What's up with this new trend of writing long-ish form crap on Twitter?
Because, as others have said, you go where the people are, otherwise you're just howling into the void, and what's the point of doing it? If I only wrote on Medium, or for niche magazines, or newspapers, then there's a whole lot of people who would never discover interesting stuff.
So I do both, depending on when the mood takes me, or if the subject can work in a Twitter format (not everything can) or needs the full longform treatment. If it's the latter, then I stick it up on Medium.
Horses for courses and all that.
I do this mostly for fun. So tbh the alternative here was "not tell people something interesting at all" rather than "write a longform piece about the Hospitallers".
I DO have plans for the latter. Eventually. But it requires lots of research and time, and I don't have a lot of either to spare these days.
That's something I would suggest that is always worth remembering, I would gently suggest. Writing isn't a free action. It takes time and mental energy/effort. I'd love it if we lived in a world where people would magically give me money to do that, just as I suspect artists and musicians would say the same, but that doesn't happen unfortunately!
That, and atrophied attention spans can only handle bite-sized readings at a time. If this thread was in blog form it would get a fraction of the viewership.
That's 1 tweet. I fucking hate Twitter longforms, because my eyes have to keep hunting for the next part of the content...
Fortunately this website exists: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1151832864494903296.html
Small chunks of information that piece together into a larger whole along a narrative timeline is the go-to document method of pretty much all of tech.
The latter makes more sense as an blog post or article.
He hasn't posted on Twitter for some years now, so it's a stretch to call the format new...