24 ms·

Twitter Notes

435 points by yellow_lead 4y ago

partiallypro 4y ago
Honestly probably too little too late. How they didn't try to have a long form product to compete with Substack (especially) and Medium is astonishing. I've long held that Twitter engineers, etc seem disconnected from their own user base.
- boringg 4y ago
  Too little too late? If they do a better job than substack or medium they can probably take marketshare. Instead of innovating on it they can emulate the effective products and build on top of it. It's like saying instagram's videos were too late to tik tok. It effectively stopped the hemorrhaging and kept market share.
  - partiallypro 4y ago
    Not really comparable at all. Instagram already had videos and stories. Twitter has had no form of long form at all. Even still Instagram user growth is in the tank. Based on this product demo in the gif, it won't be competing with Substack or Medium anytime soon.
capableweb 4y ago
In the GIF, they display that the tool is available under twitter.com/write (which, obviously wouldn't be public yet unless I was invited to participate, which I wasn't). If you go there now, there is a Twitter account there already (a private "Writers Group"). Will that Twitter account disappear now with this change?
- simonlc 4y ago
  Same thing for some of the other links, which they do twitter.com/i/bookmarks for example, instead of twitter.com/bookmarks. I know this because at one point it was broken in the UI and one of the side links went to a profile instead.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- omoikane 4y ago
  This could have been avoided if twitter had distinct URL schemes for user accounts versus site functions (like how mastodon has /@user versus /path), or it could have been avoided if they reserved enough words early on to avoid this collision. Now I wonder how they would reclaim the paths that were parked by early users. Pay these users to rename their accounts, perhaps?
  - zorr 4y ago
    Why would they pay users for this? They can just force a rename and take the path if they need it. Their house, their rules.
- twic 4y ago
  I've lost track of how many times i've loaded this guy's profile by mistake: https://twitter.com/advanced_search https://twitter.com/advanced_search
willmeyers 4y ago
I'm by no means a UI/UX expert but the article UI is no good in my opinion. I can't really focus on the paragraphs for more than a couple seconds without effort before my eyes drift over to the margins (could be just me though). Interested to see where this will go!
- midenginedcoupe 4y ago
  I agree, it looks terrible and is really hard to read. Maybe it's the line spacing?
- wmeredith 4y ago
  Well I am a UI/UX expert, and it's a pretty bad interface for reading. The main issue is the spacing after paragraphs. It's large enough to separate the main blocks of the article from each other almost as much as from other elements on the page. The central narrative content blocks don't "hang together" so your eye wanders at the end of each paragraph. They need to spend some time understanding the Gestalt principle of proximity: https://www.usertesting.com/resources/topics/gestalt-principles#proximity https://www.usertesting.com/resources/topics/gestalt-princip...
adamrezich 4y ago
interesting how Twitter is evolving from a 140-char microblog platform into a mishmash of different vaguely related and tenuously connected services/features: - main timeline - direct messages - Spaces (audio chatrooms) - Communities (sub-timelines) - Newsletters (this still exists? will it, if Notes gains traction?) - and now Notes and probably more I forgot. I wonder if they'll eventually go full-circle and add a Podcasts feature. but I just use Twitter for its core timeline feature and rarely ever engage with the rest of it. I'm not sure if Notes looks like a necessarily appealing place to post longer-form content as opposed to Substack, Medium, etc.
- dariusj18 4y ago
  Every walled garden needs to plant their own flowers. It's an unfortunate side effect of profit motive and keeping people on the platform rather than integrations and openness.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Not necessarily just the company’s profit motive. Individual careers require this sort of stuff to be done.
    - adamrezich 4y ago
      exactly—why is Newsletters still a thing if they're working on Notes now? shouldn't those two be one and the same? walled gardens planting their own flowers is unsurprising at this point, but when one goes from planting its own flowers to planting competing plants in the same space...
  - holler 4y ago
    Agree, but I don't think it necessarily has to be that way. All of these social sites have a core competency/use case, but once they start tacking on features as an effect of the profit motive, it starts to dilute the experience. Working on my own site and planning to keep it strictly focused on the core value prop.
- 4y ago
searchableguy 4y ago
In my experience, most people on twitter won't click to read long form content if it opens in a separate view. They won't read past few tweets either. I believe most twitter users don't want to read beyond 280 characters. A thread provides them an opportunity to comment on any 280 characters section they have actually read. They should have provided similar interface to typefully to write long form tweet and a button to view all tweets as an article like threader app while keeping the same UX/UI with little changes.
- ProfessorLayton 4y ago
  >They won't read past few tweets either I believe this is because twitter is actively hostile to reading long threads. They'll truncate the middle of a thread, or show "load more tweets" for replies — and then they'll only load just a few more tweets. Want to keep reading? Load a few more tweets at a time. It's miserable.
  - captn3m0 4y ago
    Yeah, a better UX would be to just make long threads more readable (compact tweets with smaller icons).
- idealmedtech 4y ago
  I think people actually want to read longer form content on Twitter, just look at how often threads appear under the viral tweets topic! It's more fundamentally a twitter problem than a user attention span problem in my opinion.
whimsicalism 4y ago
They should definitely be using the full width of screen for longer form "notes." I personally would also prefer a modal as opposed to a completely different page.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  Honestly, no. I find HN comments practically unreadable because of the lack of wrapping. The default render width of a tweet is perfectly reasonable. Maybe you could extend it out to the width of a substack or medium post. But there's nothing natural about stretching a sentence out across 800 horizontal characters. It's just miserable on a good monitor.
  - searchableguy 4y ago
    Why not use https://brianlovin.com/hn/31838049 https://brianlovin.com/hn/31838049 ?
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    I guess I should have just said wider, not necessarily full width. The current experience is incredibly narrow and bad on desktop.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    Thanks, no. If needed I can resize my FullHD browser window to the half-width. If someone decided what I can' have more than N characters on the line - it doesn't matter if I have a FullHD, UWXHDA or whatever monitor - I just CAN'T do anything (aside of Ctrl+A, CTrl+C, Ctrl+V in Notepad/gedit/whatever).
jeanlucas 4y ago
Just like all twitter stuff, is this demo only for iOS? edit: not working for me on Android/web, but could be geo-locked since I am in Brazil.
randommind 4y ago
I don't know, in times when account suspensions and/or removals for political reasons seem progressively more frequent (and arbitrary), it doesn't seem like a great idea to entrust the longer writings to them as well... It seems wiser to maintain separate blogs.
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  100% agree with you, but as long as they have an API you can access, you can always syndicate your content to Twitter. Here's an example for my potato.horse site connected to https://twitter.com/yay_psd https://twitter.com/yay_psd: https://github.com/paprikka/yay.psd/blob/main/data/twitter/push-to-twitter.ts https://github.com/paprikka/yay.psd/blob/main/data/twitter/p... Most of my users are come from the site and Reddit, but it's one of those things you just set up and forget, so it was worth the hassle.
  - randommind 4y ago
    Yes but simply linking makes it more difficult to automatically censor content. Aside from the problem of redundancy (sorry, old school here, redundancy must have a reeeally good reason for me), as I have already mentioned, this would get your readers used to reading you ONLY on twitter, while by linking to an external blog your readers will already be used to read you elsewhere, in case your account suddenly disappears. Of course I imagine that in addition to the intent to expand outward control (and let's call it aggressive "moderation"? the infamous dangerous "unfettered conversations" come back to mind ;)) of content as an alternative to blogs, there is also the intent to offer it as an alternative to long threads, which to me, however, does not seem like a good idea as well, because it is known that the average reader is more likely to read in chunks rather than deal with long text (as others have already said). Not to mention that with threads you can reply point by point, to individual tweets, which as I see it is smoother and neater. Maybe I'm biased (that's why I started out with "I don't know") but I see it as more of a political move than a functional one, that's all. And by the way, if one really doesn't want to think about censorial and narrative control intentions, in the least worst case scenario to me it looks like a push toward increasing the already troubling monopoly of a few giants on content, data, attention, etc.
anonymoushn 4y ago
You can tell the video is a mockup because it's missing a bunch of multi-second load times.
lepetitchef 4y ago
How to see this feature. I don't see Twitter Notes/Write in my sidebar.
- rg111 4y ago
  It's currently in Alpha. All users can't write now. And one cannot even view the notes outside of certain regions.
simlevesque 4y ago
I love that the mobile website forces me to use the app and now then you click a Note in the app it opens it in the browser.
- dnissley 4y ago
  Yeah, this was a huge benefit of threads for me! They don't break me out of twitter flow into some other website. On top of this they have barely distinguished notes from links (despite owning the platform!)
  - wraptile 4y ago
