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dend
lamontcg
I would just love to get rid of the obnoxious writing style that twitter thought-leaders use when they're posting a thread. They always start with a fairly obnoxious click-baitey sentence. Then usually a fairly narcissistic hook about how "i'll explain" then "a <thread>" and "/1". And then each tweet needs to be punchy enough in 240 characters to keep people reading which produces a particularly annoying writing style. Then you need to use something like threadreaderapp to make it halfway readable.
I'd rather have those posts just written long-form, where people didn't have to use weird-ly stilted language because of the post format.
ckastner
I wholeheartedly agree with all of what you said, but this stands out:
> And then each tweet needs to be punchy enough in 240 characters to keep people reading which produces a particularly annoying writing style.
I also find this writing style insufferable (every sentence a punchline), but though it may seem obvious in hindsight, the explanation that otherwise people won't keep reading had escaped me. I thought that was just a "Twitter" thing.
Twitter revolutionized online discourse. However, for whatever progression it brought us, it also brought with it a degeneration of interpersonal communication. Everything is a punchline, one-upping, echo chambers, Twitter mobs, brigadiering, and the half-life of a lot of information deserving of thoughtful processing has been reduced to hours.
robocat
/1 The existing Twitter limitations strongly encourage conciseness, which I often like.
/2 Blogs, articles, and HN comments like this, can ramble on and make diversions that I don’t always care for.
/3 I would like a dynamic slider control where I could contract someone’s writing to their essential point (tl;dr) or expand it (longreads).
/4 Bonus boffin round: a control to vary depth/complexity. I mostly would use simplification à la ELI5 or simple.wikipedia.org.
dredmorbius
"Twenty-volume folios will never make a revolution. It's the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared."
-- Voltaire
Epigraph to Andrew Potter, On Decline.
phailhaus
> the explanation that otherwise people won't keep reading had escaped me
I think you had it right the first time: the medium is the message. Twitter posts can only be 240 characters, and there is no explicit mechanism relating those "1/n" threads together; you can't even "link to a thread", you can only link to a post. Therefore, each independent thought must fit in 240 characters, which naturally leads to punchy tweets.
tern
I love tweet threads. It's a great way to write, forces concision, and as a reader, a quick way to get the gist of a complicated subject.
I learn a tremendous amount from Twitter and vastly prefer it to needing to buy a book that I then need to skim to get the same info, or read a news article. Blogs have some advantages, but you can't really find them anymore, and I find my Twitter feed is higher signal than my carefully curated RSS feed ever was.
wildmanx
> I learn a tremendous amount from Twitter and vastly prefer it to needing to buy a book
Is this "learning"? You sure get entertained, quick-and-easy-to-digest facts, good for short attention spans, and 5-10 minutes later you go back to whatever else you were doing. Or hop on the next "educative" twitter thread or somesuch. But have you actually learned something?
If I ask you a week later to summarize your new insights, will you be able to? Will you even remember that you read about this? I sometimes find an old tab in a browser window that I had forgotten to close a while back. I skim through the contents, oh right! That thing! That was interesting! Turns out, a twitter thread, barely a week old, about something interesting, "I really learned something!", but I had already forgotten about it again, and if somebody had asked, I'd mainly have answered "Oh yeah there was this thing, don't remember the details, or the conclusion, or anything really, but I think I read something the other day", which is just hot air.
We should not treat such twitter threads as educational content. They are short-term entertainment, and good at that, but in essence not very different from a tiktok clip of some girl dancing on the beach.
If you really want to learn something, you need to invest time. By reading a book, by discussing with knowledgeable people, by trying something out yourself and/or trying to put your own words down. This takes energy, patience, time and can be frustrating at times. But twitter threads can't solve this for you.
mgdlbp
Only wanted to look up etymology at first https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/concision
hmm...
1. (somewhat rare) Conciseness, brevity or terseness.
2. A form of media censorship where discussions are limited in topics on the basis of broadcast time allotments.
[...]
huh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_(media_studies)
Qub3d
Randall thought similarly: https://xkcd.com/1045/
I think there are places for both. However, reading up on a lot of business case studies, I noticed that a major tipping point for a company is often when they decide to step out of their niche.
