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Comment by FractalParadigm | Hacker News Reader

To each their own, but I feel like the discoverability of the 'whole story' seriously suffers. Any time I try to follow a Twitter thread I can usually find 2/3 of the posts pretty easily while the rest tend to be buried somewhere in the memes and pointless banter.

A blog post can be equally "to the point" as a Twitter post, your SEO might suffer but I'd imagine 99% of bloggers really don't care. And FWIW, anyone can setup a WordPress in just a few minutes assuming you use a *.wordpress.com, to name just one of many free blogging platforms.

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That's funny. I find HN far more annoying because of conversations like this. Instead of having good technical conversations it's almost always people critiquing things like the font that someone's using on their site, and for some insane reason it's voted up to the top. And here I am contributing to the problem by extending this stupid thread further.

I had to scroll down ~75% of this page, passing what seemed like many dozens of posts all saying the same useless shit about the format and not talking at all about the content.

And that got me to the next top post, which... is someone just unrolling it.

Thankfully, soon after, someone asks a legitimate question about the content. Nearly at the bottom.

The twitter thread on the other hand is concise and easy to scroll through. A couple of memes because someone's having fun telling their story seems relatively benign compared to the average HN comments section drivel.

>That's funny. I find HN far more annoying because of conversations like this.

I appreciate the critiques, saves me the wasted time going to the twitter thread and then being annoyed in the same manner.

No idea if you know this or not, but I use the thread collapse button judiciously to skip these long sidethreads (after reading the first few subcomments...)

Side note: I used to think I was down voting when I was collapsing the thread and I felt REALLY bad for doing it.

Note to Newbs: you can't dont vote until you hit 500 "points", and then an upside down arrow appears underneath the "up vote" arrow.

Thank you, I had the same idea about collapsing threads. This is really helpful!

Yeah, and normally I don't bother commenting, I just downvote and move on, but given that the comments section was already (in my mind) a disaster and the irony of the parent post I made an exception.

As far as I can tell, HN isn't designed or intended for "good technical conversations", nor "on-topic conversations". It's intended for "interesting conversations in general" (or some variant) based on the guidelines, behavior of the moderator(s?), and content.

I don't necessarily like this kind of bent, but that's the way that it is. If you want consistent technical conversations, you should check out Lobste.rs.

I wonder if HN should offer two sections: Opinion and Insight. You decide where to post, but others can disagree through reports. If someone answers a question with an insightful comment, the thread is moved over.

> good technical conversations [...] critiquing things like the font that someone's using on their site

Critiquing the font is a technical conversation to a front-end designer :)

Yeah, but that is where their friends, followers, audience, comfort is.

Its like saying 'I wish he hadn't told they story down the pub, the pub is a terrible place to tell stories as it is too noisy and I find it hard to follow with everything else going on'. But hey, they were down the pub telling stories, that is where it happened and that is where they were happy to do it. They might not have wanted to sit on a stage at a conference or record a video for you.

By all means take their story and retell it like journalist and bloggers have done for years, but don't complain about someone's medium, just be glad they shared the story at all.

> Yeah, but that is where their friends, followers, audience, comfort is.

I just link to a better format from my twitter when I want to tell a longer story and it works great. I find writing longer stories in a string of tweets even more annoying than trying to read them.

The pub is a great place to tell stories though, so your analogy is an appropriate action in an appropriate place. This is like staging a play at a pub - great gimmick once in a while, certainly not a bad thing, but it just isn't practical to do a full stage production at an average pub. The lighting isn't there, the stage isn't big enough and the patrons are busy eating and drinking. It would be better to go to a theatre.

Similarly, this fellow is telling an interesting anecdote. But what we see here is a man searching for a paragraph while living in the desert of a sentence.

> Its like saying 'I wish he hadn't told they story down the pub, the pub is a terrible place to tell stories as it is too noisy and I find it hard to follow with everything else going on'.

More like 'I wish he hadn't told the story at the pub in small snippets over 4-6 drinks'

Twitter, unlike pubs, has intentional systems in place to interrupt medium to long-form communication. It was designed to be a bad medium for telling stories, so chaining a dozen tweets is a frustrating experience for both the author and the reader.

It's obvious why people still insist on using Twitter for telling stories: Twitter is a massively popular website, and the author will lose some percentage of readership if they link to an external blog. Ideally, Twitter would recognize that this is now a major use case and would add UI to support long-form communication. In the meantime, it'd be nice if people shared Twitter chains via threadreaderapp or authors used screenshots of the Notes app. Using a medium designed for telling stories would be even better.

Screenshots of text are inaccessible to assistive technologies without alt text. Twitter's alt text limit is 1000 characters.

But, again, if you're also annoyed that social story telling IRL happens with interruptions and digressions and background noise (and perhaps even four to six drinks!) then you are really asking for something other than what it is.

> But, again, if you're also annoyed that social story telling IRL happens with interruptions and digressions and background noise

Really, this pub/Twitter comparison doesn't work. Yes, interruptions happen IRL, but they aren't systematically happening every other sentence. Also, you can use body language or talk louder to ensure you're understood IRL. Internet communication doesn't have the same luxury.

Disruption while consuming information in the browser is a different animal compared to person-to-person contact.

>Yes, interruptions happen IRL, but they aren't systematically happening every other sentence.

No, you usually have to go see Shakespeare for that.

Sure, but would you actually create a new blog just to tell a story? I would feel pretentious, like my story is so good that I need to create a new blog for it. No, I would just use what's available to me.

Every blog started with “just” a story

Well if all you ever intend to tell is the one story then I concede, use whatever medium is familiar.

It's funny, almost like I think everyone should have a website.

I never enjoyed reading anything on Twitter.

That sounds more like a content problem, not a formatting issue

To me it is both. The UI and UX makes for terrible content, perfect for drama, but hard for clear exchange.

My opinion of course. Those who enjoy the twitter conversations, go for it.

The content is shaped by the medium it is presented in.

> .. buried somewhere in the memes and pointless banter.

This doesn't really make much sense. How are you getting lost in a single top-to-bottom thread? Memes are as obstructive as in blog post and banter.. well unless you're clicking into possible individual tweet replies they are just... not present at all.

It’s not a single top-to-bottom thread. Twitter shows the first two posts from the thread and then abruptly cuts to infinite scrolling of suggested third-party content.

There's a button "see full thread".

…which is a trick that just prompts you to sign up for Twitter.

I just tried it logged out and I did not get any prompt.

Screen recording: https://imgur.com/a/hjiNrfE

Fair enough, that kind of sucks (I tried it on my laptop).

I honestly wonder if this is just due to different people getting different UIs. I just click the “see full thread” button on the last visible post of the thread, and I’m taken to the full thread.

This button forces you to login if you aren’t logged in. Inconvenient for us dinosaurs without Twitter accounts.

Not too mention, my ADD usually takes over, and half way through I am all of a sudden looking at cat memes.

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