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Comment by vesche | Hacker News Reader

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vesche·

Are we really at the point where we're using 100 tweets to write what should be in a blog post?

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Anything more than 2-3 tweets I paste into thread reader:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1207234468928356352.html

Twitter is cancer, and all we have to combat cancer is chemotherapy for now ;)

I don't like it either but I understand why people do it for both the virality and the low friction of getting something written very informally out there easily. I do wish that, when people do it, they'd also compile it into a blog to give it more permanent form.

We are and we have been for a while now :)

I'm not a fan, but there is one interesting upside--Twitter makes it simple to react to any one of those paragraphs, and spin off another discussion. The emergent graph of reactions is much more fine-grained than what blogs allowed.

To have impact, ideas need to spread. Since most people don’t blog anymore, they can’t reblog other people’s blog posts. But they can retweet other people’s tweets.

This, pretty much. I do have a blog, but 1) it's mildly more annoying to update, 2) I have >30K Twitter followers, I assume maybe 5 people have my RSS feed in a reader somewhere, and 3) I didn't actually expect it to turn out this long, but I was already typing things up into the Twitter boxes, so shrug, and 4) Twitter seems to be the place for this sort of discussion these days; my blog doesn't even have comments.

I'll use my blog for long technical posts though. Those make more sense there.

Of course, you can/should link to the blog from Twitter. But clicking through is still some friction so Twitter alone sort of substitutes for the one or two paragraph blogpost "sketches" I used to write. (I preach creating a blog version of longer threads but I don't really do it myself in practice.)

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