10 ms·

Forget Twitter threads and write a blog post instead (2021)

173 points by theshrike79 2y ago

andreygrehov 2y ago
You can write blog posts on Twitter. You couldn’t do it before, but now you can.
- pclowes 2y ago
  I find that feature very annoying. I don’t like long form text interspersed with micro-blog posts/disussion. Needed feature (partially why they acquired Revue) but implementation was botched. Also now many individual tweets in a thread are too long and expanding and scrolling through them is busted UX as well.
- smsm42 2y ago
  You can, but it feels like running Doom on a pager - you're probably not getting the best experience and the tool isn't meant for giving you one.
theshrike79 2y ago
Past discussion from 10/2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945112 I'm interested in seeing if the sentiment is different now that Twitter has ... changed.
- markoa 2y ago
  For me the sentiment is even stronger, further amplified by the presence of AI. Big reason why I started a personal blog around New year.
- mcintyre1994 2y ago
  In addition to sentiment changing, you can no longer view tweet threads without logging in. Nitter etc still work so people who know about them can work around it, but most people without a Twitter account or who can’t be bothered to log in are probably just going to bounce.
  - miohtama 2y ago
    It's one of the worst UX decision ever. Probably was done to prevent scraping, but still. If I recall correctly it was done pre-Musk.
    - pavlov 2y ago
      Based on some quick googling, it seems like this anti-feature (login wall for threads) was tested pre-Musk on some users, but it was switched on globally by Musk. For example here’s a mention from 2021 where some people report getting the login wall and others don’t: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28267774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28267774
      - dmix 2y ago
        Login gating was initially made less aggressive when Musk took over, then not long after AI scraping became a big deal and then Twitter clamped down hard, around the same time Reddit started locking down their API for same reason.
    - Angostura 2y ago
      It's probably the main reason the organisations I work with are considering an alternative like Bluesky or Mastodon - the ability to have a widget consistently displays your own posts on yoiur website is very handy.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      > If I recall correctly it was done pre-Musk. It was sporadically AB tested, IIRC, for _years_, but it was certainly _rare_. One gets the impression that the first thing Musk did on arrival was demand that every feature flag Twitter had for experimental changes be turned full on; a lot of early Musk changes were things that Twitter had flirted with in the past.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      I thought it was just market capture. It was the most popular website in the world, so if you needed to see sports news, or event updates from celebrities, or your government representatives make an announcement (ugh, I still hate that): well, you need a profile for us to monetize.
lambdadelirium 2y ago
Imagine if using a fedi service instead that allows like 10 000 characters or more
- RockRobotRock 2y ago
  RSRSSS
- immibis 2y ago
  Pleroma's default is 5000, and there's also WriteFreely (allegedly).
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
miohtama 2y ago
Twitter also supports blog posts nowadays, but you need a premium account
- brokegrammer 2y ago
  I imagine that the average writer will simply pay for X premium instead of going through the trouble of setting up a blog. There are platforms like Substack where it's easier to set up a blog, but X makes it easier to build an audience as well. I currently write on my personal blog, but I have to spend time syndicating my posts to other platforms in order to get any visibility. I'm thinking about moving the whole thing to Substack or just use X premium because I can't be bothered to go though that every time I post something.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    > I imagine that the average writer will simply pay for X premium instead of going through the trouble of setting up a blog. Everyone can see your blog. People who don't have a Twitter account will either get an error message, get redirected to your profile, or will get the first post only, on Twitter, depending on phase of moon. Unless you're catering exclusively to an audience of Twitter users it's a pretty horrendous user experience.
    - brokegrammer 2y ago
      I agree. But on X, at least people will see and read your post. On your blog, you have to wait for it to show up on Google, or you have to find a way to drive traffic before anyone see it. I have a few posts on my blog that received 0 visits after months of being online.
maxehmookau 2y ago
Since Elon took over Twitter, you can't even see a Twitter thread unless you create an account. So if you use Twitter threads I, and many others, can no longer read it.
- smsm42 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure if you use thread unroller, it'd still work. Just feed it the url of the first post of the thread and it'll make it readable. It doesn't require any login so it won't be relevant whether you have an account.
  - maxehmookau 2y ago
    Sure, but that's an awful user experience. If you've got something useful, and long-form to say a _micro_blogging platform might not be the best place.
    - smsm42 2y ago
      Totally agree, just saying if it's already there and you want to read it anyway, there are ways without making an account. Putting it on the blog would be better, ideally.
panorama 2y ago
As much as I enjoy writing and teaching, it feels like a fruitless endeavor when your content doesn't get any visibility. I've written on Twitter, Bluesky, and self-hosted my own blogs (I've even been front-paged on HN before), and each time I give up eventually because it's so hard to build a consistent readerbase. Of course, I’m self-aware enough to recognize that it might be because my writing is terrible or because I’m covering topics no one cares about. But the point is, I don’t blame people for posting on Twitter instead of going through the effort of setting up a blog. The vast majority of written content gets little to no reach, so choosing the platform with the lowest barrier to entry makes the most sense.
