for readability is somewhere in the 50-100 character range. This is one of those things that is actually backed by empirical research (lots of research... experiments in readability are cheap and easy to conduct, and people have been doing these experiments for a long time). The width of lines of text in tweets is on the shorter end of that range. Hacker News, for example, is an example of a site with poor readability. The text is as wide as the window. To address this deficiency, I open Hacker News in a narrower window. It's still harder to read.
  - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
    Now assume your and Twitter's research is wrong. How do I make it readable? Not with CSS, their markup is impenetrable. You have to have another site scrape and reformat the content. Shameful.
    - klodolph 5y ago
      Why would I assume that the research is wrong? We’re talking about a century’s worth of readability research, here. Cheap, easy-to-replicate studies which have been done over and over again over the decades. Backed by simple-to-explain theories that explain why. Seems like a completely unreasonable assumption, to be frank.
      - kbenson 5y ago
        > Why would I assume that the research is wrong? Because it's highly that even if it's correct in aggregate, there will be outliers that the opposite is true, and they'll benefit from different formatting. That is, even if it's right, it might still be wrong for them. So the question being asked is, why is it made so hard to change?
lostlogin 5y ago
> what makes this hard to follow? Short of interspaced adverts or popovers, what could be done to make it worse?
- klodolph 5y ago
  What a wonderful non-answer. “I think the answer to your question is obvious, so I will not answer it, and just give a sarcastic reply.” But, I’ll still answer your question about what could make it worse… It could have super-wide text, like Hacker News. That would make it worse. The line length is a fairly comfortable length, unlike Hacker News’s dizzying long lines. It could have unusual scrolling behavior, like those Apple product announcements. That would make it worse. You’ve mentioned the biggest thing that makes websites worse—interspaced adverts and popups, which are downright ubiquitous now. Nearly every site I visit has those. Honestly, it seems very easy to read for me.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    Apologies - there was no sarcasm intended. I am dismissive of the twitter format for this content as I don’t like that something that seems suited to a blog post is split into dozens of short snippets with reactions, likes etc beneath. It is rare I make it though them as the format seems designed to be skimmed and skipped and I vastly prefer the HN format with more text, longer lines and a limited amount of cruft. I primarily use HN on mobile.

bitwize 5y ago

In 2021, l33t hax0rs express themselves in 140-character niblets. Long form gives them migraines.

1_player 5y ago
And then make fun of people who prefer long form content without distracting crap, login screens and ads in between. Fucking nerds, am i right?