Diversifying can handicap a company if they aren't careful, because it reduces resources to the core product.
However, it can also be a real boon (see: Microsoft + Azure, which now makes most of their revenue)
j1elo
- "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
For all the horrible UX that Twitter, is, one thing I really appreciate is that the thought-leader (or anyone, really) was forced to sit down and write Pascal's shorter letter; i.e. to take their time and think hard how to convey just the essential ideas they want to express, without fluff or narrative detours (which, if preferred, can be found in other longer form media)
ALittleLight
But you can just write a thread of arbitrary length or take pictures of text.
joegahona
Same! This is what makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic feed rather than the reverse-chron feed. Almost nobody I intentionally follow uses this awful device.
andai
>makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic feed
Does Twitter change this setting against your will?
lamontcg
Thanks, I gotta remember to mash that button if I haven't done it recently.
ryantgtg
“Let me explain”
No thanks.
dredmorbius
Buttermilk is marrying Humperdink in little less than half an hour.
rapind
> twitter thought-leaders
Real question. What even is a twitter thought-leader? An expert of twitter or an expert using twitter, or something else? If it’s an expert using twitter I would assume the way they use it would vary, so this must be something else?
bombcar
The most famous got famously banned after a number of years of thought-leading.
rchaud
Do you know that Twitter still does not show link previews reliably? It does for big sites like Youtube, but if you link your dinky little self-hosted blog, with all the right OG meta tags, it's 50-50 whether Twitter decides to show the link preview image.
At this point, one must assume that Twitter will do nearly anything it can to disincentivize clicking out to a 3rd party site.
At least it's better than Instagram, which doesn't let you post clickable links at all in your posts.
masukomi
just as an FYI, someone made a tool specifically to preview what twitter was going to do for a card when you gave it a link:
vilos1611
It seems like Twitter made a tool to specifically do this, not just an altruistic individual.
dend
I think ultimately you're getting to the _why_ of the equation - there is a big desire to keep you, the customer, within the app rather than let you abandon the feed. Going back from a note to scrolling through Twitter is easier than jumping back from your browser app to the Twitter app.
I haven't had issues with link previews on my own content, but that very well could be the case for other sites.
ThatMedicIsASpy
As a non twitter user but searching for my site a few times I've always wondered why that is and what I am doing wrong. I didn't know it is a general issue since I don't use it.
nomel
> Do you know that Twitter still does not show link previews reliably?
This seems like it might be a somewhat good thing, for privacy. User generated trackers could be included in topical tweets.
manmal
Is that image not just resolved once, while posting? I remember Apple solving it in a similar way for iMessage - the sender always generates the preview.
caycep
With the "walled garden" comment, I'm wondering - nowadays, all sorts of discourse seems to depend on these types of proprietary services/platforms, that employ armies of engineers to keep them running, develop new features, etc.
Attempts to make things decentralized all seem to be aggregating into central controls, i.e. "Web3/crypto" -> coinbase, kraken, etc
Why aren't older decentralized "services" protocols being looked at, or developed further - i.e. UUnet/newsgroups, torrent, etc?
saurik
> Attempts to make things decentralized all seem to be aggregating into central controls, i.e. "Web3/crypto" -> coinbase, kraken, etc
Coinbase and Kraken are not "central controls" as you not only can use either and they are exactly fully interchangeable, but you can use any number of other similar services--or even deal directly with another user and keep your credentials locally--all of which are exactly fully interchangeable.
aardvarkr
Off topic but I wanted to say thanks for all of your contributions to the iOS jailbreak scene :)
darth_avocado
Walled gardens exist because it costs money to keep the garden flourishing.
Keep in mind, in this walled garden, all the walls do is make you log in, everything else is still free.
Decentralization still requires someone to pay for keeping these services alive. You could argue every user somehow be able to own and run their own platform, but in reality most of the users will not opt for the overhead when you can get it for "free" from a provider. And in a semi decentralized world where a few separate providers keep the lights on, the providers would still need to be compensated for the time and resources they invest, which again brings you back to a different kind of a walled garden.
dend
The thing is - other providers exists, it's just they are not as convenient as the walled gardens. That's a big part of the challenge. You can own your blog on your own domain and site, but you need to be able to set that up, not forget to renew your domain, potentially deal with availability issues if the site goes down, etc. Compare that to basically just putting your content somewhere where someone else worries about all those things.