    That's the only real reason threads are so successful imo. APP lock-in is an extremely toxic dark pattern and Twitter knows it.
- onychomys 4y ago
  Even better, if you've blocked the built-in browser in the app (via the app's settings) and you try to open a Note there, nothing happens, not even a message saying it can't be opened.
LeoPanthera 4y ago
Well, all the links to notes just result in "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else." for me. I know it says available in "most countries" but I'm right here in California. Is it not available in Twitter's home country?
- junot 4y ago
  I had the same thing happen to me. Page worked after refresh though.
  - FateOfNations 4y ago
    That seems to be an issue in general for Twitter, particularly when logged out. It often doesn't load on the first go around and you have to refresh to see the content.
    - Hackbraten 4y ago
      No dice for me in Europe. I can refresh as often as I want, it keeps saying “Page not found.”
    - melony 4y ago
      So many web developers at Twitter and they still can't fix SSR
- joegahona 4y ago
  Disabling Brave Shields rectified this for me.
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symlinkk 4y ago
This is terrible, the entire point of Twitter is that each tweet is short and easy to digest. The constraints forced authors to cut out all fluff. They’re diluting the one thing about their platform that made it special.
systemvoltage 4y ago
So much margin on either side of the mobile layout. I can read like 3 words on a line. Why do we need so much white space!?
rammy1234 4y ago
there is a great potential.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
I get why they have been working on this (ppl's thread posting out of control) but making longform posts content live on / inside the platform reaks of Facebook walled garden, or Medium etc. Should be encouraging ppl to have blogs or post on urls and just link to them. I dunno, it's annoying direction.
- __ryan__ 4y ago
  Twitter should be encouraging my grandma to leave twitter and go to random websites to view long tweets?
- mistermann 4y ago
  I have a feeling that one aspect of it is that with Musk potentially coming on board, they realized that the pathetic absence of new features is going to have high visibility drawn to it soon. Just an opinion.
- ghaff 4y ago
  That ship has sailed unfortunately. Most people are going to post in walled gardens--and, if Twitter is that walled garden, I'd much prefer they encourage longer form posting than long threads.
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  Twitlonger has been around for ages and is pretty nice to use. Writers seem to prefer just making threads because users will read them there. Every time you add a link or some other barrier in front of your content, you are reducing your readership.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
Aside, why is this shared in a very very long weird GIF and not a video. (can't pause/seek)
- cube00 4y ago
  I was curious about this too and thought it must be a massive GIF. However it's not actually a GIF, it's an MP4 video[1], I wonder why it's mislabelled as a GIF. [1]: https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/FV3mdpEXoAIrkA1.mp4 https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/FV3mdpEXoAIrkA1.mp4
  - hgazx 4y ago
    Calling videos without an audio track “gifs” has been done for years now.
    - throwamon 4y ago
      Or, more precisely, crippled video players where you can't even rewind.
    - mintplant 4y ago
      Yep. Imgur's GIFV [0] from 2014 is the earliest mainstream example I know of. In the cultural consciousness, a "GIF" represents a particular medium and form factor, which has become decoupled from its namesake file format to deliver the same experience more efficiently. [0] https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/
    - aendruk 4y ago
      My favorite solution to this is to use GIF for the 90s encoding scheme and gif for this newer lax meaning. Then while we’re at it, settle the pronunciation debate by picking a different one for each.
    - ChrisArchitect 4y ago
      ah, yes, I see, it's the no-audio that made it a 'GIF'. Fair enough. But annoying because it automatically removes seek and pause options if it assumes it's a GIF. doh.
tantalor 4y ago
Apparently the Twitter app (android) doesn't support them. Nice.
- Bigpet 4y ago
  The desktop web version also doesn't seem to support it for me. Just shows me "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else."
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cube00 4y ago
Now that Twitter have decided the solution to long form content is a link off the main thread hopefully more creators will feel more comfortable to instead link to their own blog rather then to "Notes". This could be a very positive thing for creators to gain back more control over their brand and content.
- rlopezcc 4y ago
  They will probably make Notes seamless and cool inside the twitter app and external links slow and clumsy.
paxys 4y ago
Is it "Twitter Write" or "Twitter Notes"? The branding is already confusing, and it hasn't even launched yet.
- cr3ative 4y ago
  Amusingly, they’re calling it “Notes” and specifically NOT “Twitter Notes”. Which is not going to go well for them, judging by this submission title.
suyash 4y ago
Idea is good however implementation is horrible specially on desktop web. The narrow width of the content makes it hard to read, not to mention all the distractions on left and right side of the page. They should make the notes full screen without distractions if they want people to read them.
- aendruk 4y ago
  I can see the logic behind the narrow presentation. If most people use this on pocket computers, the writing will likely be tailored to that format e.g. with generally shorter paragraphs so as not to tower. Keeping the presentation consistent might help with readability. For an example of what Twitter might be trying to avoid, look no further than this website, which has driven me to inject `.comment { max-width: 70ch; }`, among other things.
dend 4y ago
My reaction to this is that it's an effort to keep users within the "walled garden" of Twitter, which is not the best thing for those that write. Recall the story with Medium - yes, you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your content. I know that I am talking with an overly developer-focused lens (a-la "you can reimplement Dropbox in a weekend"), but self-hosting blogs outside the "walled gardens" is not super complicated even for non-power users. Ghost has existed for years and is a very user-friendly experience. Want to be a bit more technical - go the static site route. It might be a lost battle to convince the majority of the social media audience of this (after all, can't beat the convenience and the cost of $0), but I really do not see this as beneficial to those that deeply care about their long-form writing accessibility and sustainability. Twitter already has login walls to just read tweets, so I'd imagine the same is likely to apply to long-form content as well.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  > not the best thing for those that write I disagree. I think this is mostly meant to steal market share from other walled-gardens such as Medium. People who write on self-hosted blogs and the like will continue to do so.
- caycep 4y ago
  With the "walled garden" comment, I'm wondering - nowadays, all sorts of discourse seems to depend on these types of proprietary services/platforms, that employ armies of engineers to keep them running, develop new features, etc. Attempts to make things decentralized all seem to be aggregating into central controls, i.e. "Web3/crypto" -> coinbase, kraken, etc Why aren't older decentralized "services" protocols being looked at, or developed further - i.e. UUnet/newsgroups, torrent, etc?
  - dend 4y ago
    You don't need to look far for this. To be fair, my comment was much less about decentralization and more about the existence of tools for content portability and control. For example, you can have Markdown + Ghost + custom domain. Worst case scenario, you move to another hosting platform, but you're not locked to one particular service and its own goals of growth.
NearAP 4y ago
While it's all well and good to launch new features, I think Twitter should improve their existing service and I'm referring to low hanging fruits. I don't understand the rationale behind cutting me off while I'm scrolling through Twitter simply because I'm not logged in. Twitter can still display Ads to me irrespective of whether I'm logged in or not. In fact cutting me off means I leave Twitter which means I don't see the Ads they're selling which in turn means less Ad money for them. Even when logged in, Twitter will display the new message/note icon. When I click on it to read the notification, it turns out to be Twitter telling me to turn on notifications. Now normally, once you have read the message, the 'new' message/note icon is cleared. Instead Twitter displays it again almost immediately and this then goes on for the next few hours before they stop. If they can't fix these simple things, why would someone want to read longer content on Twitter. They would still get cut off again as Twitter is doing for existing tweets
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  I think the message is simply that Twitter isn’t that into you. Twitter wants people that log in, and turn on their notifications. You’d think you’re good enough for them, you can provide them ad revenue too, but you’re just not their type and they don’t find much happines with you. Ultimately it’s not you, it’s them.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Twitter doesn't care about a pair of anonynmous eyeballs not visiting their site anymore. It's not Google. Twitter's ad targeting depends on knowing what a user looks at, and how their network of connections/follows lines up with other user segments.
  - NearAP 4y ago
    >> Twitter's ad targeting depends on knowing what a user looks at But they can track which tweets are being clicked, the IP of the person and a whole bunch of things even when you're not logged in. >> and how their network of connections/follows But that's the problem right there. If you force people to create an account to read tweets, they might do so but they won't follow anybody or follow very few people and tweet quite infrequently. I just don't think it's feasible to expect a significant number of people (like say # of users on Facebook) to be tweeting regularly. But it's possible that I'm wrong.
dchuk 4y ago
