Comment by berberous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by berberous | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You make valid points, but I have to say that tweetstorms do have interesting benefits:

1. Each sentence is its own tweet, and thus can be starred or retweeted on its own. This lets certain 'key ideas' or 'best lines' in a tweetstorm go viral, and brings interested readers to the full tweetstorm that otherwise wouldn't have bothered if they weren't hooked by the best part of it and had to see a full paragraph or blog post. When scrolling, you can also see the parts of the tweetstorm that got the most likes.

2. People can reply to different parts of the tweetstorm, creating subthreads, allowing useful discussions to branch off of different parts of the tweetstorm.

3. By forcing people through a clunky UX, you still force them to condense their ideas. Most writing is much longer than it needs to be. For example, I think most books I've read would improve by being 10-50% shorter. Twitter for sure has downsides, but it is nice to have at least one writing platform that errs on forcing people to the side of 'too short' rather than 'too long'.

> People can reply to different parts of the tweetstorm

You mean like this?

You are correct, of course, but in the case of a twitter thread, the author themselves has (perhaps begrudgingly) already broken their train of thought into bite-size pieces. In fact, the commenter you were responding to already did so and you chose to elide the back half of that point to make a quick rhetorical point, rather than engage with them. The twitter thread model has its benefits in this regard.

Yet with a tweet, you can see all the reactions to a given fragment in one place.

And you cannot see all of the reactions in one place, and instead have to click on every single post in the thread.

> Each sentence is its own tweet, and thus can be starred or retweeted on its own.

Or misinterpreted on it's own. I have witnessed several cases in which a out-of-context sentence in such a tweetstorm lead to some shitstorm until the original author cleared it up.

>People can reply to different parts of the tweetstorm, creating subthreads, allowing useful discussions to branch off of different parts of the tweetstorm.

And it also leads to fragmentation where people begin to discuss subparts of the entire thread in separation and probably reurgitate the same topic twenty times in twenty different threads.

>By forcing people through a clunky UX, you still force them to condense their ideas.

Which IMO is bad since the condensed ideas I usually see on twitter lack substance (or even citations), people just throw out condensed stuff without context.

So, arguably, you could achieve the same effect with better UX around quotation, no? Hmm

3. is huge and underestimated. also the fact the you are strongly encouraged to make it up as you go along, rather than trying to edit and make it fit.

the "all at once" thing twitter is adding thus seems a likely misfeauture.

Sort of Tumblr meets Genius :-)

I've been saying this for a while: Twitter is essentially an annotation platform in reverse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com