- sph 2y ago
  Write for yourself. I (rarely) write on my website because I am terrible at it and I want to improve, though most of my writing is on private journals. I don't check analytics and don't even have comments: I don't care to know what randos have to say. Sometimes a person directly contacts me via email to discuss a post, which I appreciate much more as it feels like talking to a fellow human. As you started with "I enjoy writing and teaching", just do that. Not everything has to become a venture centred on growth and engagement. (No offense, just being a bit cheeky here: your profile says you're into influencer marketing.. that might be the reason of your disappointment in your blog's performance. Fuck metrics and KPIs, man. Enjoy what you enjoy.)
  - panorama 2y ago
    Sure, I do journal for myself and do a lot of in-person teaching/coaching, but presumably the original article is geared towards those who still choose to write publicly, which I now rarely do. No offense taken, but I had been blogging _way_ before my marketing tech startup (which itself is almost a decade old). It's not so much about the metrics, it's that there are far higher-leverage things I can do than publish articles that only a handful of people will ever see.
    - sph 2y ago
      In any case, advertise your personal blog in your HN profile. I find it's a better source of "organic engagement" than Google or social media, that don't like third-party links as they want to keep people within their walled gardens.
kelnos 2y ago
I 100% agree with this, and much prefer reading blog content than micro-blogging threads (regardless of platform). I no longer read anything anyone links to on Twitter, since it now requires a login to see replies to tweets. Whenever I see a link to a Mastodon instance or to Bluesky, I sigh, but usually still click through if it sounds interesting. But at the same time, I get it. Setting up a blog may not be hard, but it's still more work than starting a Twitter thread. And there are some people who have claimed they just don't have the attention span to write a blog post, so if they were forced to do that (instead of form their thoughts as a series of tweets), they just wouldn't write at all. I think that (if true) is a bit sad, but it is what it is, and I have a lot of respect for people who find something that works (for them), rather than continuously banging their head against something that doesn't, just because it's "the right way to do things". Nowadays, though, considering the direction Twitter has gone in, I frankly find it a little gross that left-leaning people still use it.
stared 2y ago
Using long threads is an abuse of Twitter format. While people do that? Well, because some of them have a large enough audience there. So, better to use a suboptimal solution than not being read. Yet, I think it is both bad for reading (even in the Thread wrapper), for public access (Twitter changed to X, and who knows what will be available only after logging in or disappear forever), and generally for preserving quality content. So I really, really recommend self-archiving and having a working copy (I admit, I am biased here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137616). With current LLMs, asking it to edit it for a blog post is easy. I mean, it's not even rewriting, just a minimal edit, so it works as a separate blog post. You can link both ways to get the best of both worlds. Again, posting is easy. If you like tinkering, there are many great static site generators. If not, Substack looks like the way to go as of 2025. Also, I often hesitated to post otherwise outstanding content here on the HN, as it was a chaotic mess. Should I post to the core tweet (which is unclear without the context) or to the root one (which does not yet indicate that the content is worth reading)?
- wodenokoto 2y ago
  I too think that the idealized solution is to post the first tidbit to twitter followed with a link to the rest. The problem is most of the web is trash. And a link might be stupidly slow to open, and then require the user to click away cookie banners, sign up forms and ads before getting to the content. This is a problem on HN as well and imho why so many comments without reading the article. There’s a few more mechanics specific to twitter threads. The format pushes the author to end every paragraph with a hook for engaging the reader to read the next. And the format also baits the reader to continue because “it’s just one more tweet” As to what to post to HN, write a short blog post about the exchange. Summarizes the context, link and quote the core, sprinkle a bit of opinion and save everyone on HN a click to twitter
  - timeon 2y ago
    > The problem is most of the web is trash. And a link might be stupidly slow to open, and then require the user to click away cookie banners, sign up forms and ads before getting to the content. Same goes for Twitter link. If you are not logged-in (like most people are not). You meet nag-ware just after it loads - if it loads at all.
asimpletune 2y ago
It’s crazy to think how close humanity was to having pretty nice stuff right before Facebook came along. I don’t think it was obvious at the time but in retrospect, just before Facebook there was: - RSS/atom for notifications without requiring an account - Creative Commons for establishing a legal framework to choose how you wanted your stuff to be shared - IRC for real time messaging - Wikipedia for knowledge - Craigslist for local Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website, but if we had built off these things I think the web itself could have been the platform. I know in the last few years some of these have come back in popularity (eg RSS/atom), and for me it’s been an absolute revelation experiencing what the web could have been.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website It wasn't _that_ difficult, tbh, with blogger, Wordpress, livejournal etc.
  - rchaud 2y ago
