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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

On an unrelated note, I hate how this has become the trend for long-form content- What should've been a normal blog post is now being chunked into smaller distracting paragraphs with each containing its own paths to deviate from the original topic (comments, retweets, etc.)

I wonder what's the motivation though - is it the likes? The informal setting? I really miss those days when we just had content sitting with default font styles inside plain 'ol HTML tables.

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Though not universally the case, I like to quote @foone's thread on why he publish on Twitter and not a blog post:

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

(Threader: https://threader.app/thread/1066547670477488128)

Genuine tip then: write your story on Twitter, then copy paste the compiled story from Threader into a proper blog post and replace your tweets with a link to the blog post. Problem solved!

People expect more from blog posts. Its ok for a Twitter thread to be rambling, to backtrack and clarify the premise halfway through, but this is not accepted in a blog post, which needs to be structured more like a traditional essay and it needs to be edited. Someone without the attention-span or patience to write a blog post in the first place is certainly not going to go back and revise/edit a perfectly good tweet-storm just to make someone on HN happy.

I buy into that explanation. In short it implies a few things:

1) It's not about you the reader it's about me

2) I don't intend to have so many tweets but after writing 1 or 2 I am inspired in a way that keeps me going and I end up at 20.

3) I have not figured out a way to channel my creative energy if I am faced with something that feels like work rather than a reaction or to fill an immediate creative inspiration.

Echo that. I somehow feels this reflects the op's post.

We went from blogs to twitter because you know for whatever reasons. Now we are tweeting out blogs as series of threads and using something like ThreaderApp[https://threader.app/] to recreate the blog.

It takes no effort to write out a story. It takes effort to make a Medium blog, and worse still, you have to get an audience for it.

I made it about three tweets deep and just hit the back button hoping someone would cover the salient points in the comments here.

It's the path of least resistance. I used to write one blog post per day, but when I switched to a static site generator I only write one blog post per month. The difference was that before I went to my web site, then wrote the content in a plain textarea. Or sometimes I wrote it in a text editor and copy/pasted it into the text area. Now I have 1) open the CMS 2) Create a new page 3) Fill in some meta-data like title, date and description 4) Write the blog post. Before all blog post was on one long page. Now it's one blog per page. So before I was OK with writing a very short message.

For many, it helps build followers and get lots of likes. I’m not sure that was the author’s intention.

The author has a long-form blog going into much of a similar topic: http://boringtechnology.club/. Very nice read

I like it. Every tweet is constrained. Little opportunity to insert stupid memes everywhere. The conversational style is engaging. Asking questions is easy: post a tweet.

I really don't understand all of the format hate here. Am I the only one with a working scrollwheel? This just seems like such a non-issue.

I really like to minimize distractions while reading (I love FF reader view). Reading a "long form" post on twitter is like trying to listen to someone tell you a story in a room full of people shouting at each other.

Also it seems as though Twitter never checks their non-logged-in mobile UI. More than 50% of the time I get a generic error message. Sometimes when I scroll down I'm randomly jumped to the top of the page. Comments load non-deterministically.

'I wonder what's the motivation though - is it the likes?'

It does look like some sort of attempt to garner likes rather than an innovative means of publishing content?

Then again, that's twitter.

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