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Comment by fizwhiz | Hacker News Reader

OT: Do people really enjoy reading information like this sprinkled over multiple tweets? Is it so that the can granularly react to a specific segment of information?

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https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066547670477488128

The explanation makes it sound as if the author of one of these tweet threads can start working on one but leave it in some unfinished state until such time when the author can publish it all at once. If that's the case then I can kind of understand the medium although I still think a blog post is a better fit.

How many blog posts receive that level of interaction?

And yes, actually, I do find tweet streams to be engaging. It has evolved into a different writing style that suits the medium well.

I should write a blog post about it.

The medium is less than ideal for delivering this kind of information, but it does force people to actually distill their thoughts clearly instead of writing a rambling medium post.

Which is kind of funny, because I assume punch cards forced people to distill their thoughts better, too.

TWITTER IS THE MODERN DAY PUNCH CARD

We should take this full circle and build a mainframe that one programs by tweeting at it.

I'm not always in the right headspace to read long form content. Twitter threads, that are more of a list than a text, can be very condusive to short attention span reading, I have found.

Yes. Literally millions of people enjoy writing this way and enjoy reading this way, how would Twitter exist otherwise?

Granular, fast to consume, mingled topics. It’s also addictive.

The important thing is Foone prefers writing them that way. There's a comment in thread here with a link to a more detailed explanation.

I like it when it's Foone doing the tweeting. Not so much when it's anyone else.

Yes i like it

I like it. I often retweet specific paragraphs.

I come across many such threads because of specific paragraphs others have retweeted.

I also find I'm more likely to read almost everything, rather than skim like I would with many articles. Even with the thread reader version, I find I take in less information - the Twitter format breaks up the wall of text.

But then, I also sometimes copy plaintext into Notepad++ and turn on syntax highlighting for a random language to make it easier to read.

(Also, I don't have Dyslexia nor ADD, I read novels, and I read Slatestarcodex blog posts without skimming, so I'm not really sure what's going on here).

>But then, I also sometimes copy plaintext into Notepad++ and turn on syntax highlighting for a random language to make it easier to read.

whut

It's a bit like the BeeLine reader that can make it easier to read text:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...

But the advantage of the syntax highlighting is it also gives vertical structure.

If my eyes drift away or something, I can use "pictoral landmarks" via the blocks of colour to figure out where I was.

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