This is the most painfully obvious feature they could have added to the product. Twitter is a massive distribution network with a heavily constrained format to distribute. Allowing more blog-like content formats to latch into the same established distribution network (instead of hacky threads which suck) is a no brainer.
rchaud 4y ago
Anything to end the tyranny of the 280 char hot take. Longer tweets turning into threads isn't any better, because the tweets are still written such that each one can be pulled out and quoted/retweeted. So instead of greater exposition, nuance, you get a series of hot takes compartmentalized into their own tweet.
drusepth 4y ago
Interestingly enough, Notes are editable (as seen by the "edited" tag on https://twitter.com/i/notes/1539613004370788352 https://twitter.com/i/notes/1539613004370788352). Might be an indicator of how editing will work if/when it trickles down to normal tweets, too.
- jmartens 4y ago
  I noticed this too and thought it was the best part of the announcement. I don't personally want to write notes on Twitter, but I'm eager to be able to fix my typos in tweets!
- deleted 4y ago
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barbazoo 4y ago
I'm getting "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else." for every note that I click on.
sva_ 4y ago
When I click on any of these notes, I just get > Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.
luxurytent 4y ago
Now they just need to make the reading experience of these notes not abysmal. Remove the dreaded "Who To Follow" and "Trending" sidebars, and collapse the left pane. Right now, less than 1/3rd of the screen is for representing the writing.
hintymad 4y ago
Eh...finally? Like 10 years after its competitor weibo.com? Says a lot about the culture of Twitter.
- jmartens 4y ago
  Me never having heard of weibo says a lot about Twitter's success...
  - hintymad 4y ago
    It's Chinese company, so naturally few people in the west heard about it. It does not mean that Twitter does a better job in product iteration compared to weibo, though.
- o_m 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure it has been a limitation by design, and not a technical challenge they needed to solve.
mgiannopoulos 4y ago
Hopefully this will mean the end of threads especially the ones with the first teaser / void of any content tweet.
Saint_Genet 4y ago
I’m not so sure this works with how I use twitter. My typical twitter use is when I’m on a 10 minute ride on the subway, I don’t want longform writing in this context. If I see a link to something interesting I’ll open a tab in safari for later reading, but I’m not gonna move away from my timeline just to read your thoughts
vincentmarle 4y ago
I've just tested this by clicking on one of the notes in the Twitter app: it opens up an ugly webview which I'm not logged into... and it's suggesting to download and use the app for a better experience (I was already on the app!).
vincvinc 4y ago
Any other similar platform (weibo, facebook, G+) just allows the post/tweet to be long and editable. It’s a proven concept. It leads to many people sharing their thoughts in a more readable way than a thread of tweets, and has a lower barrier than having a blog. What I see here feels overspec’d and convoluted, as if hundreds of people had to have a say on what could be a very simple and singular product.
Kye 4y ago
Good thing I never did much with Revue--which this is replacing if I understood the account's bio right--after Twitter bought it. I'm sure all the portability will vanish in the name of "better integration" or some other weak CEO-speak.
emkee 4y ago
https://twitter.com/Corey5771/status/1539645330328657920?s=20&t=GKlR656G6EVbHwfZosLb1g https://twitter.com/Corey5771/status/1539645330328657920?s=2...
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barrenko 4y ago
This is like one of those "every animal shape evolves to crab eventually" but for social networks.
cwkoss 4y ago
Notes should have the back button you get when you use a thread. First time I've used browser back button on twitter in a while.
meibo 4y ago
Very odd of them to launch this without support in apps. The mobile view doesn't even load for me, just says that the content can't be found.
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  Apparently 7500 employees is not enough to implement a basic cross platform blog viewer.
andrew_ 4y ago
The immediate vibe I got was; Twitter is channeling LiveJournal to keep users on Twitter
deanCommie 4y ago
ITT: Feedback from people who don't like Twitter, or don't use Twitter.
Mixtape 4y ago
Pretty much every take I have on this is covered by the discourse here about walled gardens, but I do have two other points of concern: Indexability and SEO. When you want to view certain content on Twitter, you need to log in. If you don't want to, you're forbidden from viewing that content. If that happens here, I worry that the accessibility of long-form, blog-style content production will lead to more users either being onboarded to Twitter for what should be a simple matter of viewing an HTML + CSS page or otherwise missing out on content that could be valuable to them (e.g. news from prominent personalities, interviews with professionals, press releases from companies, etc.) My second concern is with SEO. If this really takes off, I worry that a first page of search results that once would have contained articles from a number of separate blogs will become dominated by a single, homogenous site. Perhaps grouping results in the way that Google does could help with that, but I'd rather avoid needing to append "-site:twitter.com" to my query just to be able to find content that I can read without being tracked. As a whole, I'm not a fan. This strikes me as another move by a social media giant to become "the internet" in the eyes of some people. Maybe that's appealing to the masses, but it's dystopian in my eyes.
- wraptile 4y ago
  Facebook groups and twitter has been probably the worst things to happen to preservation of our knowledge.
  - aurea 4y ago
    Discord as well. For instance the Scala community moved from gitter to discord. I couldn’t disagree more with that decision.
jedberg 4y ago
The first note I read on Twitter was about the ecological impact of porgs on the Galactic Empire. I feel like I will remember that for a long time.
hackandtrip 4y ago
I do wonder how this plays with the acquisition. IIRC, one of the merge agreement was for Twitter to avoid drastic changes that could impact the value of the company - this seems pretty big to me.
lr 4y ago
Alternative headline: After 12 years, Twitter finally decides to do something with Posterous
- rogerallen 4y ago
  Came here to say this. I really, really liked Posterous.
  - lr 4y ago
    Even though I have not "posted" to it in years, I still maintain my https://posthaven.com/ https://posthaven.com/ account.
comment500 4y ago
Interesting feature, looks like it may be an alternative to writing big long tweet threads all in one go with a "@threadreaderapp unroll" tweet at the end. The main difference with this seems to be, you can't link to or highlight individual sections within the Note, if quote tweeting or replying. Perhaps this is a good thing, to prevent parts of what's written being too easily taken out of context. One downside may be that the entire Note would be targeted for terms of service violations, should they occur. At present, if a tweet in a multi-tweet thread breaks the rules, it can be excised without affecting the rest of what's written.
LightG 4y ago
or, "As a part of our strategy review, we've decided to test Clickbait articles, including the outraged and counter-outraged responses you've come to know and love. All on one platform!!!" ...
bearcherian 4y ago
It's amazing that the micro-blogging platform is just becoming more like every other blogging platform
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bradgessler 4y ago
It’s weird seeing Twitter build this after they acquired and shut down Posterous almost a decade ago. What’s old is new again.
Invictus0 4y ago
The text-to-viewport-height ratio of this page on desktop is so low it's just astonishing. I can't imagine many people will click on a tweet to read it. If you're going to make me click, just link to a real website?
TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
Hopefully this is the death of the practice of posting long text on Twitter as an image with no alt text. I can't believe it took Twitter this long.
JimmyRuska 4y ago
Welcome back blogger ! I was getting tired of only seeing headlines
LudwigNagasena 4y ago
They iterated on long-form UI/UX and what they came up with is just a link to a separate post that doesn't provide any additional integration?
braingenious 4y ago
So glad to see Twitter finally innovate its way to becoming Livejournal!
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blobbers 4y ago
Text is so cheap to store and distribute, yet they can monetize so well. Much cheaper than images, or video. Adding a way to get more content in their distribution network makes complete business sense. (whether it's good for the internet as a whole is another discussion; personally I prefer the weird internet of the early 2000s) Wonder why the margins are so tough for a company like twitter. Seems like they should be able to make money hand over fist with their existing product. 0 innovation in years, should be low maintenance.
ei8ths 4y ago
isnt this like tumblr?
baby 4y ago
I have this theory that, the bigger a company is the harder it is to pivot and change things. The reason is simple: it could mean killing your own business. With that in mind, how can a big company innovate on what they have? I believe there's two ways: 1. Keep your tool, but change the users 2. Keep your users, but change the tool I like to sort every new company's announcement as a one of these types of innovation. Today twitter decided to do the second: keep the users, but introduce a new tool: blogging. Interestingly, any social network companies, be it Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. can introduce these tools, and as such they can sometimes overlap. For now, twitter owns the public space, and facebook owns the "friends, neighbors, etc." space. But there's no reason that twitter couldn't create a twitter for your friends only. Facebook did try to do "facebook for the public space" but they integrated it too hard inside of the main tool instead of making it an extra tool on the side. An example of 1 is workplace: facebook but for work.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  This is a pretty well-known theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma
blairanderson 4y ago
