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Comment by tangus | Hacker News Reader

This was a fad in my local BBS around 1995. Not to these extremes, of course, but for a couple of months that year we'd justify our forum messages to the 72nd column without any extra space.

It's not too difficult, lines have enough words that there's always something you can change. After a while, as you approach the right margin, you can feel whether the rest of the sentence will fit, and you rephrase it as you write.

I see OP more as a feat of tenacity than of brilliance.

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Right.

I think the interesting lesson here is that if you find yourself in the position of the tweet's author you should be thinking "Hm, maybe writing blocktext is easier than I'd expect" rather than "I have discovered an unsung linguistic genius".

The skills required are similar to those for writing in metre: have a decent vocabulary and a good feel for the different ways to structure an idea, plus a small bag of tricks for adding or removing a syllable / character.

I love finding things like this on my own, without being told about them. I think that is what the tweet thread is about—just the author sharing their joy about that.

It also might be that the tweet author is exaggerating for comedic value. That’s a thing people do.

  > have a decent vocabulary and a good feel
  > for the different ways to structure an idea

This sign of intelligence is also good for talking to people on their level: Explaining things to children and adults alike while meeting the expectations and comfort zone of both. I've always admired people who can articulate their ideas in a broad range of spoken formats for the intended audiences.

Interestingly, some of the best-known examples of people like this are all physicists: Einstein, and Hawking, and Feynman especially.

I did the same thing on Usenet around the same time period. I was surprised at how easy it was, actually.

Same here - I did this for a couple of months on Usenet and it was more a fun challenge than genuinely difficult. Doing it over that amount of text is quite impressive, admittedly.

This doesn't seem all that far from the art of writing tweets which are exactly 280 characters. Start by writing what you mean straightforwardly, then go back and edit it down. First restructure sentences, then replace words, then elide grammatical words, then juggle punctuation.

Now try doing thousands of them consecutively.

Extremely tedious (IMO), but totally possible if I for some reason wanted to. I've often had a long tweet (it's often an effective customer support avenue, but the character limit isn't conducive to conveying detail..) but as GP says, it's just a case of writing what you want and then whittling it down with a bit of rewording/rephrasing/abbreviation.

Thousands consecutively would 'just' take thousands of times longer, it'd be O(n), I just don't have any desire to do that, it's not fun for me.

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