It's a trade-off that folks are willing to make, and for the "average user" (definition can vary depending on service/area) that is a very straightforward choice. I just hope that more folks understand what rights they give up by becoming attached to one platform as their publishing medium.
rchaud
> Why aren't older decentralized "services" protocols being looked at, or developed further - i.e. UUnet/newsgroups, torrent, etc?
Where will the money come from? The only reason there's any investment in software at all is so that a monetizable product can be built on top of it. And nothing monetizes better than vendor lock-in.
lupire
Government, universities, hobbyists.
That's how we did it the first time.
vorpalhex
You don't need a new protocol. HTTP(S) is great for blogs and writing.
bombcar
Because for the vast majority of users, they just need something they can post once in a while (if at all) and maybe the ability to form little groups. They care nothing more and need nothing more.
But some of those become popular and famous, and then there's little incentive to move elsewhere, as their "fans" are on the platform and so it continues to grow.
dend
You don't need to look far for this. To be fair, my comment was much less about decentralization and more about the existence of tools for content portability and control. For example, you can have Markdown + Ghost + custom domain. Worst case scenario, you move to another hosting platform, but you're not locked to one particular service and its own goals of growth.
caycep
distribution/eyeballs is the issue with having your own site/self hosting though. Albeit I feel like if there were momentum in that direction, someone should do the RSS reader killer app for that. I.e. something like Reeder w/ Overcast/Apple's podcast directory...
lobocinza
More like "walled garbage"
the_gipsy
Medium has turned in such a unusable shitshow now, it should be a lesson for anybody who seriously considers using twitter as a writing platform.
emadabdulrahim
It amazes me how Medium held the shrine for the BEST blogging platform and the best reading experience for a few years around 2015. Which didn't last long as it became one of the worst platform for writers and readers alike.
How can a company shit the bed so bad?!
the_gipsy
Twitter itself used to be very usable. You used to be able to just open a link to a tweet, that was just rendered as HTML. Replies in thread below.
Now it loads the SPA, you get a spinner, 1/5 times the API fails to load the actual tweet data. If you're not logged in you get bombarded with signup popups. Cookie banners come up from time to time even if logged int. Instead of the replies to the tweet, you get other supposedly related tweets as in replies, you have to click "Show more replies" over and over to load more of the fucking thread you opened.
the_gipsy
Bait and switch, we see it every day. Acquire users with a good product, then squeeze the shit outta that without remorse.
reaperducer
you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your content.
And you never know when years of hard work will simply disappear.
I'm not even talking about being kicked out for expressing opinions that aren't trendy.
I once wrote for a large blog That just disappeared one day. It was after Google took over Blogger, and searching for help with the problem turned up hundreds of other people whose blogs disappeared. Some managed to get Blogger to admit it was a technical problem. A few for their content back. Most didn't.
If you're going to trust someone else's platform for your livelihood, make sure you have a Plan B ready to go at all times.
natly
I agree. However I doubt it'll be long lived. Twitter gives up on features all the time (fleets, I doubt spaces will be around in a year). They'll try this out and abandon it like most of their experiments.
dend
I have the same hunch, to be honest. The core value proposition of Twitter, at least to me, is that it's short-form content - quick updates from the network that I care about. I don't go there to either write long-form content or consume long-form content directly (although I do get pointers to others' newsletter and blog pages).
My guess is that this is an attempt to replace long threads (1/n), but those have their own place and mechanics and I don't see how getting people to write Twitter Notes is in any way a 1:1 replacement or improvement for that.
Time will tell.
88913527
You still need to engage with the major social networks to build up traffic to your own domain name. Otherwise, posting on your blog is like talking to a brick wall. You can choose where you publish, but there's no escaping the leveraging of existing audiences.
dend
My earlier comment is not contradictory to this statement. Indeed, you need to be on social media sites to reach a broader audience, but you can post links to your content that is external to those sites rather than giving it up wholesale within the network.
bombcar
https://indieweb.org/POSSE is the term
MAGZine
I love ghost but it's always been pretty expensive for just a blog.