https://twitter.com/i/notes/1539613004370788352 https://twitter.com/i/notes/1539613004370788352 https://twitter.com/i/notes/1535469588846092288 https://twitter.com/i/notes/1535469588846092288 https://twitter.com/i/notes/1534297736597618689 https://twitter.com/i/notes/1534297736597618689
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anoncow 4y ago
Will Twitter simply evolve into allowing users to post anything Facebook-style?
razzimatazz 4y ago
I definitely will need a "Jump to the recipe" button for Twitter notes. You've found an interesting topic and decided to use that to practice your medium-long form writing - but have you actually discovered anything unique worth discussing?
amitmina 4y ago
Twitter wants to introduce everything without solving fundamental distribution problems. The constraint writing is what is powerful about Twitter but now also wants to have a voice and blogs. They really need to be bought out and injected with intelligence
andreyk 4y ago
A lot of takes wrt walled gardens here and this vs threads, to which I could add my 2 cents. Facebook used to have its own things called Notes which was basically the same thing to this (longer format writing attached to your profile). In the years leading up to me launching my blog/personal website, I wrote about a half dozen of these Notes (this was like a decade ago, I was in my early 20s). It was a pretty good 'on ramp' to writing down longer sets of thoughts to share with people, much lower friction that launching a blog. I doubt this is going to serve the same purpose for many people, but it might. Yes it is a walled garden, but I don't think it's meant as a replacement to a personal blog or Medium account (though tbh id much prefer this to Medium). I also have no doubt this will co-exist with Twitter threads, with the two having different strengths and weaknesses. So, as someone who thinks Twitter is flawed but also very usable in a way that makes it quite good, I think it's a nice addition! We'll see if it survives - I kind of hope it does.
2143 4y ago
Long ago I thought Twitter was interesting, though at the moment I'm unable to precisely state why I thought so. I think it was perhaps the simplicity. Twitter seemed feature-complete a long time ago. Handle scaling problems and the odd bugfixes, and you're good. Sometimes I wonder what all their many thousands of engineers do all day. (I understand they probably still need plenty of non-engineers to handle legal/compliance requirements etc of different countries.)
seydor 4y ago
When things like these happen, a rehash of ancient internet idea presented as new again, makes me feel very sad, like the internet is old and dying or sth. I understand it's all about UX etc now , but i wish twitter's competitors did not just copy but instead tried to make their audience a little bit smarter. If the UX is not dumb-proof, you might not get hordes of users, but at least the ones who are there will have a bit of brains.
canbus 4y ago
Personal blogs were invented for exactly this purpose.
d--b 4y ago
Twitter got where it is cause the character limit helped people overcome writer’s block. I think that the effect of this feature is that some people will start writing longer articles, never to finish them. So all in all less people tweeting. And that’s a good thing :-)
perryizgr8 4y ago
> Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.
dangerface 4y ago
Cant see any of the notes because it wants me to login. As a third party why would I want to post on a platform that hides my content from every one that isn't in your walled garden? Why not just write on my wordpress blog and then post that on twitter like I have always been doing? I get the twitter audience and the non twitter audience.
baxuz 4y ago
Looks like Medium 2.0
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I hope they keep it at 280. The value of Twitter is that it has limits, it keeps things focused and isn't trying to be everything for everyone. If someone needs to write a diatribe they can post a link to a blog.
norswap 4y ago
Ha. This is so dumb. People can already easily link a Medium page / github gist / whatever. The reason people write threads is that people don't like to click links that get them out of the Twitter flow. Many reasons for this, but basically it's friction and Twitter is very flaky with keeping your position within the timeline (at least on Android). Keeping it in app should be a step forward, but a clickable "read more" that expand *within the timeline* (same way it works for threads within the timeline, though unfortunately not within list) is the only thing that will kill threads.
WhyDoIThink 4y ago
I don't use Twitter because of its character limit on posts, trolls, spammers, ridiculous censorship, privacy-invasive phone number verification, and laughable customer support service. Twitter used to be cool. But now it's become a joke that I avoid like the plague. I feel so much better because of that.
colesantiago 4y ago
It seems that self hosted blogs are out with this new Twitter Notes feature, I can even see that Medium is pretty much in trouble here as well. Is there any point to starting a self hosted blog now that this exists for non technical people?
- dflock 4y ago
  You can own the farm, or be a share cropper on someone elses farm.
- rockbruno 4y ago
  For starters, your content will not vanish when Twitter inevitably dies or decides to suddenly kill this feature.
  - vincentmarle 4y ago
    Or when they suspend you for no reason...
- yellow_postit 4y ago
  If this ends the thread unrolling apps and posts that are clickbait headlines for 1/x to continue it’ll be good as a user but probably bad for Twitter’s engagement volume.
- barrell 4y ago
  Analytics, design, freedom of speech, durability, interoperability, privacy, different writing UI, monetisation, independence, possibly domain management and surely much much more. It's a nice feature to finally have but I wouldn't undercut the decades of work that entire teams have devoted to blogging tools. Network effects aren't that powerful, plus twitter's network effects aren't even all that strong in all domains
- jdminhbg 4y ago
  I think self-hosted blogs and Medium (and Substack) are in as much danger from Twitter Notes as Instagram stories were from Fleets.
ntoskrnl 4y ago
> A small group of writers are helping us test Notes. They can be read on and off Twitter, by people in most countries I guess I'll be the one to ask. Why would you block certain countries from reading notes, but not from viewing tweets? Also, I thought Twitter wasn't making any major product changes with the looming Musk takeover. Can we assume this means Musk is backing out of the deal?
- dgs_sgd 4y ago
  The board recently endorsed his offer. If he backs down now it would look very bad on him (though with his personality maybe he wouldn't care).
dgs_sgd 4y ago
I welcome this. I always hated the long multi-tweet essays and have often just given up on reading them, especially when I'm not logged in I can't even make it to the end before twitter blocks me from scrolling further. As of now it doesn't look like you can reply to a note with another note? That might go a long way for improving debate and discussion.
- danieldisu 4y ago
  Don’t celebrate it yet, threads have very high click through rate, I really doubt that these are going to replace threads because they won’t dare to touch “the algorithm” after they see the decrease in interactions
- hot_gril 4y ago
  I still won't bother. No matter how fast of a computer you use, Twitter is annoyingly slow to load and seems to leak memory if you scroll too far.
  - CyanBird 4y ago
    My most despised (feature) of Twitter on desktop is that purposeful delay to alerts, where it blinks for a splitsecond and then the little colored alert icon disappears for a solid 3 to 5 seconds only to appear again this time correctly and permanently It is just so annoying that they would do such a thing, I am sure that they have a/b tested it, I don't care it drives me insane, just make it work properly tho I am sure that they have also taken onto account people like me whom despise it, yet not enough to leave the platform Just an overall worsening of user experience
    - DominikPeters 4y ago
      I always thought this is a bug!
    - lupire 4y ago
      You give them away too much credit for intent and competence. They probably have a fast alert based on some cache, and a real alert that takes longer to fetch the real data.
anonymouse008 4y ago
Oh my, please at least remove us from the UX context of Tweets. The cognitive load required to read this is entirely too high - my mind is looking for the 'chunks' of tweets, delineated by the retweet/like/etc menus. And the two side bars are entirely too distracting for what is supposedly a more focused and long form read. Overall though, interesting concept
duxup 4y ago
I guess it makes sense that any micro blog is bound to evolve to have "regular blog" features and the other way around too.
themodelplumber 4y ago
Any hyperlink capability between notes? That could be pretty fascinating.
wpietri 4y ago
Oh wow, this is interesting. I've been wanting this to exist for years. It seemed like such an obvious thing to do given the workarounds people have, from screenshotting blobs of text to tweetstorms to getting a Medium account just so they'd have a place to put things that were longer than a tweet. I'm excited to see how it goes! I'm personally not sure how much I'll use it just because I've already adapted to threads as a medium. Looking back at my tweets, I think it was 2018 when I first wrote something that started in my head as a series of tweets, with the specific rhythms and frequent use of images that goes with it: https://mobile.twitter.com/williampietri/status/1010931721221607425 https://mobile.twitter.com/williampietri/status/101093172122... But I expect it will be good for quite a lot of people as a quick way to publish something, and maybe I'll come around in time.
meowface 4y ago
The only thing I don't get is why they didn't try this many years ago. I'm guessing because they might've thought it would break the "core conceit" and the aesthetic and unique differentiator, but in practice everyone has always already been using absurd, unreadable and/or inconvenient workarounds to accomplish this.
- madrox 4y ago
  I have no basis for this other than human insight, but I suspect it didn't happen sooner because Jack didn't want to compete with Ev. It makes sense too if you believe that the internet is an ecosystem and you want to support complimentary products in yours rather than roll your own.
allenleee 4y ago
Nice! A Medium-like UI is more readable than a "tweet storm".

