Edit: If anyone would care to explain why they feel that chopping an article up into pieces of arbitrary size makes for a good user experience, please do so. I know Twitter gets a pass from HN in general but it is simply not suited to this type of content by design. This was a conscious choice by its creators.
I tried to read it. I have no idea what the "silent killer" is. And I have no idea what a lot of the images had to do with anything.
Edit: Twitter is obviously the correct platform for this because of reach. Hacker News is reading it, his 33.3k twitter followers are reading it, reddit is probably reading it, everyone's reading it! So if the goal was to draw more donations, he's winning.
For example, here's the thread author quote-tweeting the beginning of his thread, which allows him to prepend both a tl;dr and a link to "archive.org/donate"
https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1204431184069058560
If he wrote a blog post that includes the fundraising URL (e.g. at the top and the bottom) and tweeted a link to that blog post, you believe that that call to action would be more visible and obvious to the average reader?
On a deeper level, content follows form. The limits of Twitter inherently force me to cut my wordiness and elaboration to a concise point. Of course whether this makes the overall thread better than a blog post is up to debate, but it most certainly makes composition easier on the creator.
Once in awhile I'll read the ThreaderApp's rollup of a thread, and almost always find it less of an optimal experience than just scrolling through the thread on mobile, though that may be attributable to differences in visual design. I can think of a number of Twitter threads that I simply cannot imagine working well in a blog or article format.
For example, here's a Twitter thread that was posted by a newspaper reporter, as she followed a mailman on his last day after 35 years:
https://twitter.com/Jennifer__Brett/status/11312980440104837...
(HN Thread is here: [0])
AFAIK, she never posted this as an article on her newspaper's site – which to me, as a former newspaper reporter, is very surprising given publishers' demand to feed the content/pageview beast. I don't know if she ever explained this decision, or if the thread eventually did make its way into native article format. But I think the thread format worked beautifully here. By necessity, it minimized whatever tendency the reporter had to insert superfluous prose. And the Twitter visual design places heavy emphasis on the photos and videos, which each exemplified the aphorism of "a picture is worth a 1,000 words"
edit: the WaPo did do a recap of her thread [1]. Being a recap, of course, means it's inherently different than an original article about the mailman, but you still get a taste of the extra verbiage needed to connect scenes in traditional prose, which is not needed (maybe because people don't necessarily expect it) in a typical Twitter thread.
And again, the visual design aspect is critical imho. Twitter's format integrates images and video much more seamlessly than a standard website design, partly because tweets have a strict container max-width of ~500px, which is far narrower than most modern sites. And I suspect knowing that you're recording media for a Twitter thread fundamentally affects how you do it – e.g. you may feel less restrained about context and quality.
For example, one of the best tweets in the mailman thread imho is this one:
https://twitter.com/Jennifer__Brett/status/11319201271575920...
The text is very informal: It took forever to #MrFloyd to even get to his own party - people kept stopping him for photos and hugs!
But the attached video tells the story better and more immediately than any prose could. I can't imagine that 49-second raw footage clip being inserted into a standard story without being a massive distraction from the reading.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20001559
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/05/24/mail-car...