It seems like they've maybe shifted prices down a bit, it used to be more than $10/mo, and measured based on page views. Now they're really pushing their content creator angle.
dend
Ghost is also just one way to do it - there are others that still allow you to have ownership of your content and the portability/domain connection that allows you, the writer, to manage your content in whatever shape you want.
NearAP
While it's all well and good to launch new features, I think Twitter should improve their existing service and I'm referring to low hanging fruits.
I don't understand the rationale behind cutting me off while I'm scrolling through Twitter simply because I'm not logged in. Twitter can still display Ads to me irrespective of whether I'm logged in or not. In fact cutting me off means I leave Twitter which means I don't see the Ads they're selling which in turn means less Ad money for them.
Even when logged in, Twitter will display the new message/note icon. When I click on it to read the notification, it turns out to be Twitter telling me to turn on notifications. Now normally, once you have read the message, the 'new' message/note icon is cleared. Instead Twitter displays it again almost immediately and this then goes on for the next few hours before they stop.
If they can't fix these simple things, why would someone want to read longer content on Twitter. They would still get cut off again as Twitter is doing for existing tweets
makeitdouble
I think the message is simply that Twitter isn’t that into you.
Twitter wants people that log in, and turn on their notifications. You’d think you’re good enough for them, you can provide them ad revenue too, but you’re just not their type and they don’t find much happines with you. Ultimately it’s not you, it’s them.
distrill
> improve their existing service
> I don't understand the rationale behind cutting me off while I'm scrolling through Twitter simply because I'm not logged in
i mean, this really isn't a bug. this is working as intended, and i don't foresee them wanting to "fix" this anytime soon.
rchaud
Twitter doesn't care about a pair of anonynmous eyeballs not visiting their site anymore. It's not Google. Twitter's ad targeting depends on knowing what a user looks at, and how their network of connections/follows lines up with other user segments.
NearAP
>> Twitter's ad targeting depends on knowing what a user looks at
But they can track which tweets are being clicked, the IP of the person and a whole bunch of things even when you're not logged in.
>> and how their network of connections/follows
But that's the problem right there. If you force people to create an account to read tweets, they might do so but they won't follow anybody or follow very few people and tweet quite infrequently. I just don't think it's feasible to expect a significant number of people (like say # of users on Facebook) to be tweeting regularly. But it's possible that I'm wrong.
bombcar
The fact this "login bullshit" appeared right about the time Apple started cracking down on privacy is very "sus" as the kids say.
dorgo
> I just don't think it's feasible to expect a significant number of people (like say # of users on Facebook) to be tweeting regularly.
The probability that somebody with a Twitter account tweets is infinitely higher than that somebody without a Twitter account tweets.
dangerface
> Twitter's ad targeting depends on knowing what a user looks at, and how their network of connections/follows lines up with other user segments.
I never understood this argument for tracking users, google and twitter already know what the user is looking at as they are serving them the content directly.
Why don't they base ads on what I'm looking at now? If I am looking at posts about dogs why not try to sell me something for my dog?
Instead they seem to want to know what I was doing last week so they can serve me ads based on that, but there is no point in showing me adverts for shoes this week as I already bought them last week!
My point is as some one who works in advertising it's more effective to target people on the content they consume today rather than base your targeting off of data you gathered last week, by then its too late.
quickthrower2
You can tell how far a service has “matured” into a big corp by this kind of behaviour. Big corps need to extract their pound of flesh from each visitor.
When you tweet you are kind of an unpaid twitter employee. But tweeting gives people enough benefit they don’t seem to mind.
ffhhj
Great point, an ad impression revenue is like $0.001, but content could be worth $1 or way more. Someone should write an article on the economics of these free labor models.
quickthrower2
Ostensibly even these very HN comments are like that. But HN seems like it will always be well stewarded and open. Stackoverflow is better as it has a permissive license.
Anyway for fun: (c) 2022 quickthrower2
Akronymus
> I don't understand the rationale behind cutting me off while I'm scrolling through Twitter simply because I'm not logged in.
