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I would just love to get rid of the obnoxious writing style that twitter thought-leaders use when they're posting a thread. They always start with a fairly obn
by lamontcg 4y ago
I would just love to get rid of the obnoxious writing style that twitter thought-leaders use when they're posting a thread. They always start with a fairly obnoxious click-baitey sentence. Then usually a fairly narcissistic hook about how "i'll explain" then "a <thread>" and "/1". And then each tweet needs to be punchy enough in 240 characters to keep people reading which produces a particularly annoying writing style. Then you need to use something like threadreaderapp to make it halfway readable.
I'd rather have those posts just written long-form, where people didn't have to use weird-ly stilted language because of the post format.
- ryantgtg 4y ago“Let me explain” No thanks.
- dredmorbius 4y agoButtermilk is marrying Humperdink in little less than half an hour.
- joegahona 4y agoSame! This is what makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic feed rather than the reverse-chron feed. Almost nobody I intentionally follow uses this awful device.
- andai 4y ago>makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic feed Does Twitter change this setting against your will?
- JMKwins 4y agoYes
- laylomo2 4y agoYes
- wenderen 4y agoYeah. "Twitter reverts back to the algorithmic timeline after you're away for a while. You need to perform the above steps again to see the chronological timeline." source https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-use-twitter-timeline-algorithm-4174499 https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-use-twitter-timeline-algorit...
- andai 4y agowtf
- lamontcg 4y agoThanks, I gotta remember to mash that button if I haven't done it recently.
- ckastner 4y agoI wholeheartedly agree with all of what you said, but this stands out: > And then each tweet needs to be punchy enough in 240 characters to keep people reading which produces a particularly annoying writing style. I also find this writing style insufferable (every sentence a punchline), but though it may seem obvious in hindsight, the explanation that otherwise people won't keep reading had escaped me. I thought that was just a "Twitter" thing. Twitter revolutionized online discourse. However, for whatever progression it brought us, it also brought with it a degeneration of interpersonal communication. Everything is a punchline, one-upping, echo chambers, Twitter mobs, brigadiering, and the half-life of a lot of information deserving of thoughtful processing has been reduced to hours.
- robocat 4y ago/1 The existing Twitter limitations strongly encourage conciseness, which I often like. /2 Blogs, articles, and HN comments like this, can ramble on and make diversions that I don’t always care for. /3 I would like a dynamic slider control where I could contract someone’s writing to their essential point (tl;dr) or expand it (longreads). /4 Bonus boffin round: a control to vary depth/complexity. I mostly would use simplification à la ELI5 or simple.wikipedia.org.
- physicsgraph 4y agoI'm unable to find the specific company and website in my old emails, but I have seen an example on the web of what you're describing. The reader could select whether to expand or collapse sections (e.g., I want more detail on this subsection). The web interface was similar to a medium blog post, but the amount of work for both the writer and the reader was more than I think most folks are willing to invest.
- pbronez 4y agoI’ve stumbled across something similar. It was a personal portfolio / bio site. The owner wrote several versions of each section, using different styles and level of detail. The various versions were selected by the reader with some sliders or something. I thought it was pretty neat. A huge pile of work to write all that, but neat.
- tern 4y agoI love tweet threads. It's a great way to write, forces concision, and as a reader, a quick way to get the gist of a complicated subject. I learn a tremendous amount from Twitter and vastly prefer it to needing to buy a book that I then need to skim to get the same info, or read a news article. Blogs have some advantages, but you can't really find them anymore, and I find my Twitter feed is higher signal than my carefully curated RSS feed ever was.
- Qub3d 4y agoRandall thought similarly: https://xkcd.com/1045/ https://xkcd.com/1045/ I think there are places for both. However, reading up on a lot of business case studies, I noticed that a major tipping point for a company is often when they decide to step out of their niche. Diversifying can handicap a company if they aren't careful, because it reduces resources to the core product. However, it can also be a real boon (see: Microsoft + Azure, which now makes most of their revenue)
- jahewson 4y agoMicrosoft doesn’t provide a revenue number for Azure. Their entire cloud + server division accounts for 29% of overall revenue.
- Qub3d 4y agoMy bad, I was working from memory. I probably did an s/Microsoft/Amazon/ in my head.
- nl 4y agoAmazon disclosed in its quarterly earnings announcement that AWS revenue totaled $18.44 billion in the quarter [snip]. That works out to about 16% of Amazon’s total revenue. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/28/aws-earnings-q1-2022.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/28/aws-earnings-q1-2022.html
- 4y ago
- rapind 4y ago> twitter thought-leaders Real question. What even is a twitter thought-leader? An expert of twitter or an expert using twitter, or something else? If it’s an expert using twitter I would assume the way they use it would vary, so this must be something else?
- j1elo 4y ago- "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." For all the horrible UX that Twitter, is, one thing I really appreciate is that the thought-leader (or anyone, really) was forced to sit down and write Pascal's shorter letter; i.e. to take their time and think hard how to convey just the essential ideas they want to express, without fluff or narrative detours (which, if preferred, can be found in other longer form media)
- ALittleLight 4y agoBut you can just write a thread of arbitrary length or take pictures of text.
- j1elo 4y agoYou can, some people do it from time to time, but in general terms it is not a common practice in the platform, at least not among the people I follow.
- Pxtl 4y agoReally? I like the Twitter writing style. It forces authors to cut to the chase and avoid fluff. Brevity is the soul of wit.
- phailhaus 4y agoCounterpoint: it also rewards oversimplification and hyperbole.
- bombcar 4y agoIt provides acres and acres of self-confirming thoughts, reminds me of: > Hobbits delighted in such things, if they were accurate: they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions. You can go to twitter for confirmation on what you already think, and amusements, but things that go against your worldview are basically impossible to do in short tweets, so you begin to filter them into a self-reinforcing bubble. And the algorithm notices and reaffirms.
- Pxtl 4y agoI find a Gish Gallop of misinformation is far more obvious on a platform that forces you to break up your points. It also provides more effective rebuttal on a point-by-point basis. And the self-confirming problem is less about the 280char thing and more about allowing people to create filter bubbles, which is intrinsic to social media.
- phailhaus 4y agoI don't see how that's the case. Misinformation thrives in low-info, high-throughput environments. You can't check everything you read, and Twitter will default to showing you all of the misinfo points in series but make you hunt for rebuttals. So most people don't see them. They see the zinger, they go "yeah that feels right", and before you know it they've incorporated it into their worldview. Point-by-point rebuttals are extremely ineffective, because by the time you move on to the next point, they've already duct-taped the previous one back together. Nobody is keeping score, nobody goes "aha, I counted and he rebutted 7/9 of your points, so I don't believe you anymore!"