    Most people creating websites want feedback too. Those platforms all had comment sections, but by the late 2000s, automated comment spam became impossible to manage. Remember all the blog comments linking to Prada and Air Jordans using nonsensical sentence structures? All of those people who once had thriving blogs quickly moved to Facebook after that, preferring to have them handle moderation. In exchange FB took their audiences and locked them inside. Which is why every website now begs you to sign up for their mailing list as soon as the page loads.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      I think that's _slightly_ ahistorical; Facebook showed up in 2005 or so, and the golden age of blogging (certainly blogging with comments and backlinks and so on) was somewhat later, really only ending around 2012 (IMO the death of Google Reader was the last straw, though it had likely been in gentle decline for a bit at that point). Comment spam was a problem throughout, but not an intractable one, and many blogs _did_ use authentication with third parties (including Facebook) to try to stem it. Also, most people who had blogs did _not_ move to Facebook. They moved, mostly, to _Twitter_, which wasn't locked up until Musk broke the logged-out view, though it was certainly less convenient for non-logged-in users to view than a blog. The idea that Facebook replaced blogging just doesn't hold up at all, I don't think; it primarily replaced other social networks, and Craigslist and similar services.
jbhoot 2y ago
After I publish a blog post, I sit back and look at the published post. At that point, I feel a lasting moment of fulfillment. Whether or not I get views on that post doesn't matter. I write for this feeling of fulfillment. I don't get that feeling after I put out a post on Bluesky.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  > Whether or not I get views on that post doesn't matter. I write for this feeling of fulfillment. This is an awesome attitude to have! I also don’t like this idea going around that unless your blog gets popular, builds your brand or makes you money, it’s pointless. Blogging can be so much more than for just shallow career-related reasons.
  - jbhoot 2y ago
    Yep. I like to post my learnings, learning processes, distillation of life experiences. My only criterion is "This feels like a good blog post".
ljf 2y ago
I think I commented something similar when this was last posted. Blogging is better in so many ways, and if you have built up a community of people who visit your blog and engage with it, it can be very fulfilling and fun. Even without an audience it can still be fun. But what the author seems to miss is that people like doing things where their community is. When I used to use Twitter regularly, I loved posting stuff there as I had friends (both real world and online) who I knew would engage and talk to me there. It felt like being in a busy pub where I could chat to loads of different people, and while sometimes something I shared would get no traction, other times we could chat for days. That is why I posted things there, not because blogging is beyond me, but the effort to build an manage a community of your own is so much harder, than piggybacking on a social network. ---- Actually it seems my point was a little different last time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945797 - I still agree with it though (though I have totally bailed on Twitter now as it is terrible.
- 3stripe 2y ago
  "It felt like being in a busy pub where I could chat to loads of different people" This is one of the best descriptions of how social media feels (when it's at its best, anyway) that I've seen
- theshrike79 2y ago
  The only issue I have with the Pub of Twitter analogy is that the Pub also has 24/7 CCTV recording all conversations not whispered (DMs). And if someone doesn't like you, they can - free of charge - go through years and years of that CCTV material to find something you said and take it out of context to use it against you. Case in point: James Gunn. He was on Twitter in its infancy, before it was mainstream, and did some typically edgy humour for an indie horror director that was ok-ish at the time. Then a decade later some right-wing people didn't like him and they dug through his old stuff and blasted it out, resulting him from getting suspended/fired from Disney. When I was on Twitter I had a 6 month auto delete running on all my tweets just because of that. Me 5 years ago isn't me of today and today me doesn't want to suffer from brain farts 5 years ago me had in public.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
Almondsetat 2y ago
Twitter threads are something that people have been doing since forever and it's crazy to me that the platform in all these years has not made it simpler to make them or easier to navigate them. It's one of the few cases where a platform knows with absolute certainty that its userbase is expressing a certain behavior but they do nothing to encourage it.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  As with all services, it comes down to "engagement". If there's a single long post, people only argue under that post. But if your long idea is split into 10-20 tweets, you can have a different argument under every tweet, and every tweet under that can again have another thread of arguments. Resulting in: engagement. Twitter is not, and has never been, a platform for discussion. It's either for shouting your stuff into the universe or arguing.
rafram 2y ago
People like Twitter threads because they’re great for engagement. The author says it’s bad that someone can retweet some random tweet in the middle of your thread without context - but what if that’s actually… good? Not necessarily for the people reading it, and definitely not for our societal discourse, but it absolutely will get people to click. Same reason every long YouTube video starts with a flash-forward “coming up” clip now. People can rant all they want about the way information is presented these days, but we’ve come to do things this way because it works.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >it’s bad that someone can retweet some random tweet in the middle of your thread without context - but what if that’s actually… good? Depends on your lens. If you're reading on twitter it's a nightmare (and is why I never really got into twitter). If you are just focused on engagement it probably doesn't matter. I only accepted how twitter works in my head when I realized it's just like its namesake: a bunch of birds all cheeping in a cacophony. Not necessarily to each other, just in a way to become known and try to stand out. >Same reason every long YouTube video starts with a flash-forward “coming up” clip now Not really a fan of those either. If it's <10 minutes, I'm going to see it soon, if it's more than like, 30 minutes, then the en media RES better strongly resonate with the thesis, otherwise it's just a strange proprechy I'll forget long before it comes true. >People can rant all they want about the way information is presented these days, but we’ve come to do things this way because it works. We do it this way because coporate billionaires shoved ads down everyone's throats to pretend it works. I've never heard anyone say Twitter is efficient, not even in its heyday. Twitter wasn't meant to be this facade of a forum/community center, it was meant to emulate a tickerboard you see on the side. But as I've seen from 3 decades of Javascript, people will in fact hammer a square peg into a circle hole rather than migrate to the actual square hole. As is, we do things this way because we're selfish and all want to be noticed. And Twitter has a lot of eyeballs.