Precisely the reason why I switched over to nitter and have a rule that redirects me to it.
stjohnswarts
You have a rule? I have a firefox plugin that does that. What is this "rule" you speak of? :)
Akronymus
I am using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/ocgpenf...
And added the following rule:
Example URL: https://twitter.com/user/status/123456789
Include Pattern: https://twitter.com/(.*)
Redirect to: https://nitter.net/$1
Pattern type: Regular expression
Akronymus
Basically using a redirector plugin with a rewrite rule for twitter URL's to be translated to nitter.
Over the months I accumulated quite a few little, useful rules. (Like stripping out the highlight text thingie that google "helpfully" adds when clicking on search results.) I can post a few once I get home.
I like to do as much as I can with as few plugins as possible, which is why I don't have a dedicated plugin for that.
simonsarris
it's gotten so bad that I started an unofficial bug tracker of broken things and missing-per-platform features (like voice tweets that have been out for years on iOS but are still absent in Android)
toephu2
> Twitter can still display Ads to me irrespective of whether I'm logged in or not.
Twitter only shows ads to logged in users.
stjohnswarts
You can use nitter and bookmarks to get most of the usefulness out of twitter.
dgs_sgd
I welcome this. I always hated the long multi-tweet essays and have often just given up on reading them, especially when I'm not logged in I can't even make it to the end before twitter blocks me from scrolling further.
As of now it doesn't look like you can reply to a note with another note? That might go a long way for improving debate and discussion.
sumy23
I just tried reading some of the things written by Twitter's test authors. I immediately missed the old format. For one, the old format forces succinct points. There isn't any fluff in a Twitter thread. First four paragraphs in the sample I read:
> Hello. Hi. Do you have a moment to talk about porgs?
> Yes. Porgs, the cute things seen in Star Wars Episodes VII and VIII.
> These.
> (Image of porg)
> Many people might look at this face and see an adorable CGI workaround for the puffins on Skellig Michael, aka Ahch-To. I see a cute, charming, complete menace to the galaxy’s ecology as we know it.
A Twitter thread would have started out with something like: "Porgs, the adorable CGI workaround for puffins, are a complete menace to the galaxy's ecology as we know it."
So much more direct and to the point. Sometimes, less is more.
rchaud
> For one, the old format forces succinct points.
Succinct points on Twitter can often feel like a clickbait/ragebait headline that's cynically designed to elicit "engagement" from as wide of an audience as possible. There is no guardrail protecting against clout chasers who have the skill to rile up online crowds and make a name for themselves.
At the scale that Twitter operates in, I think we can all identify some pretty awful things that have happened because of the above.
TillE
> There isn't any fluff in a Twitter thread.
That's optimistic. It's really common to see people drag out a very simple story or point over dozens of tweets.
wraptile
Funny, because your first example is _exactly_ what twitter threads are! "Hook -> explanation -> sell" is a pretty developed marketing technique on twitter and it's everywhere to the point where people who don't even have anything to sell are using it.
minsc_and_boo
Yeah, part of Twitter's rise to popularity was that it was the response to noisy long-form content that blogs were spamming the internet with.
Blogs are relatively rare now but it seems Twitter is coming full circle to enable blog-like content, in response to Medium and others it seems.
pavel_lishin
I think it's likelier that your first four quoted lines would have been compressed into a single tweet, including an image, followed by the second one.
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arriu
Also, I really like being able to read a thread of comments on a specific tweet as part of a thread. You would need to skim all comments otherwise.
nomilk
> I always hated the long multi-tweet essays
I'm very new to twitter but I love them because feedback can be given on a (near) per sentence basis.
anigbrowl
That's the problem; it's like a book where the footnotes come to outweigh the actual text.
Jcowell
How so? Threaded tweets are given priority over the comments and will show sorting my first in a thread chain. You have to purposely scroll past the thread to see such footnotes.
Or do you mean you hate how comments and retweets are more important than the thread itself? In that case that, to me, is just an internet thing. I got one enjoy comments about the material more than the material it self.
layer8
You’d have loved inline quoting on Usenet.
rektide
We can cite & quote pieces of Notes too. But it wont create anywhere near the interesting forms of engagement an already decomposed thread has.
