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What a painful format to read a presumably thoughtful statement I see this sentiment posted often on HN and I'm hoping you can help me understand this. I never

by 300bps 4y ago

What a painful format to read a presumably thoughtful statement I see this sentiment posted often on HN and I'm hoping you can help me understand this. I never use Twitter so am not familiar with its interface. When I click on the link in the OP I see a very easy to ready list of 13 contiguous statements. I'm using Microsoft Edge on Windows 11. I'm curious what you see that makes the format so painful to read?

gumby 4y ago
Because instead of your eye naturally flowing down the text you get a sentence or two and then have to jump down to find the next sentence or two which while remembering the context. They aren’t contiguous at all. Also because of the constraints of tweet length the sentences are chopped short rather than being whatever their “natural” length, short or long, would be. The point of writing as the GP suggested is to minimize the friction between written text and comprehension/reasoning. Twitter is designed exactly against that, so the result is a bunch of slogans or tiny sound bites.
- 300bps 4y ago
  They aren’t contiguous at all. That's what I'm saying. They are completely contiguous and easy to read and follow for me when I view the OP with Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome on Windows 11. I'm trying to figure out - what are you viewing the OP with to make it not contiguous?
  - gumby 4y ago
    In the twitter app or safari or (shudder) chrome, each tweet is decorated with the sender, date, number of likes etc.
AdrianB1 4y ago
Not the OP, but I also find it weird - content is broken based on text length, not logical separation and scrolling down at some point is freezing the page with a prompt to login or create an account (I don't have one and I don't want one). The freeze for login is the more annoying one.
xani_ 4y ago
Now imagine the author was slighty slower at typing and some randoms put the comment in the middle of that split-up comment, without even getting to read the whole
- 300bps 4y ago
  I can imagine that, I just don't see it. Every single time someone is complaining about this format it is a contiguous thought stream with no comments or other breaks in between for me. Can you tell me what client you are reading this in that is showing comments in between the original content? Again, I am simply clicking on the link from OP on Windows 11 with Microsoft Edge. If I view it in Chrome it looks to be in the same identical easy-to-read format. I'm wondering what others are using that are making it so difficult.
  - kemayo 4y ago
    Twitter tries to show the original author's thread-tweets uninterrupted. However, sometimes the thread gets broken -- generally in very long threads -- and it starts showing replies from other users rather than the next tweet in the thread. It's not happening here, so I'd assume that the person you're responding to has just had a few bad experiences trying to read threads like that in the past. (It happens with the twitter web client and app, so I'd assume it's something to do with how they build the thread server-side, rather than being something where it's meaningful to ask about the client being used.)
  - xani_ 4y ago
    XANI @XANi Even if it is contiguous you still have very long breaks. 0 ♺ 0 ♡ 0 XANI @XANi About 40% of the space between sentences is taken by the buttons and poster name 0 ♺ 0 ♡ 0 XANI @XANi Do you really can't see the issue with it ? 0 ♺ 0 ♡ 0 XANI @XANi It's really obnoxious to read 0 ♺ 0 ♡ 0 XANI @XANi Or you're just understating those flaws on purpose ? 0 ♺ 0 ♡ 0
kop316 4y ago
I actually think this link helps: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1575233618170982400.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1575233618170982400.html All of the statements are small and almost have to be encapsulated to make sense. This robs a lot of nuance and background information that is assumed you would know, or you have to dig up (with little help from the Tweet), to appreciate most of the context. Without it, all I get from the tweet is "Intel Bad". To take a couple of examples fromm the Tweet: > Yes, Intel is shipping to Argonne now. Great. How much of it? All of it at once? I have no context for this. Presumably Intel Argonna is an HPC, and I suppose it is late. Is it late by a year, 5 years, 10 years? Is it worse than something else? What am I supposed to make of it? I have to dig up a bunch of background info to understand what this means. > But I do know the worst thing Intel could do—did do—this week: host a glittering event that heralded an era of sparkling, Moores Law defying technical progress that for people in the HPC camp found *painfully tone deaf.* Ok...what event? Could you please name it? 3 tweets later... > This year at the annual Supercomputing Conference Ok....maybe looking "annual Supercomputing Conference" will find something, (which it does). But There is nothing on "host a glittering event". https://sc22.supercomputing.org/attend/schedule/ https://sc22.supercomputing.org/attend/schedule/ Nope. I could go on...but you see my point (hopefully). So now I have a bunch of stuff (that I cannot easily verify) from someone I don't know, and presumably I am supposed to take it all at face value. This person seems like they know what they are talking about, but considering the terrible Signal-to-Noise Ratio of Twitter, I am not going to accept anything on there at face value.

