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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is such a terrible way of displaying long form content like this.

You beat me to it. I find this subject interesting but the platform of Twitter is incredibly ill-fitting for this. I've noticed recently more and more people doing long-form content on Twitter - I hope it's not a trend that catches on.

Being able to link and pass around the most interesting sentence (and associated media) as a unit separate from the rest (but keeping the original context attached) makes it much easier for things to spread. How often have you wanted to share an interesting paragraph from an article and been unable to link to it? Twitter threads are an awkward solution to this, but they're the best available.

They are far from the best available. The best option is to send the link and then send the text of the paragraph you wanted to highlight.

You could do this on Twitter if you stay within the character limit but for material in the link, that requires 5+ tweets to cover completely, it simply seems that the amount of scrolling and clicking is a waste. This sort of stuff is not always so neatly presented as it is on this particular link within Twitter. On your timeline, you might notice the "part 3" tweet first. Then you gotta click it to try to gain a larger context to see if its actually interesting. Then, if it is, you have to click to find the "part 1" tweet. Sometimes this will be simple because you can show the entire thread. Other times it seems like you cant. It is a lot of manual overhead to consume two paragraphs or so plus a link to the actual podcast that the paragraphs are describing.

Twitter is obviously a broken system for trying to share interesting links then. I don't see why we should ruin publishing for everyone else because twitter doesn't allow sharing text properly.

> How often have you wanted to share an interesting paragraph from an article and been unable to link to it?

Never? If I’m linking something and I want to show some text copied from the article, I copy and paste it. Texts and email and HN and Facebook all support this...where are you sharing things outside of Twitter where this isn’t possible to do?

I was just on my way to post the ThreadreaderApp link.

Here you go:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1168101940758306817.html

It's a good teaser for the podcast, I thought. The last episode (ep 7, which covers this topic) is more than 2 hours long. It's pretty great.

The title of the podcast, and the experience of googling some of the names in the diagram and getting sites that don't scream credibility, makes me wonder:

Does anyone know the validity of this? Can any archaeologist/historian types recommend sources?

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