10 ms·

I don’t know why people don’t just create blogs, rather than these 20+ piece Twitter/mastodon post chains. It’s hard to follow and feels disjointed, and fights

I don’t know why people don’t just create blogs, rather than these 20+ piece Twitter/mastodon post chains. It’s hard to follow and feels disjointed, and fights against an authors motivation to go into detail or explore nuance

jonny_eh 4y ago
People can read it natively in the social app they find themselves already in. Also makes it easier for such readers to share, increasing the post/thread's reach.
- smeagull 4y ago
  I can't. Twitter paywalls after scrolling a little bit.
  - aqfamnzc 4y ago
    In some ways, I'm glad when twitter, reddit, etc. do things like aggressively pushing to the app or to login because it reminds me of the incentives involved and literally, actively discourages me from using their service.
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    You're not the target audience unfortunately. Without an account, and a curated follow list, you're likely not using the site for content discovery.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    Requiring a free account is not a paywall. It takes less than a minute to create a twitter account.
    - smeagull 4y ago
      That's a cost I'm not willing to pay.
- aflag 4y ago
  You can also share a link pretty easily.
  - rektide 4y ago
    Most people dont scroll through their social feeds to click links. They come to social feeds to see content. I get that some people dont want to have this experience. But this here is using the medium as intended. It fits in the scene & participates actively with others, in a way that going-off-and-doing-your-own-isolated-thing (then linking to it) doesnt. It'd be so nice if we didnt have to keep having this debate every single time. There's advantages to both. Recognizing & accepting that different things can be happening in the world & that you should maybe have a little flexibility about it seems like the mature response I'd hope for.
    - wintogreen74 4y ago
      Yes, why can't we all be flexible and mature, just like these disjointed social app threads that prioritize eyeballs, retweets and rash emotional responses over actual content are always promoting!
      - rektide 4y ago
        You definitely have captured the conventional social media boogeyman feel well. I dont think it applies nearly as much to this grass-roots, open-source, distributed, protocols & standards based form. People want a way to talk, converse, connect. Sure there's ways to do it badly, for bad cause, with bad incentive, but this is & most activity on ActivityPub reads as dielectic. As an exploration & search for truth, a desire to understand ourselves, each otger, and the worlds about us better. For sure, we can use communication & connectivity poorly. Are unwilling to imagine though that connection can be a force for good? ActivityPub here is a very very early attempt to create standards where we can explore & innovate, and hopefully some of those fronts indeed show promise of good, for raising up & improving... not just amplifying the rash, the base, the overly emotional, the manipulators. At some point we have to be willing to get beyond the long long long scapegoating & demonizing we've done. We have had very convenient targets to hang the blame on. Maybe less is the only answer, the only possibly, & hope of ever being better is foolish & mistaken, but I hope we can at least entertain that as a question, a possibility, & not act with- ahem- rash emotional fear-based certainty. This seems like a new path where we can be involved enough, have the decisions available, to start pioneering im the addition of responsibility & moderation to our social systems. That possibility excites me, and I hope we can agree is worth trying. Are there other avenues for hope you see? What else might possibly be worthy?
- wintogreen74 4y ago
  >> People can read it natively in the social app they find themselves already in Not saying you're wrong, but... if it was a blog wouldn't that "native app" be a browser? >> Also makes it easier for such readers to share, increasing the post/thread's reach I think this is a big part of it; it's not about connecting with a few deeply, but many shallow connections. I'd argue that these authors care more about the sharing than the communication aspects TBH.
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    > Not saying you're wrong, but... if it was a blog wouldn't that "native app" be a browser? But they come across the content scrolling through a social feed. They'd need to click a link, that opens a new tab (with goodness knows how many ads), to read the content.
pugio 4y ago
I don't really use Twitter and also prefer blogs to reading tweet threads, but one interesting advantage of the Twitter model is that it allows easy quoting/replying/liking of individual paragraphs / sentences. I'm not sure if this outweighs the different reading experience, but that ability makes for something which is fundamentally different, rather than being a strictly worse version of a blog.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  Does it though? Quoting was always available: select the text, copy it, and go. Is it really the deciding difference? Do people perceive selecting and copying as a major friction?
  - jxf 4y ago
    This kind of quoting doesn't link to the original source without extra steps. With Twitter it's one click.
    - avx56 4y ago
      ctrl f
- O1111OOO 4y ago
  > one interesting advantage of the Twitter model is that it allows easy quoting/replying/liking of individual paragraphs / sentences. Agree, it's interactive. It's built to involve you and the audience in a very democratically equal way. Everything is a conversation instead of a soliloquy (blog). HN also offers the same conversational interaction (with much better moderation). It's what pulls us in. It's interesting to see that every comment on HN, for example, is also an original, stand-alone post where you too become an author on this system : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34252904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34252904 : it's very balanced for all participants. It's hard not to get pulled in by this conversational aspect on Twitter (and similar) when you have (1) a voice and (2) it's generally built to be equal within the system (if we gloss over some issues created by the number of followers that give some users a much greater voice). There's a sense of ownership that comes with this.
brundolf 4y ago
I don't know why people complain about this on HN every single time, rather than accepting that people do and will continue to use these formats
- aussiesnack 4y ago
  It is a bit boring to see repetitive complaints. I suspect they just won't go away until it's made obvious from the link whether or not its worth clicking on (for those of us who won't read social media trains). Even knowing it's Twitter or Mastodon doesn't really help, because the poster might be sensible enough to post a link to a real piece.
shagie 4y ago
It's to allow engagement for any part of the post chain. With blogs it is hard to respond to just part of it - and it is hard to respond in most blog comment systems. Twitter solves both of those problems.
