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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

I hate Twitter as a company and a social institution, but

1. "People will share a random Tweet from a thread" <- this is a feature. You can't easily address bits of a blog post unless the blog uses headers with easily accessible links that one can copy. Also, getting the broader context from a Tweet in a thread is pretty easy.

2. Blogging is hard. Not just creating a blog, but actually framing the content. Tweeting in a thread feels easier. There are rails. I can respond articulately here or on Twitter, but for whatever reason I always feel like my every attempt at blogging is miserable. I'm envious that the author of TFA finds it so natural, because it's something I'd really like to be able to do well. In the meanwhile, I have Twitter threads and HN comments.

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1. How this is a feature? You share one bit out of 200 tweets and expect the audience to understand what it is about and comprehend the proper context? That isn't happening. The only thing that happens is taking quotes out of context and misinterpreting them.

Blogging takes the same effort as twitter-threading, except it saves you annoying "1/"s and clicking "post" each time. Just do like a twitter thread, but instead of clicking "post" (or whatever it's called) press "enter". Once you're done, you've got a blog post. So easy.

It’s not about whether the audience will understand the context right then right there but that they have a very accessible means to do so. By linking a tweet for a thread , the entire thread can be viewed from beginning to end. Far more contexts than a quote for a blog without a hyperlink.

Anyone can take anything out of context for anything , even if the context is right there in front of everyone faces. The best approach is to have the best accessible means of finding the context and Twitter does that far better than any blog.

"Can be" - yes, technically it can. "Will be" - in most cases it won't, because it's not what the interface is built for and it requires significant additional effort. It's not that it just could be taken out of context, it's that the whole system is optimized for short messages, so taking out of context is the default and preferred mode of operation. It's like owning a gun that by default is always aimed at your foot.

And, no, it's not better, than any blog - having encountered both for years, I can say it's not only "better", it's hugely worse. Tweets are quoted out of context in almost 100% of cases, and in many cases Twitter site actively hinders acquiring context - e.g. by demanding to use an app or log in or such. Even when it doesn't happen, the interface requires effort to acquire context - you need to click around to find the start of the thread and to browse around and to filter unrelated chatter. Blogs never do that. With a blog, you get the post in one place, comments in different place, and it is optimized for seeing the whole post, not a disjoint bag of random short messages that Twitter is optimized for.

> You can't easily address bits of a blog post unless the blog uses headers

you can by just quoting the part you want to address

Hah. I didn’t think about how this might be interpreted. By “address”, I meant “link to”. Hopefully that’s clearer.

I regularly use my browser plugin 'Display Anchors' to get the URL to direct people to the exact part of a page I'm referencing.

Yeah, but if someone reading your quote wants to verify that it's an accurate quote and not taking it out of context, they have to dig up the source article and find the text you're quoting. The blog post is also mutable, which means its contents may change after being quoted. Tweets are immutable and always have a reliable link, with built-in quoting functionality.

The one caveat is that a tweet or account can be deleted, but that's true for blogs as well so I don't view that as a mark against Twitter here.

(1) is now solved with link to text fragments.

Yeah, I haven’t used this in vain, but I’m a little skeptical. If I change the wording in my blog post it might break these links as I understand them to work.

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