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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's competitor Weibo launched a feature called "Long Weibo" years ago. It's essentially a blog service, except that Weibo would display the first 140 characters of a long post as if it is a tweet, and a reader needs to click on an icon to expand the tweet into a full article. It's a really nice feature. Clean time line as before, users who hate changes won't get bothered, but those who crave for longer writings get blogs for free. Better yet, an author gets to publish her thoughts in a single place and to engage readers as usual.

Why Twitter doesn't at least try this feature in an opt-in way beats me.

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This is exactly one of the selling points of Mastodon: the medium mimics Twitter, but allows you to write long form content at will: the administrator decides what the limit is (500 by default on Mastodon, 5000 by default on Pleroma).

This medium provides the good sides of Twitter with the good sides of a federated system, where content discovery is still done organically through people. If experts want something as easy to use as Twitter _and_ have the possibility of having more space, I feel they should migrate to it. Or anything that uses ActivityPub really, like Write.as or Plume

There's also the whole indieweb movement, with micropub, microformats and stuff that anyone can play with, like with Micro.blog.

All options that give more control to the user

I like it. Serious twitter users do make heavy use of "threader" and similar apps to roll up discussions, and serialized / daisy-chain conventions indicating long form multi-tweet posts have emerged, but yeah it'd be a lot nicer with native support.

Well they kind've do. Tweet-chains. If someone replies to their own tweet to create a series of Tweets, Twitter groups them into a chain and puts a "Show This Thread" link to expand it. It's the same thing in practice.

It is not the same thing in practice. It doesn't allow as natural paragraph formatting or sentence flow since the break-up interval for the text is dictated.

It makes it harder for people to reply to the chain (do you reply to the first or last?). The same problem exists for retweets; if someone retweets a tweet partway through the thread, it doesn't behave as neatly as you describe iirc.

Also, there's just a difference for the author. Writing a paragraph of text like this comment, where I get to go back through it and edit it as I go, add and remove paragraphs... It results in me creating a more carefully edited and thoughtful piece of writing. With the tweet threads, someone either has to write the tweets one at a time (and can't edit previous ones) with twitter dictating the breaks, or they have to do paragraph-oriented editing locally, and then figure out how to break it up correctly for tweets (which is non-trivial actually! URLs take up a difficult-to-predict-naively number of characters, so it's not naively 140 chars if you have urls, etc).

Basically, twitter's model facilitates a different sort of writing and reading than a single long post does, even if they are just both a bunch of letters.

Just to back you up, your post is 1022 characters.

If you were limited to 280:

Some discussions have nuance that cannot be expressed in 280 characters.

Yes, when expressing a simple idea or an idea you understand very well, you should be able to do so concisely.

However, when providing information to someone else about a complicated subject, or trying to

It's artificial scarcity, that doesn't really benefit the reader that much, and certainly not the writer.

Interesting. Is it for long-form text? Or can it be multimedia as well?

This would be so cool. I would still limit it somehow, tho, like at 5000 characters, to force everyone to brevity in line with twitter micromessaging branding. Honestly, also think of the amount of subtle, non invasive and highly targeted advertising space they’d just spawn out of thin air...

6.40 kB ought to be enough for anyone.

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