brianbest101 2y ago
[dead]
wiredfool 2y ago
Here's the link to the blog post from that twitter thread: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/ https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/ So, really, this is a case of writing a blog post and cross posting it to twitter. (now there are obviously other writers who don't do this, but Doctorow always does)
perrygeo 2y ago
Twitter and platforms like it encourage snippet-based thinking. I've noticed a communication trend recently where, instead of a few well constructed paragraphs, you get a pile of half-finished thoughts in 200 charachters each, strung together in a stream of consciousness. This passes for written communication in some places. Not only are blogs easier for the reader. It's a more expressive medium for writers as well. To the extent writing is a reflection of thinking, writing microblog threads reflects a scattered and haphazard approach to solving problems. It poisons how we think, not just what we read. I've said this before but it becomes more clear every year - your biggest professional advantage, the skill you need to work on more than any theory or leet code, is written communication. The number of people who simply cannot or will not write a coherent paragraph is way too high. We have people in top professional positions that are functionally illiterate.
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  These aren’t mutually exclusive. I sometimes begin with a thread as a rough draft while I’m still thinking, and then move it into a more polished blog post. It is also (at least in last years when Twitter/X had a better SNR) a great way to get people to quickly consume ideas. But most importantly, the thread format gives you instant real-time feedback about which portions of the thought process resonate with readers, whereas a blog is all-or-nothing. Hard to find a perfect example, but here’s one I learnt developed bits of: https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/1800291897245835616?s=46 https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/1800291897245835616?s=4...
- ozymandias8 2y ago
  > The number of people who simply cannot or will not write a coherent paragraph is way too high. We have people in top professional positions that are functionally illiterate. I feel this deeply in my day-to-day at a mid size public tech company. But how do you turn this into an advantage when your audience (colleagues and leadership) are either functionally illiterate as you describe, or simply refuse to read?
Tepix 2y ago
Is there a blog i can host at github with a mobile app (or PWA) that lets me draft posts offline? Ideally an app that doesn't require a pricy IAP or subscription.
- GavinAnderegg 2y ago
  If you use GitHub Pages, you can then use the built-in local VS Code (“github.dev editor”, which is separate from Codespaces) to create and edit posts. I wrote about it here: https://anderegg.ca/2024/10/16/using-github-as-a-cms https://anderegg.ca/2024/10/16/using-github-as-a-cms I ended up using this on my iPad for the posts I wrote over the Christmas break.
two_handfuls 2y ago
Today this simplifies to: Forget Twitter.
shortformblog 2y ago
I mean, threads can be awkward discussion mediums, but what’s democratizing about them is that they can atomize engagement. If every tweet is a roll of the dice, it raises your odds of reaching an audience when you have a bunch of them. And if you hook someone with just one, odds are that user will be super-engaged by the end. It’s also worth noting that social networks like Twitter tend to discourage just sharing links, whereas a thread that sucks someone in REALLY engages them. It’s interesting that he chose to cite Doctorow here, who is probably one of the more aggressive thread-sharers around. On Mastodon, where he still does it, it can clearly feel like a lot, especially given that there’s no algorithm. On Bluesky, threads are honestly a little less effective because links are not downranked. But the downside is that people may never click the link, leading to context collapse. Some of that is on you, the creator, to set the expectation. Some of that is on the end user. But the algorithm (yes, Bluesky has one) can make it hard for you personally to set that tone. As a blogger/newsletter guy with a decent-sized audience, I tend to favor Kev’s stance. But I think you have to consider what social networks are doing—and how much it reshapes/misshapes what you create. I don’t post on Threads because I find its algorithm too aggressive and believe it harms context (and it also discourages linking). But Bluesky and Mastodon are pretty good at avoiding that issue. In other words, I see it both ways.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
smsm42 2y ago
Thousand times yes! I am always completely confused why a smart person that should know better would make a 35-tweet thread instead of just writing a blog post. There are about a hundred advantages for the latter and not a single one for the former I can see. Of course you can use thread unrollers etc. but why make things broken and use special tools to fix it if you can just do it the right way? Opening a blog on any modern platform takes like 5 minutes, and unless you're planning to make business out of it, it matters not which one, any would do.
masutaka 2y ago
I think it’s better to write primary information on a blog and share the link on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to retain ownership of the content instead of giving it to them.
Creator44 2y ago
[dead]

