Comment by patrickyeon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patrickyeon | Hacker News Reader

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A little bit meta here, but I know it's going to come up: somebody is going to complain that Twitter is the wrong way to write this content. How they loved it but were infuriated to read it in snippets. Pre-emptively, I'm copy-pasting an earlier comment of mine on this:

> Heh, from foone themself: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1066547670477488128.html

> Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of getting posted on hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE TIME there's one highly-ranked reply that's "jesus man, this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets when you can make one blog post?" CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT.

> The short story is they are quite open about having ADHD, and that's what causes the long twitter rambles, but also what makes it very difficult to assemble it into a blog post. Every once in a while foone's wife will edit a popular thread into a blog post, examples: https://foone.wordpress.com/

> If this seems like a particularly good story to you, maybe you'd like to edit it into a draft for a blog post and gift that to foone?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19884445

And yeah, as soon as I saw "SNES Cartridges and Enhancement Chips" and the twitter domain, I felt about 90% sure it wouuld be linking to a foone tweetstorm.

I feel quite the converse..

..I accept twitter is here to stay, but always thought it was a a pointless snippet-fest good for nothing aside from millions being able to pile on praise/social-shaming.

Looking at this thread, it actually makes sense for once. It's a successive sequence of info & pictures - that follow a coherent thread. Great, just like any other blog.

However, if you're interested in any particular paragraph, you can click and see a whole discussion on "just that paragraph"

Not for one moment saying twitter's won me over, but it provides a cleaner way of annotating a story than any other platform I'm aware of.

I actually agree with this, Twitter is far from my favorite way to consume content but I actually really enjoyed the format that this was presented in.

I hadn't yet clicked on the link, but as soon as I read your comment I knew exactly who the author was going to be.

Foone's posts are the only content I enjoy reading on Twitter. He's mastered the format.

That’s an interesting way to look at it, and it got me thinking about how one might implement a blogging platform where discussion is more like comments in the margins of a book than some footnotes at the back of the book.

> if you're interested in any particular paragraph, you can click and see a whole discussion on "just that paragraph"

Only if you're subscribed.

Medium did that. I don't know if it still works, I haven't seen a medium post in anything other than elinks in a while.

> Not for one moment saying twitter's won me over, but it provides a cleaner way of annotating a story than any other platform I'm aware of.

Medium? It seems specially built for that.

It's not really the same. Medium turns every comment into its own full-fledged blog post. That's a lot of unbounded space if the restrictions of the format are what let you get the words out.

Mastodon does threads like Twitter with a little more room without most of the downsides. I've thought about setting up a managed Mastodon instance (with masto.host) to put under my domain to use as a sort of public outliner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner

That's what most people seem to use Twitter for anyway.

I wonder how long before there is a WordPress theme that mimics these tweetstorms?

meh. Tweet Stream of Consciousness Processors as a Service are the next new thing. A little ML, some FAAS handwaviness, and voila: Utterances as an Article as a Service for all!

Why does ADHD prevent someone from making a blog post, and how does posting it on twitter change that? Sincerely curious.

I can't speak from experience, but I can try to relay how I understand it from others. Part of the pattern of behaviour some people with ADHD describe is intense focus on topics, with no sense of when or what topics this will happen to. So someone may be intending to only post one or two tweets worth of interesting notes on enhancement chips, but find themselves going on and on without realizing that they've just spent an hour talking about the topic. They never intended to create blog-length material on the topic, but there it is.

The converse happens too: they can desperately want to write a long form article on a topic, and just can't find themselves starting it. The blank blog page is imposing and they don't know where they would start and maybe they'll distract themselves for a minute with something and whoops now they're very focussed on that distraction for a few hours.

I'm sure there's a lot more subtlety to this than I'm describing, and there's a real diversity of peoples' experiences with this, but there's one way that I understand it can lead to this situation.

This is a point often missed by people not afflicted by AD(H)D, it is not that people affected by it are incapable of focusing on things, its that they are incapable of controlling what they do, or don't pay attention to, and for how long, or how intensely.