- dilap 4y ago
  It also promotes tighter writing -- it feels more egregious to have a filler tweet than a filler sentence in a traditional essay.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- blowski 4y ago
  Copy and paste? Seems to work well enough on HN.
- everdrive 4y ago
  Could you please break your post up into multiple posts so that I can react to each part individually?
- sureglymop 4y ago
  But that's also terrible. Now anyone can take any piece of it out of context and even comment on it. I mean it's worse on Twitter but anyway. These threads can also be used as a form of clickbait. Often on twitter the first tweet in a thread will have 3x the engagement of each following tweet.
aussiesnack 4y ago
Yes I always abandon these when I see they don't just contain a link to a blog post. You might have thought someone waxing about the merits of the web would have heard of hyperlinks (admittedly, I'm only assuming that's what he's doing as I'm not going to slog through a train of mastodon posts).
kome 4y ago
I rage typed my message below, and I am happy I am not the only one!
forrestthewoods 4y ago
Because setting up a personal blog is a lot of work. And it’s not fun. And it requires maintenance over the year. Writing a sequence of tweets “just works”. I say this as someone with a custom blog written in custom HTML/CSS/JS. If it makes you feel better a lot of people are creating substacks, with no intent to monetize, to act as their blog.
- jefftk 4y ago
  In this case, the author does have a personal blog already: https://infrequently.org https://infrequently.org
nightpool 4y ago
It's just easier to write. You start with an idea about where you want to go, and then every step forward is published, so there's no editing or revision possible. Sure, the quality of the writing might suffer, but it makes up for it by allowing so much more writing to happen without getting killed by second thoughts or hesitations. The prevalence of these threads on HN is a great example of how systems can succeed by optimizing for production instead of consumption.
- jefftk 4y ago
  Is that actually what's happening? Or do people write out the whole thing ahead of time and then paste it into Twitter/Mastodon? (I had assumed the latter, but maybe not?)
  - nightpool 4y ago
    Yes, my anecdotal conversations with people who post these things is that that's mostly how they happen. The closest I ever get to writing the whole thing out ahead of time is just writing two or three posts worth of text into the reply box and then splitting it up before posting. Maybe e.g. journalists or writers with more long-form experience do sometimes write out their whole thread ahead of time and then post it, but I think that's a very small percentage. (For example, notorious thread-poster Foone elaborates on their process/why threads work for them here: https://foone.tumblr.com/post/700185724820078592/one-of-my-few-problems-with-adopting-tumblr-as-my https://foone.tumblr.com/post/700185724820078592/one-of-my-f...)
    - jefftk 4y ago
      Is the 1/25 or whatever a guess? Or are those cases where people have composed them in advance?
      - nightpool 4y ago
        Yeah, good question. Most of the threads I see are marked e.g. 1/, 2/, without a set end number, so yeah, I would expect that most ones that DO have it are composed in advance. (Although maybe not always posted all at once, because people definitely do still elaborate & extend on points and sometimes overrun their "pre-written script"). For example one Twitter user I follow who I most expect to write his threads ahead of time is Bret Devereaux, since he has significant long-form blog experience where he puts a lot of thoughts into high-level structure, pedagogy, etc. However, this thread of his from this morning does't have a set end-point: https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1610457226451484672 https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1610457226451484672. I wonder how it was composed?
alkonaut 4y ago
I prefer this medium to blogs. And I’m an old beard who reads newspapers and prefers scheduled TV to streaming. Tweet chains have a rhythm, no ads (with a decent client) and no filler. Blogs (and worse: podcasts or videos) are full of fluff and filler, and often packed with ads.
- blowski 4y ago
  If you want them to be. There are plenty of personal blogs with zero advertising.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    I don’t follow blogs though (I never understood the rss-blog era). I follow people and sites that aggregate and provide content for me, such as HN or Twitter. So I don’t really control where the blogs are hosted or how much ads they have. So when I see a HN link to Twitter or mastodon, I know what I’m going to get. When I see a link to joes blog dot biz, I’m less sure it’s going to be a good experience.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nordsieck 4y ago
> I don’t know why people don’t just create blogs, rather than these 20+ piece Twitter/mastodon post chains. Ultimately, it's because that's where the readers that they care about are. And sure, they could post a link in a tweet. But I suspect that results in much less engagement than a tweet storm. Don't get me wrong - I hate it too. But don't hate the player, hate the game.
mcrad 4y ago
[dead]
jsnell 4y ago
A) The HN guidelines [0] specifically request discussions not be about tangential annoyances (like the format of the content) rather than the submission itself. Now this potentially interesting discussion has been hijacked by the top thread, and most replies, being to yet another boring rehash of "why isn't this a blog post". B) In this specific case, the author has written a lot of blog posts about this domain (though not this specific subject), and those have been on HN frontpage occasionally. So whatever reason they had to use Mastodon for this writing, it at least wasn't coming from ignorance or a lack of a platform. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pvg 4y ago
  Another good way to promote that guideline is to flag the bejesus out of such comments. It really needs a bit of a cultural push to stick, sort of like plainly rude yelly comments get swiftly flagged.
- barbariangrunge 4y ago
  A) I'm a writer. The way something is written is a really important part of the meaning of a piece of writing. Style and formatting is meaningful and important, and isn't just window dressing. It is sometimes more important than the "content" of the message. In my opinion at least.
  - pvg 4y ago
    It's a perfectly fine opinion, it's just that whether we need further repetition of this opinion is a settled matter on HN.
- aussiesnack 4y ago
  Arguable, but I don't think it's a slam dunk that replacing the multimillenial standard interface for connected text (ie. text!) with an entirely novel chain of multiple artificially separated UI widgets is either tangential or just to do with 'format'. Personally I won't read them, so at a minimum these links when unidentified merely waste my time, and presumably that of other irritated commenters here. Maybe they should be identified. My personal preference would be a large red banner with a phrase like ("Warning: this is not a real piece"). But a small less tendentious icon would also be fine!

