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Comment by agentdrtran | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone outside of a small technical set care about this? I have no problem reading twitter threads — I think they're easier to read than this site!

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I find them significantly harder to read than this site, which renders fine in my phone.

The fact that speech is interrupted every 140 chars is ridiculous.

They bumped it up to 280 characters some time back, but the point stands. Twitter is a poor medium for communicating ideas (let alone guides as linked in TFA).

I only really see it when Foone posts something interesting and HN agrees with itself repeatedly that Twitter threads suck

Enable network throttling in your browser (to simulate the experience of people who can't afford fast internet) and see which becomes easier to read.

Tried it on the slow 3g preset in chromium for the Cory doctorow tweet linked above with cashing disabled (as a first load would be).

20 seconds load time - though readable before that. But you don't want to do that on a metered connection.

This is true, but I also don't think anything but a tiny fraction of HN is on a slow connection.

And? Do people who can't afford a fast connection not deserve to read quality content?

I think the number of people who want to use twitter, refuse to install the twitter app for ideological reasons to save data, and also have a very slow internet connection is a small group of people, yes.

It's more about people who don't want to use Twitter, but want to be able to read random posts linked from link aggregators and blogs.

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