173 points by theshrike79 2y ago

andreygrehov 2y ago

You can write blog posts on Twitter. You couldn’t do it before, but now you can.

pclowes 2y ago
I find that feature very annoying. I don’t like long form text interspersed with micro-blog posts/disussion. Needed feature (partially why they acquired Revue) but implementation was botched. Also now many individual tweets in a thread are too long and expanding and scrolling through them is busted UX as well.
smsm42 2y ago
You can, but it feels like running Doom on a pager - you're probably not getting the best experience and the tool isn't meant for giving you one.

theshrike79 2y ago

Past discussion from 10/2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945112 I'm interested in seeing if the sentiment is different now that Twitter has ... changed.

markoa 2y ago
For me the sentiment is even stronger, further amplified by the presence of AI. Big reason why I started a personal blog around New year.
mcintyre1994 2y ago
In addition to sentiment changing, you can no longer view tweet threads without logging in. Nitter etc still work so people who know about them can work around it, but most people without a Twitter account or who can’t be bothered to log in are probably just going to bounce.
- miohtama 2y ago
  It's one of the worst UX decision ever. Probably was done to prevent scraping, but still. If I recall correctly it was done pre-Musk.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    Based on some quick googling, it seems like this anti-feature (login wall for threads) was tested pre-Musk on some users, but it was switched on globally by Musk. For example here’s a mention from 2021 where some people report getting the login wall and others don’t: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28267774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28267774
    - dmix 2y ago
      Login gating was initially made less aggressive when Musk took over, then not long after AI scraping became a big deal and then Twitter clamped down hard, around the same time Reddit started locking down their API for same reason.
  - Angostura 2y ago
    It's probably the main reason the organisations I work with are considering an alternative like Bluesky or Mastodon - the ability to have a widget consistently displays your own posts on yoiur website is very handy.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    > If I recall correctly it was done pre-Musk. It was sporadically AB tested, IIRC, for _years_, but it was certainly _rare_. One gets the impression that the first thing Musk did on arrival was demand that every feature flag Twitter had for experimental changes be turned full on; a lot of early Musk changes were things that Twitter had flirted with in the past.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    I thought it was just market capture. It was the most popular website in the world, so if you needed to see sports news, or event updates from celebrities, or your government representatives make an announcement (ugh, I still hate that): well, you need a profile for us to monetize.

lambdadelirium 2y ago

Imagine if using a fedi service instead that allows like 10 000 characters or more

RockRobotRock 2y ago
RSRSSS
immibis 2y ago
Pleroma's default is 5000, and there's also WriteFreely (allegedly).

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

miohtama 2y ago

Twitter also supports blog posts nowadays, but you need a premium account

brokegrammer 2y ago
I imagine that the average writer will simply pay for X premium instead of going through the trouble of setting up a blog. There are platforms like Substack where it's easier to set up a blog, but X makes it easier to build an audience as well. I currently write on my personal blog, but I have to spend time syndicating my posts to other platforms in order to get any visibility. I'm thinking about moving the whole thing to Substack or just use X premium because I can't be bothered to go though that every time I post something.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > I imagine that the average writer will simply pay for X premium instead of going through the trouble of setting up a blog. Everyone can see your blog. People who don't have a Twitter account will either get an error message, get redirected to your profile, or will get the first post only, on Twitter, depending on phase of moon. Unless you're catering exclusively to an audience of Twitter users it's a pretty horrendous user experience.
  - brokegrammer 2y ago
    I agree. But on X, at least people will see and read your post. On your blog, you have to wait for it to show up on Google, or you have to find a way to drive traffic before anyone see it. I have a few posts on my blog that received 0 visits after months of being online.

maxehmookau 2y ago

Since Elon took over Twitter, you can't even see a Twitter thread unless you create an account. So if you use Twitter threads I, and many others, can no longer read it.

smsm42 2y ago
I'm pretty sure if you use thread unroller, it'd still work. Just feed it the url of the first post of the thread and it'll make it readable. It doesn't require any login so it won't be relevant whether you have an account.
- maxehmookau 2y ago
  Sure, but that's an awful user experience. If you've got something useful, and long-form to say a _micro_blogging platform might not be the best place.
  - smsm42 2y ago
    Totally agree, just saying if it's already there and you want to read it anyway, there are ways without making an account. Putting it on the blog would be better, ideally.

panorama 2y ago

As much as I enjoy writing and teaching, it feels like a fruitless endeavor when your content doesn't get any visibility. I've written on Twitter, Bluesky, and self-hosted my own blogs (I've even been front-paged on HN before), and each time I give up eventually because it's so hard to build a consistent readerbase. Of course, I’m self-aware enough to recognize that it might be because my writing is terrible or because I’m covering topics no one cares about. But the point is, I don’t blame people for posting on Twitter instead of going through the effort of setting up a blog. The vast majority of written content gets little to no reach, so choosing the platform with the lowest barrier to entry makes the most sense.