jonny_eh 4y ago

People can read it natively in the social app they find themselves already in. Also makes it easier for such readers to share, increasing the post/thread's reach.

smeagull 4y ago
I can't. Twitter paywalls after scrolling a little bit.
- aqfamnzc 4y ago
  In some ways, I'm glad when twitter, reddit, etc. do things like aggressively pushing to the app or to login because it reminds me of the incentives involved and literally, actively discourages me from using their service.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  You're not the target audience unfortunately. Without an account, and a curated follow list, you're likely not using the site for content discovery.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Requiring a free account is not a paywall. It takes less than a minute to create a twitter account.
  - smeagull 4y ago
    That's a cost I'm not willing to pay.
aflag 4y ago
You can also share a link pretty easily.
- rektide 4y ago
  Most people dont scroll through their social feeds to click links. They come to social feeds to see content. I get that some people dont want to have this experience. But this here is using the medium as intended. It fits in the scene & participates actively with others, in a way that going-off-and-doing-your-own-isolated-thing (then linking to it) doesnt. It'd be so nice if we didnt have to keep having this debate every single time. There's advantages to both. Recognizing & accepting that different things can be happening in the world & that you should maybe have a little flexibility about it seems like the mature response I'd hope for.
  - wintogreen74 4y ago
    Yes, why can't we all be flexible and mature, just like these disjointed social app threads that prioritize eyeballs, retweets and rash emotional responses over actual content are always promoting!
    - rektide 4y ago
      You definitely have captured the conventional social media boogeyman feel well. I dont think it applies nearly as much to this grass-roots, open-source, distributed, protocols & standards based form. People want a way to talk, converse, connect. Sure there's ways to do it badly, for bad cause, with bad incentive, but this is & most activity on ActivityPub reads as dielectic. As an exploration & search for truth, a desire to understand ourselves, each otger, and the worlds about us better. For sure, we can use communication & connectivity poorly. Are unwilling to imagine though that connection can be a force for good? ActivityPub here is a very very early attempt to create standards where we can explore & innovate, and hopefully some of those fronts indeed show promise of good, for raising up & improving... not just amplifying the rash, the base, the overly emotional, the manipulators. At some point we have to be willing to get beyond the long long long scapegoating & demonizing we've done. We have had very convenient targets to hang the blame on. Maybe less is the only answer, the only possibly, & hope of ever being better is foolish & mistaken, but I hope we can at least entertain that as a question, a possibility, & not act with- ahem- rash emotional fear-based certainty. This seems like a new path where we can be involved enough, have the decisions available, to start pioneering im the addition of responsibility & moderation to our social systems. That possibility excites me, and I hope we can agree is worth trying. Are there other avenues for hope you see? What else might possibly be worthy?
wintogreen74 4y ago
>> People can read it natively in the social app they find themselves already in Not saying you're wrong, but... if it was a blog wouldn't that "native app" be a browser? >> Also makes it easier for such readers to share, increasing the post/thread's reach I think this is a big part of it; it's not about connecting with a few deeply, but many shallow connections. I'd argue that these authors care more about the sharing than the communication aspects TBH.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  > Not saying you're wrong, but... if it was a blog wouldn't that "native app" be a browser? But they come across the content scrolling through a social feed. They'd need to click a link, that opens a new tab (with goodness knows how many ads), to read the content.

