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Comment by the2and7 | Hacker News Reader

Blogging on Twitter has to stop.

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Blogging on Twitter is preferable to "not blogging at all" and "blogging on an obscure domain that almost nobody ever discovers". Consume the content with threadreaderapp if you don't like the UI or use Nitter if you don't want to log in to Twitter (maybe ignore it if neither of that sounds like an acceptable choice).

> Blogging on Twitter is preferable to "not blogging at all" and "blogging on an obscure domain that almost nobody ever discovers".

Short blurb in tweet with link to actual content? You know, like they used to do?

> Consume the content with threadreaderapp if you don't like the UI or use Nitter if you don't want to log in to Twitter.

Or perhaps, people should choose the correct medium to begin with? To me, you might as well be saying I should do X because someone else is trying to hold a "video conference" with me via snail mail and photos.

> Blogging on Twitter is preferable to "not blogging at all" and "blogging on an obscure domain that almost nobody ever discovers".

There is a third option, linking to the blog from twitter. I'm surprised so many people would bother splitting long form writing into a bunch of separate tweets, as it is even more obnoxious than reading them in that format.

Nitter is great, I use that a lot.

From an author’s perspective, why split their posts between platforms depending on their length?

Twitter isn’t perfect, but it’s where the readers are, so they publish there, even if it doesn’t have the best UI for them or their readers.

Linking from twitter to a seld hosted blog makes sense for long term control over distribution of their content, and discoverability of their other work.

I wish RSS were more popular.

I would guess many Twitter users don’t care much about discoverability of their other work, if they have it in the first place.

If they have it, I think “self-hosted” isn’t a realistic option for the majority of Twitter users. Their other content will likely be distributed between Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Twitter users also can have some long term control over what they wrote: users that want that can regularly download a machine-readable copy of their feed. I doubt many use that kind of backup, though.

Also, the chunking done because of limited character space actually helps the brain avoid cognitive overload. May be not in all the cases but it certainly helps in lot.

The main problem with Twitter blogs is that it’s like the scariest infinite-scroll. On a regular blog post you can get a sense of how long it is and just about where someone should be hammering home a point. But one tweet after the other feels like an infinite lazy loaded slideshow. I get no sense if I mostly got the point of it or if I should keep scrolling.

It has a chance of becoming an insane dark pattern, especially if they jam ads in between.

Meh - every service has it's pro's and con's. Thankfully for Twitter there is threadreaderapp: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1516013489722216450.html

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

One should never stop pointing out egregiously bad things. If you stop complaining about something you start accepting it, and eventually it becomes one of those extremely stupid things everyone just takes for granted.

Was it this common before about 2016? It seems like society only recently pulled into this trend.

Please just follow the site guidelines. Thanks.

Sounds like some of us would like to change the guidelines to be against twitter reposts to HN. Might not be agreeable to everyone but surely we can agree that should be a valid opinion to voice.

If you'd like that to happen please bring it up with dang. Don't complain about it in the comments. But don't hold your breath, it's not likely to happen.

Ban Twitter posts? Is you complaint about Twitter threads or Twitter generally? People also tweet links to things, or single-tweet statements.

Perhaps linking to one of the tweet concatenating websites would be a solution. (The ones which are summoned almost immediately in a reply after the freight train of distinct thought snippets leaves the intersection.)

Banning an entire site that is potentially full of primary sources is a poor idea.

Why?

it's hard to read?

I actually find it easy to read since the format requires users to break things up in to what feels like shorter, bite-sized pieces.

cause they've burnt our attention spans

More like I'm not really interested in hearing another quack talk about their opinion as though it were fact, chipping away at my very limited time.

We used to call those sentences. Grouping multiple sentences together to form paragraphs were not difficult to read.

A thousand paper cuts. For one, if I click on any of the text, anywhere, it takes me out of context to somewhere else. Another: It can use up to ~20% of my screen space to show content I care about. Most of the rest goes to menus and trending nonsense.

About 15% of the page is available for the actual content. The rest is distracting clutter (eg. the share bar thing repeated over and over again after every sentence almost) or just void.

You have to scroll like crazy to read a very small amount of text

The text overall is extremely long and skinny, like a receipt, thats a highly suboptimal aspect ratio.

Comments are formatted exactly the same as the article, the article doesnt seem to end properly just morphs directly into comments.

Single sentences floating alone in a sea of crap is not a good way to read.

Get a better client.

Get a better medium. If I have to spend more time than it takes to read it to figure out how to read your content, you are doing it wrong.

Or you could just ignore it. The person was writing for their Twitter audience. If you aren't on Twitter, then maybe you aren't who they are writing for.

If you routinely find yourself on Twitter reading threads, it's worth the time to find a better client. If you aren't, then why complain about a rare posting that catches your interest?

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