sph 2y ago
Write for yourself. I (rarely) write on my website because I am terrible at it and I want to improve, though most of my writing is on private journals. I don't check analytics and don't even have comments: I don't care to know what randos have to say. Sometimes a person directly contacts me via email to discuss a post, which I appreciate much more as it feels like talking to a fellow human. As you started with "I enjoy writing and teaching", just do that. Not everything has to become a venture centred on growth and engagement. (No offense, just being a bit cheeky here: your profile says you're into influencer marketing.. that might be the reason of your disappointment in your blog's performance. Fuck metrics and KPIs, man. Enjoy what you enjoy.)
- panorama 2y ago
  Sure, I do journal for myself and do a lot of in-person teaching/coaching, but presumably the original article is geared towards those who still choose to write publicly, which I now rarely do. No offense taken, but I had been blogging _way_ before my marketing tech startup (which itself is almost a decade old). It's not so much about the metrics, it's that there are far higher-leverage things I can do than publish articles that only a handful of people will ever see.
  - sph 2y ago
    In any case, advertise your personal blog in your HN profile. I find it's a better source of "organic engagement" than Google or social media, that don't like third-party links as they want to keep people within their walled gardens.

kelnos 2y ago

I 100% agree with this, and much prefer reading blog content than micro-blogging threads (regardless of platform). I no longer read anything anyone links to on Twitter, since it now requires a login to see replies to tweets. Whenever I see a link to a Mastodon instance or to Bluesky, I sigh, but usually still click through if it sounds interesting. But at the same time, I get it. Setting up a blog may not be hard, but it's still more work than starting a Twitter thread. And there are some people who have claimed they just don't have the attention span to write a blog post, so if they were forced to do that (instead of form their thoughts as a series of tweets), they just wouldn't write at all. I think that (if true) is a bit sad, but it is what it is, and I have a lot of respect for people who find something that works (for them), rather than continuously banging their head against something that doesn't, just because it's "the right way to do things". Nowadays, though, considering the direction Twitter has gone in, I frankly find it a little gross that left-leaning people still use it.

stared 2y ago

Using long threads is an abuse of Twitter format. While people do that? Well, because some of them have a large enough audience there. So, better to use a suboptimal solution than not being read. Yet, I think it is both bad for reading (even in the Thread wrapper), for public access (Twitter changed to X, and who knows what will be available only after logging in or disappear forever), and generally for preserving quality content. So I really, really recommend self-archiving and having a working copy (I admit, I am biased here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137616). With current LLMs, asking it to edit it for a blog post is easy. I mean, it's not even rewriting, just a minimal edit, so it works as a separate blog post. You can link both ways to get the best of both worlds. Again, posting is easy. If you like tinkering, there are many great static site generators. If not, Substack looks like the way to go as of 2025. Also, I often hesitated to post otherwise outstanding content here on the HN, as it was a chaotic mess. Should I post to the core tweet (which is unclear without the context) or to the root one (which does not yet indicate that the content is worth reading)?

wodenokoto 2y ago
I too think that the idealized solution is to post the first tidbit to twitter followed with a link to the rest. The problem is most of the web is trash. And a link might be stupidly slow to open, and then require the user to click away cookie banners, sign up forms and ads before getting to the content. This is a problem on HN as well and imho why so many comments without reading the article. There’s a few more mechanics specific to twitter threads. The format pushes the author to end every paragraph with a hook for engaging the reader to read the next. And the format also baits the reader to continue because “it’s just one more tweet” As to what to post to HN, write a short blog post about the exchange. Summarizes the context, link and quote the core, sprinkle a bit of opinion and save everyone on HN a click to twitter
- timeon 2y ago
  > The problem is most of the web is trash. And a link might be stupidly slow to open, and then require the user to click away cookie banners, sign up forms and ads before getting to the content. Same goes for Twitter link. If you are not logged-in (like most people are not). You meet nag-ware just after it loads - if it loads at all.

asimpletune 2y ago

It’s crazy to think how close humanity was to having pretty nice stuff right before Facebook came along. I don’t think it was obvious at the time but in retrospect, just before Facebook there was: - RSS/atom for notifications without requiring an account - Creative Commons for establishing a legal framework to choose how you wanted your stuff to be shared - IRC for real time messaging - Wikipedia for knowledge - Craigslist for local Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website, but if we had built off these things I think the web itself could have been the platform. I know in the last few years some of these have come back in popularity (eg RSS/atom), and for me it’s been an absolute revelation experiencing what the web could have been.

