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How blogging is different from tweeting
- vouaobrasil 3y agoBlogging is writing something to change minds. Twitter is harrassing other people to change their minds.
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoBlogging is developing an argument, Twitter is having an argument.
- quickthrower2 3y agoBlogging is brain dumping something I thought was interesting I worked on. Slight hope it boosts my career somewhere down the line.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoTweeting is brain dumping something while you were drunk. Slight chance it tanks your career somewhere down the line.
- kevindamm 3y agoBlogging is for hit posts, tweeting is for ... something that rhymes with hit posts
- philipov 3y agoYou must be thinking of "bit posts", because they're so small :p
- quickthrower2 3y agolit posts, quit posts, split posts, nit posts, hiit posts, writ posts, flit posts, reddit posts, whatchamacallit posts …
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoit was obviously pit posts, like posts you throw into the everlasting pit of damnation.
- orthoxerox 3y agoNo it isn't, to quote Monty Python. You can't productively argue with someone by splitting your position into 280-character-long bites, each of which can be easily quoted out of context.
- brlewis 3y agoThe problem isn't that Twitter is split into small bites. Essays do that with paragraphs and sentences as well. It's that Twitter is not structured in a way conducive to conveying an argument.
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoyou're not conveying an argument, you're having an argument - which will never be resolved. The best you can hope for is that one of you blocks the other without wasting too many hours of life.
- lloydatkinson 3y agoDon't forget grifting too. Classic example being crypto/nft/dao bullshit. Then you have devs posting clickbait "hot takes" about the most inane thing you've ever seen or screenshots of code in order to then sell their courses or gain more social influence. I won't give specific names, but one of these characters rhythms with prime numbers and another rhythms with thesaurus.
- ishanhegde 3y agoI feel more and more disgusted by social media like twitter nowadays. Too much shilling, too much pushing of extereme unhinged ideas, not to mention the crypto bots, and now the only fans, porn bots. You have thousands of popular accounts exaggerating stupid gimmicks like being against seed oils for some reason. There is such an absurd amount of transparent grifting that twitter looks like some sort of fish market. The moment, twitter added monetization, engagement farming got much worse. Was Social Media always destined to be like this?
- JCharante 3y agoThreads is such an example of this. The first people to sign up to threads wasn't authentic people, it was a bunch of marketing departments going "well, this new social media site is live, we should put our presence on there too" and a bunch of influencers who go "hmm this new platform could be a good way to gain new followers if I post enough content before everybody else gets in on this". Personallly, I think an anonymous social media could work better. If people view content as content without carying about who published it, then you would get good stuff trending and not a 2am selfie from some random celebrity who at this point is famous for being famous. Brands would also have a hard time because their junk wouldn't get engagement unless it was actually good.
- ishanhegde 3y agoAn anonymous social media could work if you moderate it extensively and/or restrict who can sign up in the first place. Not to mention, the need to monetize or support the site. Creating a good Social Media site is a hard problem IMO. For all the snark Hacker News gets, I think its not a bad attempt at creating a tech focused social media. Reddit and its many subreddits is something else that works to some extent.
- SekstiNi 3y agoI've seen this sentiment echoed a lot, and I find it somewhat perplexing as my own twitter experience has been mostly pleasant. Do people simply not bother curating their follows?
- vouaobrasil 3y agoWell, I think Twitter can actually be a normal place. But the sentiment is about the average, not what it can or can't be.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y agoIt definitely used to be a lot more 'curatable', but in the Musk era, it's become less pleasant on average.
- xanderlewis 3y agoIt has become harder and harder to do so, because Twitter (in its default state) now insists on inserting brain-meltingly lowbrow content in between every other post from someone you actually follow. And adverts for low quality iPhone games that are themselves also simply platforms for further adverts.
- qzx_pierri 3y agoThis is no longer true. Twitter now has 2 browsing tabs that you can easily swipe between. The first is a “For you” tab which contains recommended content based on YOUR browsing habits (and a “Not Interested” option to curate, just like Tiktok). The second tab is a “Following” tab which is strictly tweets from people you follow, in chronological order. It’s pretty great now. Twitter used to be nothing but quasi activism and rage bait. Now it’s exactly what I envisioned it could’ve been, which is nice. But stay away from it if you have the reddit mindset of “If I don’t agree with it, it should be banned”, because your feelings will get hurt. It feels a lot like the internet 10-15 years ago, it’s great. But I can freely talk about sports and shoot the shit without worrying about triggering an autoban for saying the “badspeak” term or phrase which is currently flavor of the month.