pugio 4y ago

I don't really use Twitter and also prefer blogs to reading tweet threads, but one interesting advantage of the Twitter model is that it allows easy quoting/replying/liking of individual paragraphs / sentences. I'm not sure if this outweighs the different reading experience, but that ability makes for something which is fundamentally different, rather than being a strictly worse version of a blog.

rhn_mk1 4y ago
Does it though? Quoting was always available: select the text, copy it, and go. Is it really the deciding difference? Do people perceive selecting and copying as a major friction?
- jxf 4y ago
  This kind of quoting doesn't link to the original source without extra steps. With Twitter it's one click.
  - avx56 4y ago
    ctrl f
O1111OOO 4y ago
> one interesting advantage of the Twitter model is that it allows easy quoting/replying/liking of individual paragraphs / sentences. Agree, it's interactive. It's built to involve you and the audience in a very democratically equal way. Everything is a conversation instead of a soliloquy (blog). HN also offers the same conversational interaction (with much better moderation). It's what pulls us in. It's interesting to see that every comment on HN, for example, is also an original, stand-alone post where you too become an author on this system : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34252904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34252904 : it's very balanced for all participants. It's hard not to get pulled in by this conversational aspect on Twitter (and similar) when you have (1) a voice and (2) it's generally built to be equal within the system (if we gloss over some issues created by the number of followers that give some users a much greater voice). There's a sense of ownership that comes with this.

brundolf 4y ago

I don't know why people complain about this on HN every single time, rather than accepting that people do and will continue to use these formats

aussiesnack 4y ago
It is a bit boring to see repetitive complaints. I suspect they just won't go away until it's made obvious from the link whether or not its worth clicking on (for those of us who won't read social media trains). Even knowing it's Twitter or Mastodon doesn't really help, because the poster might be sensible enough to post a link to a real piece.

shagie 4y ago

It's to allow engagement for any part of the post chain. With blogs it is hard to respond to just part of it - and it is hard to respond in most blog comment systems. Twitter solves both of those problems.

dilap 4y ago
It also promotes tighter writing -- it feels more egregious to have a filler tweet than a filler sentence in a traditional essay.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
blowski 4y ago
Copy and paste? Seems to work well enough on HN.
everdrive 4y ago
Could you please break your post up into multiple posts so that I can react to each part individually?
sureglymop 4y ago
But that's also terrible. Now anyone can take any piece of it out of context and even comment on it. I mean it's worse on Twitter but anyway. These threads can also be used as a form of clickbait. Often on twitter the first tweet in a thread will have 3x the engagement of each following tweet.

aussiesnack 4y ago

Yes I always abandon these when I see they don't just contain a link to a blog post. You might have thought someone waxing about the merits of the web would have heard of hyperlinks (admittedly, I'm only assuming that's what he's doing as I'm not going to slog through a train of mastodon posts).

kome 4y ago

I rage typed my message below, and I am happy I am not the only one!

forrestthewoods 4y ago

Because setting up a personal blog is a lot of work. And it’s not fun. And it requires maintenance over the year. Writing a sequence of tweets “just works”. I say this as someone with a custom blog written in custom HTML/CSS/JS. If it makes you feel better a lot of people are creating substacks, with no intent to monetize, to act as their blog.