rsynnott 2y ago
> Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website It wasn't _that_ difficult, tbh, with blogger, Wordpress, livejournal etc.
- rchaud 2y ago
  Most people creating websites want feedback too. Those platforms all had comment sections, but by the late 2000s, automated comment spam became impossible to manage. Remember all the blog comments linking to Prada and Air Jordans using nonsensical sentence structures? All of those people who once had thriving blogs quickly moved to Facebook after that, preferring to have them handle moderation. In exchange FB took their audiences and locked them inside. Which is why every website now begs you to sign up for their mailing list as soon as the page loads.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    I think that's _slightly_ ahistorical; Facebook showed up in 2005 or so, and the golden age of blogging (certainly blogging with comments and backlinks and so on) was somewhat later, really only ending around 2012 (IMO the death of Google Reader was the last straw, though it had likely been in gentle decline for a bit at that point). Comment spam was a problem throughout, but not an intractable one, and many blogs _did_ use authentication with third parties (including Facebook) to try to stem it. Also, most people who had blogs did _not_ move to Facebook. They moved, mostly, to _Twitter_, which wasn't locked up until Musk broke the logged-out view, though it was certainly less convenient for non-logged-in users to view than a blog. The idea that Facebook replaced blogging just doesn't hold up at all, I don't think; it primarily replaced other social networks, and Craigslist and similar services.

jbhoot 2y ago

After I publish a blog post, I sit back and look at the published post. At that point, I feel a lasting moment of fulfillment. Whether or not I get views on that post doesn't matter. I write for this feeling of fulfillment. I don't get that feeling after I put out a post on Bluesky.

joshdavham 2y ago
> Whether or not I get views on that post doesn't matter. I write for this feeling of fulfillment. This is an awesome attitude to have! I also don’t like this idea going around that unless your blog gets popular, builds your brand or makes you money, it’s pointless. Blogging can be so much more than for just shallow career-related reasons.
- jbhoot 2y ago
  Yep. I like to post my learnings, learning processes, distillation of life experiences. My only criterion is "This feels like a good blog post".

ljf 2y ago

I think I commented something similar when this was last posted. Blogging is better in so many ways, and if you have built up a community of people who visit your blog and engage with it, it can be very fulfilling and fun. Even without an audience it can still be fun. But what the author seems to miss is that people like doing things where their community is. When I used to use Twitter regularly, I loved posting stuff there as I had friends (both real world and online) who I knew would engage and talk to me there. It felt like being in a busy pub where I could chat to loads of different people, and while sometimes something I shared would get no traction, other times we could chat for days. That is why I posted things there, not because blogging is beyond me, but the effort to build an manage a community of your own is so much harder, than piggybacking on a social network. ---- Actually it seems my point was a little different last time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945797 - I still agree with it though (though I have totally bailed on Twitter now as it is terrible.

3stripe 2y ago
"It felt like being in a busy pub where I could chat to loads of different people" This is one of the best descriptions of how social media feels (when it's at its best, anyway) that I've seen
theshrike79 2y ago
The only issue I have with the Pub of Twitter analogy is that the Pub also has 24/7 CCTV recording all conversations not whispered (DMs). And if someone doesn't like you, they can - free of charge - go through years and years of that CCTV material to find something you said and take it out of context to use it against you. Case in point: James Gunn. He was on Twitter in its infancy, before it was mainstream, and did some typically edgy humour for an indie horror director that was ok-ish at the time. Then a decade later some right-wing people didn't like him and they dug through his old stuff and blasted it out, resulting him from getting suspended/fired from Disney. When I was on Twitter I had a 6 month auto delete running on all my tweets just because of that. Me 5 years ago isn't me of today and today me doesn't want to suffer from brain farts 5 years ago me had in public.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

Almondsetat 2y ago

Twitter threads are something that people have been doing since forever and it's crazy to me that the platform in all these years has not made it simpler to make them or easier to navigate them. It's one of the few cases where a platform knows with absolute certainty that its userbase is expressing a certain behavior but they do nothing to encourage it.

theshrike79 2y ago
As with all services, it comes down to "engagement". If there's a single long post, people only argue under that post. But if your long idea is split into 10-20 tweets, you can have a different argument under every tweet, and every tweet under that can again have another thread of arguments. Resulting in: engagement. Twitter is not, and has never been, a platform for discussion. It's either for shouting your stuff into the universe or arguing.

rafram 2y ago

People like Twitter threads because they’re great for engagement. The author says it’s bad that someone can retweet some random tweet in the middle of your thread without context - but what if that’s actually… good? Not necessarily for the people reading it, and definitely not for our societal discourse, but it absolutely will get people to click. Same reason every long YouTube video starts with a flash-forward “coming up” clip now. People can rant all they want about the way information is presented these days, but we’ve come to do things this way because it works.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
>it’s bad that someone can retweet some random tweet in the middle of your thread without context - but what if that’s actually… good? Depends on your lens. If you're reading on twitter it's a nightmare (and is why I never really got into twitter). If you are just focused on engagement it probably doesn't matter. I only accepted how twitter works in my head when I realized it's just like its namesake: a bunch of birds all cheeping in a cacophony. Not necessarily to each other, just in a way to become known and try to stand out. >Same reason every long YouTube video starts with a flash-forward “coming up” clip now Not really a fan of those either. If it's <10 minutes, I'm going to see it soon, if it's more than like, 30 minutes, then the en media RES better strongly resonate with the thesis, otherwise it's just a strange proprechy I'll forget long before it comes true. >People can rant all they want about the way information is presented these days, but we’ve come to do things this way because it works. We do it this way because coporate billionaires shoved ads down everyone's throats to pretend it works. I've never heard anyone say Twitter is efficient, not even in its heyday. Twitter wasn't meant to be this facade of a forum/community center, it was meant to emulate a tickerboard you see on the side. But as I've seen from 3 decades of Javascript, people will in fact hammer a square peg into a circle hole rather than migrate to the actual square hole. As is, we do things this way because we're selfish and all want to be noticed. And Twitter has a lot of eyeballs.