435 points by yellow_lead 4y ago

Honestly probably too little too late. How they didn't try to have a long form product to compete with Substack (especially) and Medium is astonishing. I've long held that Twitter engineers, etc seem disconnected from their own user base.

boringg 4y ago
Too little too late? If they do a better job than substack or medium they can probably take marketshare. Instead of innovating on it they can emulate the effective products and build on top of it. It's like saying instagram's videos were too late to tik tok. It effectively stopped the hemorrhaging and kept market share.
- partiallypro 4y ago
  Not really comparable at all. Instagram already had videos and stories. Twitter has had no form of long form at all. Even still Instagram user growth is in the tank. Based on this product demo in the gif, it won't be competing with Substack or Medium anytime soon.

capableweb 4y ago

In the GIF, they display that the tool is available under twitter.com/write (which, obviously wouldn't be public yet unless I was invited to participate, which I wasn't). If you go there now, there is a Twitter account there already (a private "Writers Group"). Will that Twitter account disappear now with this change?

simonlc 4y ago
Same thing for some of the other links, which they do twitter.com/i/bookmarks for example, instead of twitter.com/bookmarks. I know this because at one point it was broken in the UI and one of the side links went to a profile instead.
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omoikane 4y ago
This could have been avoided if twitter had distinct URL schemes for user accounts versus site functions (like how mastodon has /@user versus /path), or it could have been avoided if they reserved enough words early on to avoid this collision. Now I wonder how they would reclaim the paths that were parked by early users. Pay these users to rename their accounts, perhaps?
- zorr 4y ago
  Why would they pay users for this? They can just force a rename and take the path if they need it. Their house, their rules.
twic 4y ago
I've lost track of how many times i've loaded this guy's profile by mistake: https://twitter.com/advanced_search https://twitter.com/advanced_search

willmeyers 4y ago

I'm by no means a UI/UX expert but the article UI is no good in my opinion. I can't really focus on the paragraphs for more than a couple seconds without effort before my eyes drift over to the margins (could be just me though). Interested to see where this will go!

midenginedcoupe 4y ago
I agree, it looks terrible and is really hard to read. Maybe it's the line spacing?
wmeredith 4y ago
Well I am a UI/UX expert, and it's a pretty bad interface for reading. The main issue is the spacing after paragraphs. It's large enough to separate the main blocks of the article from each other almost as much as from other elements on the page. The central narrative content blocks don't "hang together" so your eye wanders at the end of each paragraph. They need to spend some time understanding the Gestalt principle of proximity: https://www.usertesting.com/resources/topics/gestalt-principles#proximity https://www.usertesting.com/resources/topics/gestalt-princip...

adamrezich 4y ago

interesting how Twitter is evolving from a 140-char microblog platform into a mishmash of different vaguely related and tenuously connected services/features: - main timeline - direct messages - Spaces (audio chatrooms) - Communities (sub-timelines) - Newsletters (this still exists? will it, if Notes gains traction?) - and now Notes and probably more I forgot. I wonder if they'll eventually go full-circle and add a Podcasts feature. but I just use Twitter for its core timeline feature and rarely ever engage with the rest of it. I'm not sure if Notes looks like a necessarily appealing place to post longer-form content as opposed to Substack, Medium, etc.

dariusj18 4y ago
Every walled garden needs to plant their own flowers. It's an unfortunate side effect of profit motive and keeping people on the platform rather than integrations and openness.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Not necessarily just the company’s profit motive. Individual careers require this sort of stuff to be done.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    exactly—why is Newsletters still a thing if they're working on Notes now? shouldn't those two be one and the same? walled gardens planting their own flowers is unsurprising at this point, but when one goes from planting its own flowers to planting competing plants in the same space...
- holler 4y ago
  Agree, but I don't think it necessarily has to be that way. All of these social sites have a core competency/use case, but once they start tacking on features as an effect of the profit motive, it starts to dilute the experience. Working on my own site and planning to keep it strictly focused on the core value prop.
4y ago

searchableguy 4y ago

In my experience, most people on twitter won't click to read long form content if it opens in a separate view. They won't read past few tweets either. I believe most twitter users don't want to read beyond 280 characters. A thread provides them an opportunity to comment on any 280 characters section they have actually read. They should have provided similar interface to typefully to write long form tweet and a button to view all tweets as an article like threader app while keeping the same UX/UI with little changes.

ProfessorLayton 4y ago
>They won't read past few tweets either I believe this is because twitter is actively hostile to reading long threads. They'll truncate the middle of a thread, or show "load more tweets" for replies — and then they'll only load just a few more tweets. Want to keep reading? Load a few more tweets at a time. It's miserable.
- captn3m0 4y ago
  Yeah, a better UX would be to just make long threads more readable (compact tweets with smaller icons).
idealmedtech 4y ago
I think people actually want to read longer form content on Twitter, just look at how often threads appear under the viral tweets topic! It's more fundamentally a twitter problem than a user attention span problem in my opinion.

whimsicalism 4y ago

They should definitely be using the full width of screen for longer form "notes." I personally would also prefer a modal as opposed to a completely different page.

bpodgursky 4y ago
Honestly, no. I find HN comments practically unreadable because of the lack of wrapping. The default render width of a tweet is perfectly reasonable. Maybe you could extend it out to the width of a substack or medium post. But there's nothing natural about stretching a sentence out across 800 horizontal characters. It's just miserable on a good monitor.
- searchableguy 4y ago
  Why not use https://brianlovin.com/hn/31838049 https://brianlovin.com/hn/31838049 ?
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  I guess I should have just said wider, not necessarily full width. The current experience is incredibly narrow and bad on desktop.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  Thanks, no. If needed I can resize my FullHD browser window to the half-width. If someone decided what I can' have more than N characters on the line - it doesn't matter if I have a FullHD, UWXHDA or whatever monitor - I just CAN'T do anything (aside of Ctrl+A, CTrl+C, Ctrl+V in Notepad/gedit/whatever).

jeanlucas 4y ago

Just like all twitter stuff, is this demo only for iOS? edit: not working for me on Android/web, but could be geo-locked since I am in Brazil.

randommind 4y ago

I don't know, in times when account suspensions and/or removals for political reasons seem progressively more frequent (and arbitrary), it doesn't seem like a great idea to entrust the longer writings to them as well... It seems wiser to maintain separate blogs.

rpastuszak 4y ago
100% agree with you, but as long as they have an API you can access, you can always syndicate your content to Twitter. Here's an example for my potato.horse site connected to https://twitter.com/yay_psd https://twitter.com/yay_psd: https://github.com/paprikka/yay.psd/blob/main/data/twitter/push-to-twitter.ts https://github.com/paprikka/yay.psd/blob/main/data/twitter/p... Most of my users are come from the site and Reddit, but it's one of those things you just set up and forget, so it was worth the hassle.
- randommind 4y ago
  Yes but simply linking makes it more difficult to automatically censor content. Aside from the problem of redundancy (sorry, old school here, redundancy must have a reeeally good reason for me), as I have already mentioned, this would get your readers used to reading you ONLY on twitter, while by linking to an external blog your readers will already be used to read you elsewhere, in case your account suddenly disappears. Of course I imagine that in addition to the intent to expand outward control (and let's call it aggressive "moderation"? the infamous dangerous "unfettered conversations" come back to mind ;)) of content as an alternative to blogs, there is also the intent to offer it as an alternative to long threads, which to me, however, does not seem like a good idea as well, because it is known that the average reader is more likely to read in chunks rather than deal with long text (as others have already said). Not to mention that with threads you can reply point by point, to individual tweets, which as I see it is smoother and neater. Maybe I'm biased (that's why I started out with "I don't know") but I see it as more of a political move than a functional one, that's all. And by the way, if one really doesn't want to think about censorial and narrative control intentions, in the least worst case scenario to me it looks like a push toward increasing the already troubling monopoly of a few giants on content, data, attention, etc.

anonymoushn 4y ago

You can tell the video is a mockup because it's missing a bunch of multi-second load times.

lepetitchef 4y ago

How to see this feature. I don't see Twitter Notes/Write in my sidebar.

rg111 4y ago
It's currently in Alpha. All users can't write now. And one cannot even view the notes outside of certain regions.

simlevesque 4y ago

I love that the mobile website forces me to use the app and now then you click a Note in the app it opens it in the browser.

dnissley 4y ago
Yeah, this was a huge benefit of threads for me! They don't break me out of twitter flow into some other website. On top of this they have barely distinguished notes from links (despite owning the platform!)
- wraptile 4y ago
  That's the only real reason threads are so successful imo. APP lock-in is an extremely toxic dark pattern and Twitter knows it.
onychomys 4y ago
Even better, if you've blocked the built-in browser in the app (via the app's settings) and you try to open a Note there, nothing happens, not even a message saying it can't be opened.