- ChrisRR 3y agoTweeting is shouting into the void. You're not interested in getting a conversational response, but interested in how many impressions you make The twitter UI is just not designed for conversation.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoIsn't it X'ing now?
- JCharante 3y ago(May 2023)
- rpastuszak 3y agoMy personal approach to Twitter: when I feel like tweeting a longer opinion, I write a post and link to it. (always better than screaming into the void) https://untested.sonnet.io/Instead+or+writing+a+comment%2C+write+a+post+and+link+it https://untested.sonnet.io/Instead+or+writing+a+comment%2C+w...
- JCharante 3y agoI like this approach, but unfortunately many online communities see it as self promotion. I especially want to use it on communities focused around learning a certain topic, because you might have a method that works best for you that you invested time into explaining nicely. https://gist.github.com/JCharante/c38c0993c831581ac1e659fa19f11ff0 https://gist.github.com/JCharante/c38c0993c831581ac1e659fa19...
- theshrike79 3y agoIt's not "self-promotion" it's "we'd like your content to live on our platform where we can get the views"...
- philipov 3y agoAll twitter influencer posts are "self-promotion", whether they link externally or not.
- theshrike79 3y agoThis is the POSSE approach: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE Which is IMO the only correct way to do things. Keep the canonical source of everything you create somewhere you actually own the content.
- ishanhegde 3y agoTweets are much more ephemeral than blogs. Longform writing indeed is a great avenue for working with ideas, and letting them take root. But getting engagement from blogging is much harder. It takes much longer for blogs to get popular. Walled gardens like twitter are much more convinient for people to get into. More importantly, due to network effect, it is much harder to get engagement outside.
- aethertron 3y agoThe ephemerality is the reverse to how it should be. A tweet from 15 years ago is probably still there. A blog's domain name might have expired, so its posts are lost. So bloggers should copypaste the other blog posts they like into their own blog.
- ishanhegde 3y agoTrue. I was mistakenly confusing how the blogs/tweets ought to be Vs How they actually are
- johndunne 3y agoI find that there's too much cruft to filter through to get to the valuable discussions. And lately, it feels like a lot more effort is required to get to anything worth spending your time on the platform for. I don't spend anywhere near as much time on twitter as I once did. I've been given substack more time lately.
- ishanhegde 3y agoThere is a torrent of completely unrelated memes under every mainstream, popular tweet now. Completely unsubale. At this point I am seriously considering subscribing to a local newspaper to get news.
- JCharante 3y agoI started blogging more once I stopped trying to make something fancy. Instead of trying to create my own markup and create a new site every time I feel like blogging again, I just create github gists now. It's portable in that I could download all my markdown gists and just put them on a simple nginx server with a gfm renderer. And it has a built-in comments section.
- neontomo 3y ago> create a new site every time I feel like blogging again Relatable haha, I've rebuilt mine so many times. Some times barebones minimalist with just text documents in a list, other times with pagination and nice styling and a database, it's fun but probably no body cares about the differences.
- epiccoleman 3y agoI'm not so much in the "constantly rebuilding my site" territory, but as a general rule the stuff on my blog is pretty high-effort (and, I like to think, pretty high quality). I need to get in the habit of writing short quick updates every now and then. As much as stuff like X / Twitter is annoying / harmful / bad for society / $negative_words , one thing about blogging is that the return on effort has been somewhat low for me, whereas Twitter can really increase your reach. I recently did a pretty huge post as an extension of a comment I wrote on the /r/guitarlessons subreddit, and also made a video demo of the concept. My analytics suggest that about 10% of the people who watched the video clicked the link to my site. That netted out to about 10-15 views of the article. I don't care necessarily, in the sense that there's not really an incentive for me to "get views" - I'm not advertising or expecting to make any money or anything - but I do, you know, want people to read my stuff after putting so much effort to make it. That said, though, there has been a benefit to me, at least, in that I frequently reference at least one of the articles I wrote when I need a refresher in SVG. So I guess in some sense, that effort was well spent to create a high quality reference resource for myself.
- axegon_ 3y agoComparing the two is a bit unfair. Don't get me wrong, I never liked twitter all that much and lately I've grown to hate it(and I wouldn't miss it one bit if it suddenly disappeared) while in principle I love blogs. But they are very different beasts: twitter is a cheap cheese and tomato frozen pre-made pizza from Lidl: it's food but that's about it. You could hand it to a professional chef and that might make it somewhat better if they add some personal touch with ingredients they have laying around but... It's still a frozen, pre-made pizza. It will never be what the chef would be able to come up with if you give them the ability to choose their ingredients and tools.
