As for why Twitter specifically it's because that's where their followers are, it will get the most views presumably vs. other platforms or mediums.
FWIW I personally enjoy tweetstorms, I'm not sure why. I think the break in between each tweet is nice, it's like reading a series of messages rather than a blog post and I find myself more engaged. It also means the author has to be fairly concise
FWIW, I used to despise it when people did this (post massive threads of messages), but frankly I think they fixed the UI for this years ago, and just don't understand the complaints anymore: you click the link, and can scroll through messages as if it were an article.
Between it auto-flowing the messages and the longer tweet length of 280 characters, I honestly don't see any advantage to those "thread readers" people keep linking to... they don't even have larger information density, which is ridiculous. (Hell... they frankly seem to make the text harder to read!)
(And yeah: I carefully write my tons of text on Twitter such that every single message is a carefully enough crafted thought that they could just about stand alone, which I think is actually good for the content.)
"fixed the UI" is a big overstatement - they improved the UI from utterly horrible to barely usable (for this purpose).
> you click the link, and can scroll through messages as if it were an article.
Imagine if someone wrote an article by creating a phpBB forum thread and posting every couple of sentences as a post on the thread. That's what this is like, for the rest of us - since you have a half million followers, your brain is probably used to filtering out all the crap and parsing the posts quickly. But the vast majority of us don't use Twitter as much or at all, and this adds a mental tax for all of us.
That's why the thread readers are so successful - you're not the target audience of them, but most of the rest of the Internet users are.
I remember in middle school jailbreaking my iPod touch to install all kinds of cool tweaks from Cydia, and I'm sure that exposure led me to continue messing around with electronics.
Thank you for all you did for the community, I attribute a lot of my interest in computers and coding to the early jailbreak days.
No you can not. Often times the posts are not in order. You have to expand multiple times and if you are unlucky you get pulled into another direction and miss half the story.
Unreadable isn't hyperbole. Maybe you have to have an account for it to be usable?
Note: the posted twitter-thread is the first I've seen that actually works for me. Not sure why that is.
Do you typically read Twitter in an app or via the web?
I find it annoying enough to read Twitter on the web - that I don't. Part of that is the fact that Twitter spends sizeable screenspace nagging me to log in - which presumably isn't a problem if you have an account.
Just wanted to say thanks for making Cydia! It feels very nostalgic to me.
i used to get frustrated like you.
then i realized that both correlate heavily with crap content, which makes sense, since the same person writing is also choosing the platform.
these days i say thanks for their self-filtering and move on to the next link.
there is more content than i can read as it is.
Twitter is even worse. Not only does it not make the time commitment clear up front, the tweets are short enough that you read them automatically. Then you're hooked into the doom scroll as you keep automatically reading one after another.
As a writer it means you don't need to bother with structure and other classical writing skills to keep your reader interested. You can just write disconnected chunks of text and rely on twitter to keep them interested.
It's also perfectly readable for its target audience of people who use twitter.