LeoPanthera 4y ago

Well, all the links to notes just result in "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else." for me. I know it says available in "most countries" but I'm right here in California. Is it not available in Twitter's home country?

junot 4y ago
I had the same thing happen to me. Page worked after refresh though.
- FateOfNations 4y ago
  That seems to be an issue in general for Twitter, particularly when logged out. It often doesn't load on the first go around and you have to refresh to see the content.
  - Hackbraten 4y ago
    No dice for me in Europe. I can refresh as often as I want, it keeps saying “Page not found.”
  - melony 4y ago
    So many web developers at Twitter and they still can't fix SSR
joegahona 4y ago
Disabling Brave Shields rectified this for me.

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symlinkk 4y ago

This is terrible, the entire point of Twitter is that each tweet is short and easy to digest. The constraints forced authors to cut out all fluff. They’re diluting the one thing about their platform that made it special.

systemvoltage 4y ago

So much margin on either side of the mobile layout. I can read like 3 words on a line. Why do we need so much white space!?

rammy1234 4y ago

there is a great potential.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

I get why they have been working on this (ppl's thread posting out of control) but making longform posts content live on / inside the platform reaks of Facebook walled garden, or Medium etc. Should be encouraging ppl to have blogs or post on urls and just link to them. I dunno, it's annoying direction.

__ryan__ 4y ago
Twitter should be encouraging my grandma to leave twitter and go to random websites to view long tweets?
mistermann 4y ago
I have a feeling that one aspect of it is that with Musk potentially coming on board, they realized that the pathetic absence of new features is going to have high visibility drawn to it soon. Just an opinion.
ghaff 4y ago
That ship has sailed unfortunately. Most people are going to post in walled gardens--and, if Twitter is that walled garden, I'd much prefer they encourage longer form posting than long threads.
jabroni_salad 4y ago
Twitlonger has been around for ages and is pretty nice to use. Writers seem to prefer just making threads because users will read them there. Every time you add a link or some other barrier in front of your content, you are reducing your readership.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

Aside, why is this shared in a very very long weird GIF and not a video. (can't pause/seek)

cube00 4y ago
I was curious about this too and thought it must be a massive GIF. However it's not actually a GIF, it's an MP4 video[1], I wonder why it's mislabelled as a GIF. [1]: https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/FV3mdpEXoAIrkA1.mp4 https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/FV3mdpEXoAIrkA1.mp4
- hgazx 4y ago
  Calling videos without an audio track “gifs” has been done for years now.
  - throwamon 4y ago
    Or, more precisely, crippled video players where you can't even rewind.
  - mintplant 4y ago
    Yep. Imgur's GIFV [0] from 2014 is the earliest mainstream example I know of. In the cultural consciousness, a "GIF" represents a particular medium and form factor, which has become decoupled from its namesake file format to deliver the same experience more efficiently. [0] https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/
  - aendruk 4y ago
    My favorite solution to this is to use GIF for the 90s encoding scheme and gif for this newer lax meaning. Then while we’re at it, settle the pronunciation debate by picking a different one for each.
  - ChrisArchitect 4y ago
    ah, yes, I see, it's the no-audio that made it a 'GIF'. Fair enough. But annoying because it automatically removes seek and pause options if it assumes it's a GIF. doh.

tantalor 4y ago

Apparently the Twitter app (android) doesn't support them. Nice.

Bigpet 4y ago
The desktop web version also doesn't seem to support it for me. Just shows me "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else."

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cube00 4y ago

Now that Twitter have decided the solution to long form content is a link off the main thread hopefully more creators will feel more comfortable to instead link to their own blog rather then to "Notes". This could be a very positive thing for creators to gain back more control over their brand and content.

rlopezcc 4y ago
They will probably make Notes seamless and cool inside the twitter app and external links slow and clumsy.

paxys 4y ago

Is it "Twitter Write" or "Twitter Notes"? The branding is already confusing, and it hasn't even launched yet.

cr3ative 4y ago
Amusingly, they’re calling it “Notes” and specifically NOT “Twitter Notes”. Which is not going to go well for them, judging by this submission title.

suyash 4y ago

Idea is good however implementation is horrible specially on desktop web. The narrow width of the content makes it hard to read, not to mention all the distractions on left and right side of the page. They should make the notes full screen without distractions if they want people to read them.

aendruk 4y ago
I can see the logic behind the narrow presentation. If most people use this on pocket computers, the writing will likely be tailored to that format e.g. with generally shorter paragraphs so as not to tower. Keeping the presentation consistent might help with readability. For an example of what Twitter might be trying to avoid, look no further than this website, which has driven me to inject `.comment { max-width: 70ch; }`, among other things.

dend 4y ago

My reaction to this is that it's an effort to keep users within the "walled garden" of Twitter, which is not the best thing for those that write. Recall the story with Medium - yes, you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your content. I know that I am talking with an overly developer-focused lens (a-la "you can reimplement Dropbox in a weekend"), but self-hosting blogs outside the "walled gardens" is not super complicated even for non-power users. Ghost has existed for years and is a very user-friendly experience. Want to be a bit more technical - go the static site route. It might be a lost battle to convince the majority of the social media audience of this (after all, can't beat the convenience and the cost of $0), but I really do not see this as beneficial to those that deeply care about their long-form writing accessibility and sustainability. Twitter already has login walls to just read tweets, so I'd imagine the same is likely to apply to long-form content as well.

phendrenad2 4y ago
> not the best thing for those that write I disagree. I think this is mostly meant to steal market share from other walled-gardens such as Medium. People who write on self-hosted blogs and the like will continue to do so.
caycep 4y ago
With the "walled garden" comment, I'm wondering - nowadays, all sorts of discourse seems to depend on these types of proprietary services/platforms, that employ armies of engineers to keep them running, develop new features, etc. Attempts to make things decentralized all seem to be aggregating into central controls, i.e. "Web3/crypto" -> coinbase, kraken, etc Why aren't older decentralized "services" protocols being looked at, or developed further - i.e. UUnet/newsgroups, torrent, etc?
- dend 4y ago
  You don't need to look far for this. To be fair, my comment was much less about decentralization and more about the existence of tools for content portability and control. For example, you can have Markdown + Ghost + custom domain. Worst case scenario, you move to another hosting platform, but you're not locked to one particular service and its own goals of growth.

NearAP 4y ago

While it's all well and good to launch new features, I think Twitter should improve their existing service and I'm referring to low hanging fruits. I don't understand the rationale behind cutting me off while I'm scrolling through Twitter simply because I'm not logged in. Twitter can still display Ads to me irrespective of whether I'm logged in or not. In fact cutting me off means I leave Twitter which means I don't see the Ads they're selling which in turn means less Ad money for them. Even when logged in, Twitter will display the new message/note icon. When I click on it to read the notification, it turns out to be Twitter telling me to turn on notifications. Now normally, once you have read the message, the 'new' message/note icon is cleared. Instead Twitter displays it again almost immediately and this then goes on for the next few hours before they stop. If they can't fix these simple things, why would someone want to read longer content on Twitter. They would still get cut off again as Twitter is doing for existing tweets

makeitdouble 4y ago
I think the message is simply that Twitter isn’t that into you. Twitter wants people that log in, and turn on their notifications. You’d think you’re good enough for them, you can provide them ad revenue too, but you’re just not their type and they don’t find much happines with you. Ultimately it’s not you, it’s them.
rchaud 4y ago
Twitter doesn't care about a pair of anonynmous eyeballs not visiting their site anymore. It's not Google. Twitter's ad targeting depends on knowing what a user looks at, and how their network of connections/follows lines up with other user segments.
- NearAP 4y ago
  >> Twitter's ad targeting depends on knowing what a user looks at But they can track which tweets are being clicked, the IP of the person and a whole bunch of things even when you're not logged in. >> and how their network of connections/follows But that's the problem right there. If you force people to create an account to read tweets, they might do so but they won't follow anybody or follow very few people and tweet quite infrequently. I just don't think it's feasible to expect a significant number of people (like say # of users on Facebook) to be tweeting regularly. But it's possible that I'm wrong.

dchuk 4y ago

This is the most painfully obvious feature they could have added to the product. Twitter is a massive distribution network with a heavily constrained format to distribute. Allowing more blog-like content formats to latch into the same established distribution network (instead of hacky threads which suck) is a no brainer.