As an example of this: yesterday I sat down just to add a “testimonials” section to one of my websites. By the end of the work day, I’d redesigned the entire site (which I’d just done back in January), something I had no inclination of doing when I first sat down.

I got nothing else done that day, all because I got a whiff of inspiration, causing me to lose all sense of time and place in an obsessive pursuit of bringing a fleeting vision to life. I didn’t eat breakfast, and I didn’t stop to eat lunch until my stomach hurt. There were several times during the day where I got caught myself forgetting to breathe.

But I’m mostly happy with how the website turned out, so there’s that. There’s some things that need to be done still, and it’s really, really hard for me to put the brakes on it over the weekend. Hell, here I am talking about it on Saturday morning.

Come Monday, maybe I’ll unravel a clumsily packaged mental model of what needs to be finished up in a whirlwind of keystrokes.

Or, just as likely, I’ll get annoyed by some trivial problem with a piece of code I’ve written, and go down a rabbit hole of studying alternative approaches until I find something I’m happy with, at which point I’m already waist-deep in the middle of some new project that may or may not ever see the light of day.

Equally likely is the possibility that too many sleepless nights will have sapped any semblance of focus and I’ll find myself just mindlessly going through the motions of being a semi-functional adult, forgetting all about finishing up this redesign.

Or, maybe I’ll get frustrated by a bug and decide to take a break from software development and come back to it later, like the time in 2012 when I realized that I’d accidentally trashed the source control on a project that I wanted to roll back a crappy refactoring job I’d just done on it, resulting in a five year gap on my resume and Github commits.

Thankfully, I’m self-employed and married to an incredibly understanding woman. ADHD is a hell of a disorder.

As someone with ADHD, this feels rather accurate. Thanks for the explanation!

As someone that loves retro tech (having started on a VIC-20) I love stuff like this! If Twitter is the method the author picked to share, I am happy that he shared. If it is not your cup of tea, do not read it or take the time to re-create in a method that you think works better.

From foone itself:

> they don't have the endless editing I get into with blog posts

I don't know if this is true or not, however Twitter is one of the only platforms that doesn't have an edit button. So it makes sense that Twitter may helps remove from people with ADHD the sentiment of "oh, maybe there is something that I can still improve from this post" before publishing it.

I know with my OCD, it's easier to send a single line/short message than write a post and sit there staring out at it whilst I overthink it (once I've sent it, it's not worth changing it), so this may be similar .

I think it only makes it worse by adding a fear of not making it perfect on the first time.

Maybe for you. Clearly not for foone, and not for me either. It's not that I have a fear of making something imperfect; it's that an unpublished blog post is an invitation to improve "just one more thing" before publishing... forever. Additionally, expectations are different on Twitter.

You can also delete a single tweet that feels like a much easier decision (because smaller impact) than deleting a blogpost.

I dunno, maybe he should work on that? I mean, you can’t let your weaknesses define you forever, right?

Maybe they should. Maybe they've got more urgent things to work on, like weaknesses that actually hold them back in life rather than producing fun-but-ultimately-unimportant information in your preferred format.

Maybe they're doing this for fun, and don't want to turn every aspect of their life into a self-improvement slog.

True, but learning how to write is pretty important in many aspects of life.

I’ve got ADHD pretty bad, and I can definitely understand why that’s an impediment to blogging.

For me at least, the “big picture” of a concept is definitely there, but it’s in the back of my mind. I can access it and talk about it, but particularly when writing, it takes serious concentration for me to convey that information to others, because in general, I’m more interested in fully understanding the mechanics of particular components of the picture.

When I attempt to write about a topic in-depth, I’m typically doing it in one of two ways: either it’s a sort of stream of consciousness sort of writing, full of digressions and errors, or it’s the result of a lot of planning, in which case it often takes me so long that I just give up before I finish.

I’m not a big Twitter user at all, but I have to admit that I’m drawn to the idea of writing about my interests in a more granular manner than traditional blogging generally permits.

The medium comes with lower expectations of structure.

That's a really cool way to write, I feel like it could be a methodology for students with ADHD (and maybe an addiction to their cell phone) to flesh out ideas for a paper and then reorganize (like a Trello column) them to get their base structure

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