In a thread there are ready made pieces of the thread to talk about. Each piece of the thread has it's own likes. Discussions can start around any piece & we know they're talking about the same general area.
Notes feels like a severe & critical downgrade, a regression to a pre-connected, earlier, less capable form. Putting different pieces of information/content into their own places, giving each their own url, giving each their own engagement points: that has been why Twitter's been so remarkably unlike anything else. Ideas have to be broken down, and that constraint has been what's made Twitter so powerful & engageable as a medium.
Akronymus
I still use a few forums that allow you to quote other messages/parts of it.
Funny how I used to be a fan of the branching structure of reddit threads, but now went on to prefer the list of traditional forums with quoting more.
raydev
I was there. Someone should've made a nice, readable interface for it.
jazzyjackson
I never figured out how to see the comments on a tweet which was part of a thread, it seemed to just push all the comments down below the thread no matter which tweet I had selected.
werid
you have to select the tweet, then scroll down past the rest of the thread to see replies to that specific tweet. then go back and load next tweet and do the same.
the scrolling down in a long thread is maddening
danieldisu
Don’t celebrate it yet, threads have very high click through rate, I really doubt that these are going to replace threads because they won’t dare to touch “the algorithm” after they see the decrease in interactions
hot_gril
I still won't bother. No matter how fast of a computer you use, Twitter is annoyingly slow to load and seems to leak memory if you scroll too far.
CyanBird
My most despised (feature) of Twitter on desktop is that purposeful delay to alerts, where it blinks for a splitsecond and then the little colored alert icon disappears for a solid 3 to 5 seconds only to appear again this time correctly and permanently
It is just so annoying that they would do such a thing, I am sure that they have a/b tested it, I don't care it drives me insane, just make it work properly tho I am sure that they have also taken onto account people like me whom despise it, yet not enough to leave the platform
Just an overall worsening of user experience
DominikPeters
I always thought this is a bug!
lupire
You give them away too much credit for intent and competence.
They probably have a fast alert based on some cache, and a real alert that takes longer to fetch the real data.
jacobolus
Try nitter.net, an alternate Twitter front-end that is much less gimmicky and uses dramatically less resources with fewer UI glitches, while also doing a better job of presenting 'threads' of tweets.
pastor_bob
One of the advantages of the tweet thread is others can embed one of the tweets elsewhere. I've seen this done often on news sites. This seems to compartmentalize what you're writing, which I think will be unappealing for 'big names' on Twitter.
woliveirajr
Well, the first 3 links from the twitter annoucement gives a "page not found". Seems that they avoided starting with the right foot.
stefan_
Got the same. Classic Twitter execution, nothing ever changes.
tuukkah
Works for me after a page reload.
Mixtape
Pretty much every take I have on this is covered by the discourse here about walled gardens, but I do have two other points of concern: Indexability and SEO.
When you want to view certain content on Twitter, you need to log in. If you don't want to, you're forbidden from viewing that content. If that happens here, I worry that the accessibility of long-form, blog-style content production will lead to more users either being onboarded to Twitter for what should be a simple matter of viewing an HTML + CSS page or otherwise missing out on content that could be valuable to them (e.g. news from prominent personalities, interviews with professionals, press releases from companies, etc.)
My second concern is with SEO. If this really takes off, I worry that a first page of search results that once would have contained articles from a number of separate blogs will become dominated by a single, homogenous site. Perhaps grouping results in the way that Google does could help with that, but I'd rather avoid needing to append "-site:twitter.com" to my query just to be able to find content that I can read without being tracked.
As a whole, I'm not a fan. This strikes me as another move by a social media giant to become "the internet" in the eyes of some people. Maybe that's appealing to the masses, but it's dystopian in my eyes.
LeoPanthera
Well, all the links to notes just result in "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else." for me. I know it says available in "most countries" but I'm right here in California. Is it not available in Twitter's home country?
junot
I had the same thing happen to me. Page worked after refresh though.
FateOfNations
That seems to be an issue in general for Twitter, particularly when logged out. It often doesn't load on the first go around and you have to refresh to see the content.