rchaud 4y ago

Anything to end the tyranny of the 280 char hot take. Longer tweets turning into threads isn't any better, because the tweets are still written such that each one can be pulled out and quoted/retweeted. So instead of greater exposition, nuance, you get a series of hot takes compartmentalized into their own tweet.

drusepth 4y ago

Interestingly enough, Notes are editable (as seen by the "edited" tag on https://twitter.com/i/notes/1539613004370788352 https://twitter.com/i/notes/1539613004370788352). Might be an indicator of how editing will work if/when it trickles down to normal tweets, too.

jmartens 4y ago
I noticed this too and thought it was the best part of the announcement. I don't personally want to write notes on Twitter, but I'm eager to be able to fix my typos in tweets!
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barbazoo 4y ago

I'm getting "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else." for every note that I click on.

sva_ 4y ago

When I click on any of these notes, I just get > Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.

luxurytent 4y ago

Now they just need to make the reading experience of these notes not abysmal. Remove the dreaded "Who To Follow" and "Trending" sidebars, and collapse the left pane. Right now, less than 1/3rd of the screen is for representing the writing.

hintymad 4y ago

Eh...finally? Like 10 years after its competitor weibo.com? Says a lot about the culture of Twitter.

jmartens 4y ago
Me never having heard of weibo says a lot about Twitter's success...
- hintymad 4y ago
  It's Chinese company, so naturally few people in the west heard about it. It does not mean that Twitter does a better job in product iteration compared to weibo, though.
o_m 4y ago
I'm pretty sure it has been a limitation by design, and not a technical challenge they needed to solve.

mgiannopoulos 4y ago

Hopefully this will mean the end of threads especially the ones with the first teaser / void of any content tweet.

Saint_Genet 4y ago

I’m not so sure this works with how I use twitter. My typical twitter use is when I’m on a 10 minute ride on the subway, I don’t want longform writing in this context. If I see a link to something interesting I’ll open a tab in safari for later reading, but I’m not gonna move away from my timeline just to read your thoughts

vincentmarle 4y ago

I've just tested this by clicking on one of the notes in the Twitter app: it opens up an ugly webview which I'm not logged into... and it's suggesting to download and use the app for a better experience (I was already on the app!).

vincvinc 4y ago

Any other similar platform (weibo, facebook, G+) just allows the post/tweet to be long and editable. It’s a proven concept. It leads to many people sharing their thoughts in a more readable way than a thread of tweets, and has a lower barrier than having a blog. What I see here feels overspec’d and convoluted, as if hundreds of people had to have a say on what could be a very simple and singular product.

Kye 4y ago

Good thing I never did much with Revue--which this is replacing if I understood the account's bio right--after Twitter bought it. I'm sure all the portability will vanish in the name of "better integration" or some other weak CEO-speak.

emkee 4y ago

https://twitter.com/Corey5771/status/1539645330328657920?s=20&t=GKlR656G6EVbHwfZosLb1g https://twitter.com/Corey5771/status/1539645330328657920?s=2...

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barrenko 4y ago

This is like one of those "every animal shape evolves to crab eventually" but for social networks.

cwkoss 4y ago

Notes should have the back button you get when you use a thread. First time I've used browser back button on twitter in a while.

meibo 4y ago

Very odd of them to launch this without support in apps. The mobile view doesn't even load for me, just says that the content can't be found.

LudwigNagasena 4y ago
Apparently 7500 employees is not enough to implement a basic cross platform blog viewer.

andrew_ 4y ago

The immediate vibe I got was; Twitter is channeling LiveJournal to keep users on Twitter

deanCommie 4y ago

ITT: Feedback from people who don't like Twitter, or don't use Twitter.

Mixtape 4y ago

Pretty much every take I have on this is covered by the discourse here about walled gardens, but I do have two other points of concern: Indexability and SEO. When you want to view certain content on Twitter, you need to log in. If you don't want to, you're forbidden from viewing that content. If that happens here, I worry that the accessibility of long-form, blog-style content production will lead to more users either being onboarded to Twitter for what should be a simple matter of viewing an HTML + CSS page or otherwise missing out on content that could be valuable to them (e.g. news from prominent personalities, interviews with professionals, press releases from companies, etc.) My second concern is with SEO. If this really takes off, I worry that a first page of search results that once would have contained articles from a number of separate blogs will become dominated by a single, homogenous site. Perhaps grouping results in the way that Google does could help with that, but I'd rather avoid needing to append "-site:twitter.com" to my query just to be able to find content that I can read without being tracked. As a whole, I'm not a fan. This strikes me as another move by a social media giant to become "the internet" in the eyes of some people. Maybe that's appealing to the masses, but it's dystopian in my eyes.

wraptile 4y ago
Facebook groups and twitter has been probably the worst things to happen to preservation of our knowledge.
- aurea 4y ago
  Discord as well. For instance the Scala community moved from gitter to discord. I couldn’t disagree more with that decision.

jedberg 4y ago

The first note I read on Twitter was about the ecological impact of porgs on the Galactic Empire. I feel like I will remember that for a long time.

hackandtrip 4y ago

I do wonder how this plays with the acquisition. IIRC, one of the merge agreement was for Twitter to avoid drastic changes that could impact the value of the company - this seems pretty big to me.

lr 4y ago

Alternative headline: After 12 years, Twitter finally decides to do something with Posterous

rogerallen 4y ago
Came here to say this. I really, really liked Posterous.
- lr 4y ago
  Even though I have not "posted" to it in years, I still maintain my https://posthaven.com/ https://posthaven.com/ account.

comment500 4y ago

Interesting feature, looks like it may be an alternative to writing big long tweet threads all in one go with a "@threadreaderapp unroll" tweet at the end. The main difference with this seems to be, you can't link to or highlight individual sections within the Note, if quote tweeting or replying. Perhaps this is a good thing, to prevent parts of what's written being too easily taken out of context. One downside may be that the entire Note would be targeted for terms of service violations, should they occur. At present, if a tweet in a multi-tweet thread breaks the rules, it can be excised without affecting the rest of what's written.

LightG 4y ago

or, "As a part of our strategy review, we've decided to test Clickbait articles, including the outraged and counter-outraged responses you've come to know and love. All on one platform!!!" ...

bearcherian 4y ago

It's amazing that the micro-blogging platform is just becoming more like every other blogging platform

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bradgessler 4y ago

It’s weird seeing Twitter build this after they acquired and shut down Posterous almost a decade ago. What’s old is new again.

Invictus0 4y ago

The text-to-viewport-height ratio of this page on desktop is so low it's just astonishing. I can't imagine many people will click on a tweet to read it. If you're going to make me click, just link to a real website?

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago

Hopefully this is the death of the practice of posting long text on Twitter as an image with no alt text. I can't believe it took Twitter this long.

JimmyRuska 4y ago

Welcome back blogger ! I was getting tired of only seeing headlines

LudwigNagasena 4y ago

They iterated on long-form UI/UX and what they came up with is just a link to a separate post that doesn't provide any additional integration?

braingenious 4y ago

So glad to see Twitter finally innovate its way to becoming Livejournal!

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blobbers 4y ago

Text is so cheap to store and distribute, yet they can monetize so well. Much cheaper than images, or video. Adding a way to get more content in their distribution network makes complete business sense. (whether it's good for the internet as a whole is another discussion; personally I prefer the weird internet of the early 2000s) Wonder why the margins are so tough for a company like twitter. Seems like they should be able to make money hand over fist with their existing product. 0 innovation in years, should be low maintenance.

ei8ths 4y ago

isnt this like tumblr?

baby 4y ago

I have this theory that, the bigger a company is the harder it is to pivot and change things. The reason is simple: it could mean killing your own business. With that in mind, how can a big company innovate on what they have? I believe there's two ways: 1. Keep your tool, but change the users 2. Keep your users, but change the tool I like to sort every new company's announcement as a one of these types of innovation. Today twitter decided to do the second: keep the users, but introduce a new tool: blogging. Interestingly, any social network companies, be it Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. can introduce these tools, and as such they can sometimes overlap. For now, twitter owns the public space, and facebook owns the "friends, neighbors, etc." space. But there's no reason that twitter couldn't create a twitter for your friends only. Facebook did try to do "facebook for the public space" but they integrated it too hard inside of the main tool instead of making it an extra tool on the side. An example of 1 is workplace: facebook but for work.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
This is a pretty well-known theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

blairanderson 4y ago

https://twitter.com/i/notes/1539613004370788352 https://twitter.com/i/notes/1539613004370788352 https://twitter.com/i/notes/1535469588846092288 https://twitter.com/i/notes/1535469588846092288 https://twitter.com/i/notes/1534297736597618689 https://twitter.com/i/notes/1534297736597618689