brianbest101 2y ago

[dead]

wiredfool 2y ago

Here's the link to the blog post from that twitter thread: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/ https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/ So, really, this is a case of writing a blog post and cross posting it to twitter. (now there are obviously other writers who don't do this, but Doctorow always does)

perrygeo 2y ago

Twitter and platforms like it encourage snippet-based thinking. I've noticed a communication trend recently where, instead of a few well constructed paragraphs, you get a pile of half-finished thoughts in 200 charachters each, strung together in a stream of consciousness. This passes for written communication in some places. Not only are blogs easier for the reader. It's a more expressive medium for writers as well. To the extent writing is a reflection of thinking, writing microblog threads reflects a scattered and haphazard approach to solving problems. It poisons how we think, not just what we read. I've said this before but it becomes more clear every year - your biggest professional advantage, the skill you need to work on more than any theory or leet code, is written communication. The number of people who simply cannot or will not write a coherent paragraph is way too high. We have people in top professional positions that are functionally illiterate.

matthewdgreen 2y ago
These aren’t mutually exclusive. I sometimes begin with a thread as a rough draft while I’m still thinking, and then move it into a more polished blog post. It is also (at least in last years when Twitter/X had a better SNR) a great way to get people to quickly consume ideas. But most importantly, the thread format gives you instant real-time feedback about which portions of the thought process resonate with readers, whereas a blog is all-or-nothing. Hard to find a perfect example, but here’s one I learnt developed bits of: https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/1800291897245835616?s=46 https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/1800291897245835616?s=4...
ozymandias8 2y ago
> The number of people who simply cannot or will not write a coherent paragraph is way too high. We have people in top professional positions that are functionally illiterate. I feel this deeply in my day-to-day at a mid size public tech company. But how do you turn this into an advantage when your audience (colleagues and leadership) are either functionally illiterate as you describe, or simply refuse to read?

Tepix 2y ago

Is there a blog i can host at github with a mobile app (or PWA) that lets me draft posts offline? Ideally an app that doesn't require a pricy IAP or subscription.

GavinAnderegg 2y ago
If you use GitHub Pages, you can then use the built-in local VS Code (“github.dev editor”, which is separate from Codespaces) to create and edit posts. I wrote about it here: https://anderegg.ca/2024/10/16/using-github-as-a-cms https://anderegg.ca/2024/10/16/using-github-as-a-cms I ended up using this on my iPad for the posts I wrote over the Christmas break.

two_handfuls 2y ago

Today this simplifies to: Forget Twitter.

shortformblog 2y ago

I mean, threads can be awkward discussion mediums, but what’s democratizing about them is that they can atomize engagement. If every tweet is a roll of the dice, it raises your odds of reaching an audience when you have a bunch of them. And if you hook someone with just one, odds are that user will be super-engaged by the end. It’s also worth noting that social networks like Twitter tend to discourage just sharing links, whereas a thread that sucks someone in REALLY engages them. It’s interesting that he chose to cite Doctorow here, who is probably one of the more aggressive thread-sharers around. On Mastodon, where he still does it, it can clearly feel like a lot, especially given that there’s no algorithm. On Bluesky, threads are honestly a little less effective because links are not downranked. But the downside is that people may never click the link, leading to context collapse. Some of that is on you, the creator, to set the expectation. Some of that is on the end user. But the algorithm (yes, Bluesky has one) can make it hard for you personally to set that tone. As a blogger/newsletter guy with a decent-sized audience, I tend to favor Kev’s stance. But I think you have to consider what social networks are doing—and how much it reshapes/misshapes what you create. I don’t post on Threads because I find its algorithm too aggressive and believe it harms context (and it also discourages linking). But Bluesky and Mastodon are pretty good at avoiding that issue. In other words, I see it both ways.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

smsm42 2y ago

Thousand times yes! I am always completely confused why a smart person that should know better would make a 35-tweet thread instead of just writing a blog post. There are about a hundred advantages for the latter and not a single one for the former I can see. Of course you can use thread unrollers etc. but why make things broken and use special tools to fix it if you can just do it the right way? Opening a blog on any modern platform takes like 5 minutes, and unless you're planning to make business out of it, it matters not which one, any would do.

masutaka 2y ago

I think it’s better to write primary information on a blog and share the link on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to retain ownership of the content instead of giving it to them.

Creator44 2y ago

[dead]