I believe it is harder to write (due to the character limit of each text block), but, far from “unreadable”, I can read it fairly easily.
But it is literally unreadable to me. I couldn't finish reading the thread and had to find an alternative way out of twitter.
Fist trial, using my android phone with fennec fox. There is a modal that hides the content asking me to "log in"; if I close the modal I go back to the twitter homepage. Thus unreadable because I don't have a twitter account. Sometimes I have managed to read a few tweets by a "smart" combination of closing the successive modals and reloading the page, but not this time.
Second trial, using my laptop with firefox browser and heavy adblocking. I can read only the first three tweets, the rest do not load due to some third-party javascript.
No big deal. Third trial, now I open a "clean" firefox browser session with just ublock origin, and I manage to read about 30 tweets, until it starts talking about hyperbolic rotations. The thread obviously continues, but the sole link below it "show replies" does not work. When I click on it it says "Whoops! Something went wrong. Please try again!".
Typically I wouldn't bother and stop reading. Fuck twitter. But today I really wanted to read this thread because I teach these things. Thus I learned to use nitter, which gives an interface of twitter that, even if it's equally ugly, it sort of works (in that you can actually manage to read the text).
In retrospect, this is an extremely sad state of affairs. We have an excellent article which is made of a short text, a few simple formulas, and a few simple images. This could be a static html page of a handful of Kb with img tags. But it is a slow and humongous javascript monstrosity that does not even work, and may disappear at any time if twitter "bans" this user for reasons unrelated to this text.
The tricky part is that if this was published in a static html page it would be less likely that it would reach us (even if the page was linked in the thread). Distribution is hard.
A good compromise I think is keeping the thread but having a link to a blogpost with the same content in the first (or second) tweet.
A Twitter thread formatting tool that also publishes a web version and automatically link to it in the second tweet is a good micro Saas idea if anyone is looking I think.
But this is an orthogonal issue. Twitter could have exactly the same terms of service, but still serve a single, static, small, html page that would load instantly on all devices. But instead, they choose to serve a bloated mess that does not work in many browsers, and is slow everywhere. Just to display a few lines of text.
I know shitting on twitter threads is a venerable HN tradition, but at this point I barely even know what people around here are complaining about anymore.
People are correct to point out it helps material reach a wide audience, but that's not the point. The point is what could be better?
The original argument was to keep communication brief, shorter is better, etc. The fact it keeps being circumvented in this way suggests sometimes a longer format is necessary.
As a practical matter, in this case the person could have linked to a long form blog post and used Twitter as a sort of comment discussion section?
For readers twitter threads are pretty crap tho, that's why I really like to use thread reader app.