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anoncow 4y ago

Will Twitter simply evolve into allowing users to post anything Facebook-style?

razzimatazz 4y ago

I definitely will need a "Jump to the recipe" button for Twitter notes. You've found an interesting topic and decided to use that to practice your medium-long form writing - but have you actually discovered anything unique worth discussing?

amitmina 4y ago

Twitter wants to introduce everything without solving fundamental distribution problems. The constraint writing is what is powerful about Twitter but now also wants to have a voice and blogs. They really need to be bought out and injected with intelligence

andreyk 4y ago

A lot of takes wrt walled gardens here and this vs threads, to which I could add my 2 cents. Facebook used to have its own things called Notes which was basically the same thing to this (longer format writing attached to your profile). In the years leading up to me launching my blog/personal website, I wrote about a half dozen of these Notes (this was like a decade ago, I was in my early 20s). It was a pretty good 'on ramp' to writing down longer sets of thoughts to share with people, much lower friction that launching a blog. I doubt this is going to serve the same purpose for many people, but it might. Yes it is a walled garden, but I don't think it's meant as a replacement to a personal blog or Medium account (though tbh id much prefer this to Medium). I also have no doubt this will co-exist with Twitter threads, with the two having different strengths and weaknesses. So, as someone who thinks Twitter is flawed but also very usable in a way that makes it quite good, I think it's a nice addition! We'll see if it survives - I kind of hope it does.

2143 4y ago

Long ago I thought Twitter was interesting, though at the moment I'm unable to precisely state why I thought so. I think it was perhaps the simplicity. Twitter seemed feature-complete a long time ago. Handle scaling problems and the odd bugfixes, and you're good. Sometimes I wonder what all their many thousands of engineers do all day. (I understand they probably still need plenty of non-engineers to handle legal/compliance requirements etc of different countries.)

seydor 4y ago

When things like these happen, a rehash of ancient internet idea presented as new again, makes me feel very sad, like the internet is old and dying or sth. I understand it's all about UX etc now , but i wish twitter's competitors did not just copy but instead tried to make their audience a little bit smarter. If the UX is not dumb-proof, you might not get hordes of users, but at least the ones who are there will have a bit of brains.

canbus 4y ago

Personal blogs were invented for exactly this purpose.

d--b 4y ago

Twitter got where it is cause the character limit helped people overcome writer’s block. I think that the effect of this feature is that some people will start writing longer articles, never to finish them. So all in all less people tweeting. And that’s a good thing :-)

perryizgr8 4y ago

> Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.

dangerface 4y ago

Cant see any of the notes because it wants me to login. As a third party why would I want to post on a platform that hides my content from every one that isn't in your walled garden? Why not just write on my wordpress blog and then post that on twitter like I have always been doing? I get the twitter audience and the non twitter audience.

baxuz 4y ago

Looks like Medium 2.0

stjohnswarts 4y ago

I hope they keep it at 280. The value of Twitter is that it has limits, it keeps things focused and isn't trying to be everything for everyone. If someone needs to write a diatribe they can post a link to a blog.

norswap 4y ago

Ha. This is so dumb. People can already easily link a Medium page / github gist / whatever. The reason people write threads is that people don't like to click links that get them out of the Twitter flow. Many reasons for this, but basically it's friction and Twitter is very flaky with keeping your position within the timeline (at least on Android). Keeping it in app should be a step forward, but a clickable "read more" that expand *within the timeline* (same way it works for threads within the timeline, though unfortunately not within list) is the only thing that will kill threads.

WhyDoIThink 4y ago

I don't use Twitter because of its character limit on posts, trolls, spammers, ridiculous censorship, privacy-invasive phone number verification, and laughable customer support service. Twitter used to be cool. But now it's become a joke that I avoid like the plague. I feel so much better because of that.

colesantiago 4y ago

It seems that self hosted blogs are out with this new Twitter Notes feature, I can even see that Medium is pretty much in trouble here as well. Is there any point to starting a self hosted blog now that this exists for non technical people?

dflock 4y ago
You can own the farm, or be a share cropper on someone elses farm.
rockbruno 4y ago
For starters, your content will not vanish when Twitter inevitably dies or decides to suddenly kill this feature.
- vincentmarle 4y ago
  Or when they suspend you for no reason...
yellow_postit 4y ago
If this ends the thread unrolling apps and posts that are clickbait headlines for 1/x to continue it’ll be good as a user but probably bad for Twitter’s engagement volume.
barrell 4y ago
Analytics, design, freedom of speech, durability, interoperability, privacy, different writing UI, monetisation, independence, possibly domain management and surely much much more. It's a nice feature to finally have but I wouldn't undercut the decades of work that entire teams have devoted to blogging tools. Network effects aren't that powerful, plus twitter's network effects aren't even all that strong in all domains
jdminhbg 4y ago
I think self-hosted blogs and Medium (and Substack) are in as much danger from Twitter Notes as Instagram stories were from Fleets.

ntoskrnl 4y ago

> A small group of writers are helping us test Notes. They can be read on and off Twitter, by people in most countries I guess I'll be the one to ask. Why would you block certain countries from reading notes, but not from viewing tweets? Also, I thought Twitter wasn't making any major product changes with the looming Musk takeover. Can we assume this means Musk is backing out of the deal?

dgs_sgd 4y ago
The board recently endorsed his offer. If he backs down now it would look very bad on him (though with his personality maybe he wouldn't care).

dgs_sgd 4y ago

I welcome this. I always hated the long multi-tweet essays and have often just given up on reading them, especially when I'm not logged in I can't even make it to the end before twitter blocks me from scrolling further. As of now it doesn't look like you can reply to a note with another note? That might go a long way for improving debate and discussion.

danieldisu 4y ago
Don’t celebrate it yet, threads have very high click through rate, I really doubt that these are going to replace threads because they won’t dare to touch “the algorithm” after they see the decrease in interactions
hot_gril 4y ago
I still won't bother. No matter how fast of a computer you use, Twitter is annoyingly slow to load and seems to leak memory if you scroll too far.
- CyanBird 4y ago
  My most despised (feature) of Twitter on desktop is that purposeful delay to alerts, where it blinks for a splitsecond and then the little colored alert icon disappears for a solid 3 to 5 seconds only to appear again this time correctly and permanently It is just so annoying that they would do such a thing, I am sure that they have a/b tested it, I don't care it drives me insane, just make it work properly tho I am sure that they have also taken onto account people like me whom despise it, yet not enough to leave the platform Just an overall worsening of user experience
  - DominikPeters 4y ago
    I always thought this is a bug!
  - lupire 4y ago
    You give them away too much credit for intent and competence. They probably have a fast alert based on some cache, and a real alert that takes longer to fetch the real data.

anonymouse008 4y ago

Oh my, please at least remove us from the UX context of Tweets. The cognitive load required to read this is entirely too high - my mind is looking for the 'chunks' of tweets, delineated by the retweet/like/etc menus. And the two side bars are entirely too distracting for what is supposedly a more focused and long form read. Overall though, interesting concept

duxup 4y ago

I guess it makes sense that any micro blog is bound to evolve to have "regular blog" features and the other way around too.

themodelplumber 4y ago

Any hyperlink capability between notes? That could be pretty fascinating.

wpietri 4y ago

Oh wow, this is interesting. I've been wanting this to exist for years. It seemed like such an obvious thing to do given the workarounds people have, from screenshotting blobs of text to tweetstorms to getting a Medium account just so they'd have a place to put things that were longer than a tweet. I'm excited to see how it goes! I'm personally not sure how much I'll use it just because I've already adapted to threads as a medium. Looking back at my tweets, I think it was 2018 when I first wrote something that started in my head as a series of tweets, with the specific rhythms and frequent use of images that goes with it: https://mobile.twitter.com/williampietri/status/1010931721221607425 https://mobile.twitter.com/williampietri/status/101093172122... But I expect it will be good for quite a lot of people as a quick way to publish something, and maybe I'll come around in time.

meowface 4y ago

The only thing I don't get is why they didn't try this many years ago. I'm guessing because they might've thought it would break the "core conceit" and the aesthetic and unique differentiator, but in practice everyone has always already been using absurd, unreadable and/or inconvenient workarounds to accomplish this.

madrox 4y ago
I have no basis for this other than human insight, but I suspect it didn't happen sooner because Jack didn't want to compete with Ev. It makes sense too if you believe that the internet is an ecosystem and you want to support complimentary products in yours rather than roll your own.

allenleee 4y ago

Nice! A Medium-like UI is more readable than a "tweet storm".