- Ensorceled 3y agoYour analogy is unfair and, from that analogy, it's quite clear you hate twitter so there was no need for the "Don't get me wrong," Twitter is for updates, blogs are for thoughts. The are two entirely different things, you are comparing them as if they are the same thing but one is the cheap, terrible version.
- gardenhedge 3y agoTwitter is not just for updates. People use it in a variety of ways including updates but also things like thought streaming, humour, conversations, trolling, etc
- Ensorceled 3y agoSure, I miss Cory Doctorow's essays for instance. But mostly it was updates. But Cory Doctorow isn't crappy, barely edible pizza.
- da_chicken 3y agoCory's blog posts are great, even when they're shredded into Twitter threads. Cory's image spam is crappy, barely edible pizza.
- meiraleal 3y ago
- nitin-pai 3y agoThoughts are somewhat like electric current: prefers lower resistance paths to the ground. Twitter succeeded because it is the least resistance path to an audience. Blogs in comparison are kiloohms of resistance.
- passion__desire 3y agoThe good thing about twitter is people of expertise chiming in to deconstruct or fortify an argument. The whole process is like having a peek into a writer's draft of a book and get a feel for the process (word choices, flow, rewrites) rather than just reading the final finished "perfect" chapter. In blog scenario, the writer is embodying all these distinct positions and forging a path from premises to conclusions to make a case. Being a fallible human, he will prefer a path which makes his pre-decided conclusions stand out best.
- brlewis 3y agoOn twitter, the replies that deconstruct or fortify an argument are interspersed with a lot of junk. I've built https://en.howtruthful.com/ https://en.howtruthful.com/ as a tool specifically for deconstructing and fortifying arguments. I see a lot of potential to succeed where twitter failed.
- passion__desire 3y ago"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" — F. Scott Fitzgerald. Infact we can generalize this to N ideas cases. Take two ideas. A and B. Give weight ∆ and 1-∆ to them. Multiple the positions of those ideas with the weights. This gives you a new interpolated position. Now repeat this with new position and idea C. And so on. You will quickly cover the area of convex hull of these ideas. I think with future advanced LLMs the above scenario is achievable.
- Ensorceled 3y agoWell, in the early posting, it is quite clear a lot of people both hate even the idea of twitter and were using it wrong. I say "were" since, like many others, I've be off twitter for a while. It's devolved into the things that people have always said it was. But it wasn't always like that. I was on twitter for breaking news updates, links to long form posts from people I followed, new book announcements from authors I followed, insightful thoughts from journalists, scientists, etc. Follow good people and cull/block everybody else. Kind of like real life; if you go to the local nazi bar and talk to the racists, it's going to be unpleasant. I could always tell when twitter had switched me back to "For You" ... it became a cesspool. Under Musk, it is always just a cesspool.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoTwitter's purpose was short status updates, and links to longer content. It was never an either/or proposition. Alas none of this matters because Twitter is dead spiritually, and X is dying financially and culturally, and they're adding so much random crap to it in a desperate bid for relevance (like long posts, long videos, dating, banking, LLM chat, ..., ..., ...) that it just looks like noise at this point.
- SomeRndName11 3y agoI have personally obtained unmesurable amount of relevant info from twitter; lots of true experts in every area in real time. Blogs were more like reading a published magazine article - for something not time sensitive.
- vctrfrnndz 3y agoWish we could go back to the glory days of blogging
- bovermyer 3y agoThis passage got me thinking: > It’s become an ideas forest which people wander into from different directions, finding trails which I had long since forgotten about and inviting me to explore a now overgrown area to see if I should begin tending to it once more. I'm going to spend time thinking about this. And, perhaps, blogging about it, in much the same fashion as the author.
- throwaway318 3y agoIt's nicely put. Go for it. It reminds me of why I've returned to reading academic papers. Not for the 'correctness', but as I've tired tripping on the twisting vines of short digestible answers endlessly immovably entwined by themselves but whose true root is no more than the thinnest topsoil.
- brlewis 3y agoShort, digestible content like tweets can be arranged into an ideas forest, but only if connected by lines of reasoning instead of being piled one on top of the other in reverse chronological order. I have a first implementation. Details at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f2CftRRndH97RpAwL/how-i-got-so-excited-about-howtruthful https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f2CftRRndH97RpAwL/how-i-got-...