by 300bps 4y ago

gumby 4y ago

Because instead of your eye naturally flowing down the text you get a sentence or two and then have to jump down to find the next sentence or two which while remembering the context. They aren’t contiguous at all. Also because of the constraints of tweet length the sentences are chopped short rather than being whatever their “natural” length, short or long, would be. The point of writing as the GP suggested is to minimize the friction between written text and comprehension/reasoning. Twitter is designed exactly against that, so the result is a bunch of slogans or tiny sound bites.

300bps 4y ago
They aren’t contiguous at all. That's what I'm saying. They are completely contiguous and easy to read and follow for me when I view the OP with Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome on Windows 11. I'm trying to figure out - what are you viewing the OP with to make it not contiguous?
- gumby 4y ago
  In the twitter app or safari or (shudder) chrome, each tweet is decorated with the sender, date, number of likes etc.

AdrianB1 4y ago

Not the OP, but I also find it weird - content is broken based on text length, not logical separation and scrolling down at some point is freezing the page with a prompt to login or create an account (I don't have one and I don't want one). The freeze for login is the more annoying one.

xani_ 4y ago

Now imagine the author was slighty slower at typing and some randoms put the comment in the middle of that split-up comment, without even getting to read the whole

300bps 4y ago
I can imagine that, I just don't see it. Every single time someone is complaining about this format it is a contiguous thought stream with no comments or other breaks in between for me. Can you tell me what client you are reading this in that is showing comments in between the original content? Again, I am simply clicking on the link from OP on Windows 11 with Microsoft Edge. If I view it in Chrome it looks to be in the same identical easy-to-read format. I'm wondering what others are using that are making it so difficult.
- kemayo 4y ago
  Twitter tries to show the original author's thread-tweets uninterrupted. However, sometimes the thread gets broken -- generally in very long threads -- and it starts showing replies from other users rather than the next tweet in the thread. It's not happening here, so I'd assume that the person you're responding to has just had a few bad experiences trying to read threads like that in the past. (It happens with the twitter web client and app, so I'd assume it's something to do with how they build the thread server-side, rather than being something where it's meaningful to ask about the client being used.)
- xani_ 4y ago
  XANI @XANi Even if it is contiguous you still have very long breaks. 0 ♺ 0 ♡ 0 XANI @XANi About 40% of the space between sentences is taken by the buttons and poster name 0 ♺ 0 ♡ 0 XANI @XANi Do you really can't see the issue with it ? 0 ♺ 0 ♡ 0 XANI @XANi It's really obnoxious to read 0 ♺ 0 ♡ 0 XANI @XANi Or you're just understating those flaws on purpose ? 0 ♺ 0 ♡ 0

kop316 4y ago

I actually think this link helps: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1575233618170982400.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1575233618170982400.html All of the statements are small and almost have to be encapsulated to make sense. This robs a lot of nuance and background information that is assumed you would know, or you have to dig up (with little help from the Tweet), to appreciate most of the context. Without it, all I get from the tweet is "Intel Bad". To take a couple of examples fromm the Tweet: > Yes, Intel is shipping to Argonne now. Great. How much of it? All of it at once? I have no context for this. Presumably Intel Argonna is an HPC, and I suppose it is late. Is it late by a year, 5 years, 10 years? Is it worse than something else? What am I supposed to make of it? I have to dig up a bunch of background info to understand what this means. > But I do know the worst thing Intel could do—did do—this week: host a glittering event that heralded an era of sparkling, Moores Law defying technical progress that for people in the HPC camp found *painfully tone deaf.* Ok...what event? Could you please name it? 3 tweets later... > This year at the annual Supercomputing Conference Ok....maybe looking "annual Supercomputing Conference" will find something, (which it does). But There is nothing on "host a glittering event". https://sc22.supercomputing.org/attend/schedule/ https://sc22.supercomputing.org/attend/schedule/ Nope. I could go on...but you see my point (hopefully). So now I have a bunch of stuff (that I cannot easily verify) from someone I don't know, and presumably I am supposed to take it all at face value. This person seems like they know what they are talking about, but considering the terrible Signal-to-Noise Ratio of Twitter, I am not going to accept anything on there at face value.