Hackbraten
No dice for me in Europe. I can refresh as often as I want, it keeps saying “Page not found.”
melony
So many web developers at Twitter and they still can't fix SSR
joegahona
Disabling Brave Shields rectified this for me.
simlevesque
I love that the mobile website forces me to use the app and now then you click a Note in the app it opens it in the browser.
onychomys
Even better, if you've blocked the built-in browser in the app (via the app's settings) and you try to open a Note there, nothing happens, not even a message saying it can't be opened.
dnissley
Yeah, this was a huge benefit of threads for me! They don't break me out of twitter flow into some other website. On top of this they have barely distinguished notes from links (despite owning the platform!)
wraptile
That's the only real reason threads are so successful imo. APP lock-in is an extremely toxic dark pattern and Twitter knows it.
capableweb
In the GIF, they display that the tool is available under twitter.com/write (which, obviously wouldn't be public yet unless I was invited to participate, which I wasn't). If you go there now, there is a Twitter account there already (a private "Writers Group"). Will that Twitter account disappear now with this change?
omoikane
This could have been avoided if twitter had distinct URL schemes for user accounts versus site functions (like how mastodon has /@user versus /path), or it could have been avoided if they reserved enough words early on to avoid this collision. Now I wonder how they would reclaim the paths that were parked by early users. Pay these users to rename their accounts, perhaps?
zorr
Why would they pay users for this? They can just force a rename and take the path if they need it. Their house, their rules.
simonlc
Same thing for some of the other links, which they do twitter.com/i/bookmarks for example, instead of twitter.com/bookmarks.
I know this because at one point it was broken in the UI and one of the side links went to a profile instead.
undefined
twic
I've lost track of how many times i've loaded this guy's profile by mistake:
barrenko
This is like one of those "every animal shape evolves to crab eventually" but for social networks.
wpietri
Oh wow, this is interesting. I've been wanting this to exist for years. It seemed like such an obvious thing to do given the workarounds people have, from screenshotting blobs of text to tweetstorms to getting a Medium account just so they'd have a place to put things that were longer than a tweet.
I'm excited to see how it goes! I'm personally not sure how much I'll use it just because I've already adapted to threads as a medium. Looking back at my tweets, I think it was 2018 when I first wrote something that started in my head as a series of tweets, with the specific rhythms and frequent use of images that goes with it: https://mobile.twitter.com/williampietri/status/101093172122...
But I expect it will be good for quite a lot of people as a quick way to publish something, and maybe I'll come around in time.
anonymoushn
You can tell the video is a mockup because it's missing a bunch of multi-second load times.
searchableguy
In my experience, most people on twitter won't click to read long form content if it opens in a separate view. They won't read past few tweets either. I believe most twitter users don't want to read beyond 280 characters. A thread provides them an opportunity to comment on any 280 characters section they have actually read.
They should have provided similar interface to typefully to write long form tweet and a button to view all tweets as an article like threader app while keeping the same UX/UI with little changes.
ProfessorLayton
>They won't read past few tweets either
I believe this is because twitter is actively hostile to reading long threads. They'll truncate the middle of a thread, or show "load more tweets" for replies — and then they'll only load just a few more tweets. Want to keep reading? Load a few more tweets at a time. It's miserable.
captn3m0
Yeah, a better UX would be to just make long threads more readable (compact tweets with smaller icons).
idealmedtech
I think people actually want to read longer form content on Twitter, just look at how often threads appear under the viral tweets topic! It's more fundamentally a twitter problem than a user attention span problem in my opinion.
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My reaction to this is that it's an effort to keep users within the "walled garden" of Twitter, which is not the best thing for those that write.
Recall the story with Medium - yes, you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your content.
I know that I am talking with an overly developer-focused lens (a-la "you can reimplement Dropbox in a weekend"), but self-hosting blogs outside the "walled gardens" is not super complicated even for non-power users. Ghost has existed for years and is a very user-friendly experience. Want to be a bit more technical - go the static site route.
It might be a lost battle to convince the majority of the social media audience of this (after all, can't beat the convenience and the cost of $0), but I really do not see this as beneficial to those that deeply care about their long-form writing accessibility and sustainability.
Twitter already has login walls to just read tweets, so I'd imagine the same is likely to apply to long-form content as well.