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Comment by ljf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

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