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You make valid points, but I have to say that tweetstorms do have interesting benefits:

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'.

Sort of Tumblr meets Genius :-)

I've been saying this for a while: Twitter is essentially an annotation platform in reverse.

So, arguably, you could achieve the same effect with better UX around quotation, no? Hmm

> People can reply to different parts of the tweetstorm

You mean like this?

Yet with a tweet, you can see all the reactions to a given fragment in one place.

And you cannot see all of the reactions in one place, and instead have to click on every single post in the thread.

You are correct, of course, but in the case of a twitter thread, the author themselves has (perhaps begrudgingly) already broken their train of thought into bite-size pieces. In fact, the commenter you were responding to already did so and you chose to elide the back half of that point to make a quick rhetorical point, rather than engage with them. The twitter thread model has its benefits in this regard.

3. is huge and underestimated. also the fact the you are strongly encouraged to make it up as you go along, rather than trying to edit and make it fit.

the "all at once" thing twitter is adding thus seems a likely misfeauture.

> Each sentence is its own tweet, and thus can be starred or retweeted on its own.

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.

You say "limitations" like it was a bad thing. But Twitter has a history of turning arbitrary limitiations into interesting social media experiments.

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?

The limitations are not arbitrary but an artifact of its original purpose and design. A lot of those "interesting social media experiments" have been conducted before, with the same outcomes - at a time when SMS was still free and SMS-boards were thriving.

> Breaking it up allows each sentence to be reshared more easily, which seems like it has interesting possibilities.

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.

Yes, cut-and-paste is a traditional way of quoting. Resharing a Tweet is easier, particularly when not using a mouse or keyboard. It also automatically cites the source.

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.

I'd argue it isn't Twitter with this history, so much as society.

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.

They should have just called it a Tweet Storm and let the crowd win. Instead, they tried to pioneer a new term and act as if it was in their heads all along.

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.

You forgot that your first tweet should be: "So, I'd like to talk today about threading."

  Trust me, nobody who uses threading wants to be using 
  threading. They want to be able to write a paragraph. (3/8)

Did you not see the backlash that came from them upping the limit to 280 chars?

The backlash that involved the requisite "three days of hate because something changed on the Internet" and then moved on to "everyone is using it and pretending that it was always that way"?

Yeah, I saw that.

Sounds like you don't like twitter's limitations and want to express your thoughts in a longer format. I think that has been invented before(you may have heard of blogging, news websites, articles, books).

> 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.

I can think of one valid use of the Tweetstorm, which you haven't identified, and that's to associate Tweets on a single subject spread across time.

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.