jefftk 4y ago
In this case, the author does have a personal blog already: https://infrequently.org https://infrequently.org

nightpool 4y ago

It's just easier to write. You start with an idea about where you want to go, and then every step forward is published, so there's no editing or revision possible. Sure, the quality of the writing might suffer, but it makes up for it by allowing so much more writing to happen without getting killed by second thoughts or hesitations. The prevalence of these threads on HN is a great example of how systems can succeed by optimizing for production instead of consumption.

jefftk 4y ago
Is that actually what's happening? Or do people write out the whole thing ahead of time and then paste it into Twitter/Mastodon? (I had assumed the latter, but maybe not?)
- nightpool 4y ago
  Yes, my anecdotal conversations with people who post these things is that that's mostly how they happen. The closest I ever get to writing the whole thing out ahead of time is just writing two or three posts worth of text into the reply box and then splitting it up before posting. Maybe e.g. journalists or writers with more long-form experience do sometimes write out their whole thread ahead of time and then post it, but I think that's a very small percentage. (For example, notorious thread-poster Foone elaborates on their process/why threads work for them here: https://foone.tumblr.com/post/700185724820078592/one-of-my-few-problems-with-adopting-tumblr-as-my https://foone.tumblr.com/post/700185724820078592/one-of-my-f...)
  - jefftk 4y ago
    Is the 1/25 or whatever a guess? Or are those cases where people have composed them in advance?
    - nightpool 4y ago
      Yeah, good question. Most of the threads I see are marked e.g. 1/, 2/, without a set end number, so yeah, I would expect that most ones that DO have it are composed in advance. (Although maybe not always posted all at once, because people definitely do still elaborate & extend on points and sometimes overrun their "pre-written script"). For example one Twitter user I follow who I most expect to write his threads ahead of time is Bret Devereaux, since he has significant long-form blog experience where he puts a lot of thoughts into high-level structure, pedagogy, etc. However, this thread of his from this morning does't have a set end-point: https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1610457226451484672 https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1610457226451484672. I wonder how it was composed?

alkonaut 4y ago

I prefer this medium to blogs. And I’m an old beard who reads newspapers and prefers scheduled TV to streaming. Tweet chains have a rhythm, no ads (with a decent client) and no filler. Blogs (and worse: podcasts or videos) are full of fluff and filler, and often packed with ads.

blowski 4y ago
If you want them to be. There are plenty of personal blogs with zero advertising.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  I don’t follow blogs though (I never understood the rss-blog era). I follow people and sites that aggregate and provide content for me, such as HN or Twitter. So I don’t really control where the blogs are hosted or how much ads they have. So when I see a HN link to Twitter or mastodon, I know what I’m going to get. When I see a link to joes blog dot biz, I’m less sure it’s going to be a good experience.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nordsieck 4y ago

> I don’t know why people don’t just create blogs, rather than these 20+ piece Twitter/mastodon post chains. Ultimately, it's because that's where the readers that they care about are. And sure, they could post a link in a tweet. But I suspect that results in much less engagement than a tweet storm. Don't get me wrong - I hate it too. But don't hate the player, hate the game.

mcrad 4y ago

[dead]

jsnell 4y ago

A) The HN guidelines [0] specifically request discussions not be about tangential annoyances (like the format of the content) rather than the submission itself. Now this potentially interesting discussion has been hijacked by the top thread, and most replies, being to yet another boring rehash of "why isn't this a blog post". B) In this specific case, the author has written a lot of blog posts about this domain (though not this specific subject), and those have been on HN frontpage occasionally. So whatever reason they had to use Mastodon for this writing, it at least wasn't coming from ignorance or a lack of a platform. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

pvg 4y ago
Another good way to promote that guideline is to flag the bejesus out of such comments. It really needs a bit of a cultural push to stick, sort of like plainly rude yelly comments get swiftly flagged.
barbariangrunge 4y ago
A) I'm a writer. The way something is written is a really important part of the meaning of a piece of writing. Style and formatting is meaningful and important, and isn't just window dressing. It is sometimes more important than the "content" of the message. In my opinion at least.
- pvg 4y ago
  It's a perfectly fine opinion, it's just that whether we need further repetition of this opinion is a settled matter on HN.
aussiesnack 4y ago
Arguable, but I don't think it's a slam dunk that replacing the multimillenial standard interface for connected text (ie. text!) with an entirely novel chain of multiple artificially separated UI widgets is either tangential or just to do with 'format'. Personally I won't read them, so at a minimum these links when unidentified merely waste my time, and presumably that of other irritated commenters here. Maybe they should be identified. My personal preference would be a large red banner with a phrase like ("Warning: this is not a real piece"). But a small less tendentious icon would also be fine!