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He's not wrong, but he's also overlooking that it's darn easy to open Twitter and start typing, and get instant conversation started, IE: it's a path of least r
by poulsbohemian 4y ago
He's not wrong, but he's also overlooking that it's darn easy to open Twitter and start typing, and get instant conversation started, IE: it's a path of least resistance. Set up your own site? Sure, I wish more people would, but it takes some degree of knowledge to do that, and then your mom and your dog are the only people who will find your site unless you work really hard at self-promotion. Facebook would have been a good place for this in the past, but is a cesspool these days. There might be specialized forums and interest groups out there - but it can be hard to pin your content for general use, IE: it gets lost in some thread, whereas at least Twitter is tied to you.
Yes, there are various sites promoting themselves as places for long-form writing, but they have their own issues with copyright, walled gardens, etc. This is a space that needs entrepreneurial focus.
- kspacewalk2 4y agoTweet a summary, supply a link. Discussion can take place on Twitter, but I won't have to use those thread unrollers (or rollers, I don't know) to emulate a functioning article.
- poulsbohemian 4y agoI don't disagree that this would be more desirable, but then we are asking people to find a place to write their long-form content. For a lot of people, anything more complicated than a text message is too much - just keeping it real here.
- kspacewalk2 4y agoHaving just registered a substack in ~25 seconds just to see how long it takes, I struggle to imagine that such people, doubtless numerous in the general population, have the capacity to produce Twitter threads or articles that add particularly valuable insight on any topic of interest (to me, anyway). I genuinely don't know how it can be any simpler to do. Signing up for an email account is far more complicated.
- pixl97 4y ago> darn easy to open Twitter and start typing, signs in [Your account is suspended until you give us your phone number] never signs in again
- shmageggy 4y agoOpening twitter.com on my phone reveals no fewer than 4 (FOUR!) obstacles to doing or seeing anything. Log-in with Google pop-up | “Use the app” nag box | Cookie modal | Log-in page When I get bombarded like that I just “nope” right out
- shever73 4y agoExactly. I don't have a Twitter account for precisely this reason. Without an account, you have to be very careful about scrolling before Twitter decides you've seen enough. If the content is really interesting, then I might resort to Developer Tools to remove the overlay, but most often I just close the tab.
- baal80spam 4y agoFor quite a while now I'm using nitter [1]. It's a wrapper for twitter (without the login requirements). There even are browser extensions that autoredirect you to privacy respecting websites instead of the default ones (so for example you'd get redirected to nitter after going to any twitter thread, wikiless when going to wikipedia etc.). Anyway, I highly recommend nitter. [1] https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/
- draw_down 4y ago
- yunohn 4y agoI agree with you, except for: > the only people who will find your site unless you work really hard at self-promotion Twitter breakthroughs also need quite a bit of self promotion and luck for virality.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xigoi 4y agoOpen the site and start typing? You mean this? http://txti.es/ http://txti.es/