- cxr 3y agoYou're re-inventing IBIS[1]. See also Marshall 1989[2] but be conscious of Marshall 1999[3]. 1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue_mapping>. 2. <https://doi.org/10.1145/74014.74031 https://doi.org/10.1145/74014.74031> 3. <https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008716330212 https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008716330212>
- brlewis 3y agoThanks for the interesting references. I think I have a better data model than those had, but it's cool that people have recognized before that there's a need for something like this.
- lapcat 3y agoHas this submission title been auto-mangled by HN? The article title is "How blogging is different from tweeting".
- harryvederci 3y agoYes.
- Uriopass 3y agoYes: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- daoboy 3y agoDifferent things are different. Related, the same thing is different to different people, and can even be different to the same person at different times. Also related, everything is more than one thing depending on the context in which it is evaluated.
- ChrisRR 3y agoMy opinion is different to your opinion I believe different things are different, but in a different way
- sethammons 3y ago"how blogging is different from tweeting" sounds like "how is a raven like a writing desk" -- these are two different things; a nonsensical title. The author acknowledges they are different by pointing out, well, how they are different: > I care about the reaction a tweet gets because it is self-standing and immediately public whereas a blog post is an element of a large whole. It is a contribution to growing my ideas garden, for my own later use and whatever enjoyment others find in it, rather than something I have expectations of receiving a reaction for.
- jfengel 3y agoTwitter was at one time commonly referred to as "microblogging". So it seems reasonable to ask what the similarities and differences are.
- hashemian 3y agoI don't think tweeting and blogging can be compared really. I would see tweeting as a form of "talking to a group of people". You often don't research, proofread, and rewrite yourself when talking. The UI to tweeting also boosts this (mostly mobile devices I assume, via a small text box). While bloggin is for writing an essay. You may write the essay and just publish it, but in most cases you do some research and at least proofread it once. And again the blogging UI is optimized for this: you have an empty page, nothing other than your written content. And they really complement each other: you talk to people to get ideas for your essays, and you write essays to share your ideas with people and use them as the base for your writing. I don't think you ever can replace tweeter (or similar services) with blogging.
- thomasahle 3y agoSome people write long form tweets or threads, and they can take hours to research/compose etc. Not as long as blogs, but still a decent amount of work. I personally prefer to follow people like that.
- hashemian 3y agoI agree, but I think they are more outlier than normal tweeter users. I've been also trying to find these people and follow them on tweeter, but it's hard to find. Mostly either don't tweet much, or tweet a lot of noise!
- thomasahle 3y agoThe people who tweet 25% gold and 75% noise are the hardest to deal with. Probably follows aren't worth it. If you can't find a lot of good people to follow, it just means you end up wasting less time in Twitter. It's a win-win really.
- smegsicle 3y agocan't you just set a per-account retweet threshold for their posts to show up in your feed?
- Apocryphon 3y agoDevil’s advocate: 1. Despite the platform’s unsuitability for long form writing, you often do get multi-part tweetstorms that are basically blog posts, that you then need to unroll with threadreaderapp. HN loves to hate on the practice, but people do often treat Twitter as a blog service. 2. Isn’t Twitter supposed to be a microblogging platform? Or maybe that’s tumblr. Nanoblogging, then.
- 2Gkashmiri 3y agohttps://upcomingkoshurmahraz.wordpress.com/ https://upcomingkoshurmahraz.wordpress.com/ I write an anonymous blog detailing my struggles of getting married. I am pretty sure I would not be able to explain 1% of this on tweeting
- musha68k 3y agoInteresting that social media's gamification “engagement” really seems to be influencing academia at this point. Also terrible news about LinkedIn apparently becoming an escape hatch? Has LinkedIn enhanced its user interface to boost engagement, similar to other social platforms (likes, retweets, upvotes, etc?)? Could self-publishing or “new” old school web-hosting platforms like Neocities offer a better UX for meaningful interactions - moving away from those quick “engagement” loops? If so, how to best complement / extend such a very differently focused UX? What do we really need / omit to facilitate science / rational discussion?
- brlewis 3y agoMy experience trying to market a UX designed for rational discussion is that you still need an engagement-focused part to attract users.
- radlad 3y agoI don't think that the problem is that users can't find sites which aren't engagement-driven. I think the problem is that sites that aren't driven by engagement can't find or maintain a userbase.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoWhen Twitter first came out, I thought it would be RSS for the masses. The character limit made it useless for conveying anything but a headline, so that's what it would be used for: a headline with a link pointing to content elsewhere. People wouldn't consume content on Twitter, they'd find content on Twitter. Alas, i was very wrong.