Nice Threads
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
An innovative way to present a train of thought? (1/8)
Publishing multiple tweets because the character limit prevents you from keeping the "connected" elements (i.e. sentences in a paragraph) in a single tweet? (2/8)
Trust me, nobody who uses threading wants to be using threading. They want to be able to write a paragraph. (3/8)
The limitations of the platform prevent them from doing so, but the reach of the platform prevents them from publishing elsewhere. (4/8)
Sentences in tweets tend to be about the same length, so there's a distinctly wooden cadence to the writing as a whole. (5/8)
The Twitter format makes editing your work laborious, especially when the edits go beyond just fixing a typo. (6/8)
For the reader of multi-tweet writings, the Twitter format is like having to open and read a series of telegrams STOP. (7/8)
And yet, here we are at the end of 2017, where a tweetstorm has the potential to get more eyeballs than a blog post. (8/8)
Breaking it up allows each sentence to be reshared more easily, which seems like it has interesting possibilities. (A simple variation on Ted Nelson's "transclusion" back in the day.)
Anyone wanting to write an essay in the traditional way could post somewhere else (perhaps Medium) and share the link. They don't do it, suggesting that maybe that's not what they wanted to do?
That's not a result of the length restriction; it's how quoting works -- right here in this very comment, I've chosen to only "reshare" one sentence from your comment.
As for the interesting possiibilities that could arise from mixing and matching transcluded tweets: either the mixing and matching are going to be done manually by someone assembling a series of quotes (a process not unique to twitter) or it's going to be the result of whatever order they show up in your timeline -- I think the results of that could be interesting if it was a random process, or if there were any way to influence the order apart from whatever twitter thinks will maximize user engagement.
Resharing part of a series is somewhat interesting since the author controls how their series gets cut up, instead of leaving it up to the reader.
None of this is anything you couldn't do before, but changing what's easy to do in a UI also changes what's common on the network.
Good thing about extreme limitations is it also makes exploitation harder. Though, there is money in exploiting social channels, so I'd expect that to follow quickly.
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'.
You mean like this?
the "all at once" thing twitter is adding thus seems a likely misfeauture.
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.
> but the reach of the platform prevents them from publishing elsewhere.
No it doesn't.
Twitter's limitations are it's main advantage and value prop. Many people enjoy using it for what it is, if you don't - you can always write a medium article. You can automatically share it on twitter, which looks great and gives you the same advantages of exposure as a longer tweet would.
Trust me, nobody who uses threading wants to be using
threading. They want to be able to write a paragraph. (3/8)
Yeah, I saw that.
As for the topic itself, I do find "threads" interesting, but on the whole, would much rather read longer format text.
I love the 240 character limit. I do not love having to sort through a thread, or seeing a single thread item retweeted.
There's a reason athletes and entertainers are using notepad to author longer form content, and there's a reason "threads" are interesting, and it's not because of the format. It's the content.
There are so many times that I read a tweet, and because of its length, have zero context to use in understanding its meaning. This is one of the reasons I've stopped using Twitter, and why my businesses are planning to do the same.
It's a pool of nonsense.
So, when live Tweeting from a conference or other event, using the plus button to add another tweet and group them together seems rather useful, and not necessarily driven by length limitations.
I think tweetstorms are 1) actually useful, 2) obviously something people are using twitter for and 3) better improvement than the character expansion.
The character limit combined with the threading, made people really think when writing, rather than blathering on - in other words, it forced people to edit themselves.
It's strange they made this change AFTER they made the character limit change (and it seems maybe less useful now), but it's still long-overdue.
I say that without snark, just wonderment at how resilient it is even thought it's so totally ill-suited for the actual use.
There is a time and a place for long-form text, but that should never be because the writer has not taken the time to make the text short.
There's a nugget of wisdom in what you're saying, and it animates a lot of the backlash on Twitter for expanding to 280 in the first place. But I think the value isn't concision but clarity. Concision forces clarity in some contexts, for some people, but destroys it in many other circumstances.
You're ignoring the real-time connectivity that twitter offers to the entire world. No other platform comes close.
And sometimes, this concise thought platform is not enough to share an in-depth thought. Hence, this.
My only complaint here is that this took way too long. Things must move really slow at twitter.
If this was true, don't you think people would stop posting tweetstorms that are 50-100 (sometimes more) tweets long?
To be fair, even he hates it: https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/940658870808186881
> 1. I hate Twitter.
> 2. No one should be on Twitter.
> 3. I can't wait to no longer be on Twitter.
But using it gets him the reach he wants shrug.
I'd be curious about your thoughts WRT to this thread, and the resulting 'threaded cache.'
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/939432544008921088
And this was turned into:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/939432544008921088
Edit: I should add that I don't have a Twitter account anymore, just a lurker.
The problem in general is a bit tough - since it's a little "choose-your-own-adventurey", but this is an interesting concept. Nice.
[0]: https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/i...