5 ms·

Twitter 'threads' are bad and people should feel badly for creating/posting them.

shagie 5y ago
I nearly completely agree with you. The one thing that a twitter "threat" enables that is poorly supported in other formats is the ability to have comments on a particular sentence. The worst part of the twitter as a long form platform is when a single idea extends beyond the limitations of a single tweet.
- trentgreene 5y ago
  I see your point about commenting on sentences, but would also argue that academic writing provides a better model for this via quotations and references
  - shagie 5y ago
    Yep, but there's no place that provides the combination of user base, potential for engagement, and commenting on sentences. Long form is a much better format for comprehensive ideas, but the "this is something I want to comment on" isn't there and the engagement on the comment and comments on the comments rarely exists in those formats. Medium's "highlight" and "respond" functionality is a rather poor implementation of that desired ability (the discoverability beyond the "top highlight" is difficult for other users) ... and then there's that whole "upgrade to read more" problem. And beyond that, there's the bit that twitter has a large number of users - trying to traverse Wordpress pings and comment moderation... ugh. Unfortunately, twitter is the best place that offers users, aggregation, no $ needed, comment on sentence, and the opportunity for engagement of followers.
- trutannus 5y ago
  That also causes replies to sections of text taken out of context to get more traction than they should, feeding the "dunk" culture on Twitter. I'm not sure being able to reply to and highlight an out of context chunk of text is a useful thing for communication at all really.
batman-farts 5y ago
Imagine how busted archived Twitter threads are going to look in 20 years. If linkrot in the early Web is bad now, how bad will “tweet-rot” be, after Twitter declines into disuse, quite likely fails as a corporation, and its CDN is scattered to the winds? I couldn’t care much less about VC or crypto-bro brain farts like the linked post, although historians writing about this period probably will be, if only to write cautionary tales. But there’s a lot of deeply interesting expertise that’s been crammed into this godawful format, especially during fraught times like the pandemic and the current Ukraine invasion. I can only guess that the experts in question assume that Twitter will be the format with the widest reach, although I have to doubt that will always be true. If the Internet Archive comes up with a project specifically targeted at archiving Twitter threads as coherent artifacts, I for one would be happy to earmark a donation for that.
jdrc 5y ago
I prefer them to long winded blog posts with fluffy personal anecdotes that read like a novella. Twitter threads are so bad that nobody wants to write more than they have to.

I nearly completely agree with you. The one thing that a twitter "threat" enables that is poorly supported in other formats is the ability to have comments on a particular sentence. The worst part of the twitter as a long form platform is when a single idea extends beyond the limitations of a single tweet.

trentgreene 5y ago
I see your point about commenting on sentences, but would also argue that academic writing provides a better model for this via quotations and references
- shagie 5y ago
  Yep, but there's no place that provides the combination of user base, potential for engagement, and commenting on sentences. Long form is a much better format for comprehensive ideas, but the "this is something I want to comment on" isn't there and the engagement on the comment and comments on the comments rarely exists in those formats. Medium's "highlight" and "respond" functionality is a rather poor implementation of that desired ability (the discoverability beyond the "top highlight" is difficult for other users) ... and then there's that whole "upgrade to read more" problem. And beyond that, there's the bit that twitter has a large number of users - trying to traverse Wordpress pings and comment moderation... ugh. Unfortunately, twitter is the best place that offers users, aggregation, no $ needed, comment on sentence, and the opportunity for engagement of followers.
trutannus 5y ago
That also causes replies to sections of text taken out of context to get more traction than they should, feeding the "dunk" culture on Twitter. I'm not sure being able to reply to and highlight an out of context chunk of text is a useful thing for communication at all really.

batman-farts 5y ago

Imagine how busted archived Twitter threads are going to look in 20 years. If linkrot in the early Web is bad now, how bad will “tweet-rot” be, after Twitter declines into disuse, quite likely fails as a corporation, and its CDN is scattered to the winds? I couldn’t care much less about VC or crypto-bro brain farts like the linked post, although historians writing about this period probably will be, if only to write cautionary tales. But there’s a lot of deeply interesting expertise that’s been crammed into this godawful format, especially during fraught times like the pandemic and the current Ukraine invasion. I can only guess that the experts in question assume that Twitter will be the format with the widest reach, although I have to doubt that will always be true. If the Internet Archive comes up with a project specifically targeted at archiving Twitter threads as coherent artifacts, I for one would be happy to earmark a donation for that.

jdrc 5y ago

I prefer them to long winded blog posts with fluffy personal anecdotes that read like a novella. Twitter threads are so bad that nobody wants to write more than they have to.