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Twitter Notes

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My reaction to this is that it's an effort to keep users within the "walled garden" of Twitter, which is not the best thing for those that write.

Recall the story with Medium - yes, you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your content.

I know that I am talking with an overly developer-focused lens (a-la "you can reimplement Dropbox in a weekend"), but self-hosting blogs outside the "walled gardens" is not super complicated even for non-power users. Ghost has existed for years and is a very user-friendly experience. Want to be a bit more technical - go the static site route.

It might be a lost battle to convince the majority of the social media audience of this (after all, can't beat the convenience and the cost of $0), but I really do not see this as beneficial to those that deeply care about their long-form writing accessibility and sustainability.

Twitter already has login walls to just read tweets, so I'd imagine the same is likely to apply to long-form content as well.

With the "walled garden" comment, I'm wondering - nowadays, all sorts of discourse seems to depend on these types of proprietary services/platforms, that employ armies of engineers to keep them running, develop new features, etc.

Attempts to make things decentralized all seem to be aggregating into central controls, i.e. "Web3/crypto" -> coinbase, kraken, etc

Why aren't older decentralized "services" protocols being looked at, or developed further - i.e. UUnet/newsgroups, torrent, etc?

You don't need to look far for this. To be fair, my comment was much less about decentralization and more about the existence of tools for content portability and control. For example, you can have Markdown + Ghost + custom domain. Worst case scenario, you move to another hosting platform, but you're not locked to one particular service and its own goals of growth.

distribution/eyeballs is the issue with having your own site/self hosting though. Albeit I feel like if there were momentum in that direction, someone should do the RSS reader killer app for that. I.e. something like Reeder w/ Overcast/Apple's podcast directory...

You could also still post links to your content wherever your audience is - it's just a matter of being able to maintain control over the content itself.

You don't need a new protocol. HTTP(S) is great for blogs and writing.

> Why aren't older decentralized "services" protocols being looked at, or developed further - i.e. UUnet/newsgroups, torrent, etc?

Where will the money come from? The only reason there's any investment in software at all is so that a monetizable product can be built on top of it. And nothing monetizes better than vendor lock-in.

Government, universities, hobbyists.

That's how we did it the first time.

The tools are available to them right now, nothing's stopping them except the fact that people want to spend their time in walled gardens.

I can't help but think that walled gardens are attractive places to spend time, not that people want to spend their time in them.

> Attempts to make things decentralized all seem to be aggregating into central controls, i.e. "Web3/crypto" -> coinbase, kraken, etc

Coinbase and Kraken are not "central controls" as you not only can use either and they are exactly fully interchangeable, but you can use any number of other similar services--or even deal directly with another user and keep your credentials locally--all of which are exactly fully interchangeable.

Off topic but I wanted to say thanks for all of your contributions to the iOS jailbreak scene :)

Walled gardens exist because it costs money to keep the garden flourishing.

Keep in mind, in this walled garden, all the walls do is make you log in, everything else is still free.

Decentralization still requires someone to pay for keeping these services alive. You could argue every user somehow be able to own and run their own platform, but in reality most of the users will not opt for the overhead when you can get it for "free" from a provider. And in a semi decentralized world where a few separate providers keep the lights on, the providers would still need to be compensated for the time and resources they invest, which again brings you back to a different kind of a walled garden.

The thing is - other providers exists, it's just they are not as convenient as the walled gardens. That's a big part of the challenge. You can own your blog on your own domain and site, but you need to be able to set that up, not forget to renew your domain, potentially deal with availability issues if the site goes down, etc. Compare that to basically just putting your content somewhere where someone else worries about all those things.

It's a trade-off that folks are willing to make, and for the "average user" (definition can vary depending on service/area) that is a very straightforward choice. I just hope that more folks understand what rights they give up by becoming attached to one platform as their publishing medium.

More like "walled garbage"

Because for the vast majority of users, they just need something they can post once in a while (if at all) and maybe the ability to form little groups. They care nothing more and need nothing more.

But some of those become popular and famous, and then there's little incentive to move elsewhere, as their "fans" are on the platform and so it continues to grow.

I would just love to get rid of the obnoxious writing style that twitter thought-leaders use when they're posting a thread. They always start with a fairly obnoxious click-baitey sentence. Then usually a fairly narcissistic hook about how "i'll explain" then "a <thread>" and "/1". And then each tweet needs to be punchy enough in 240 characters to keep people reading which produces a particularly annoying writing style. Then you need to use something like threadreaderapp to make it halfway readable.

I'd rather have those posts just written long-form, where people didn't have to use weird-ly stilted language because of the post format.

“Let me explain”

No thanks.

Buttermilk is marrying Humperdink in little less than half an hour.

Same! This is what makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic feed rather than the reverse-chron feed. Almost nobody I intentionally follow uses this awful device.

>makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic feed

Does Twitter change this setting against your will?

Yes

Yeah. "Twitter reverts back to the algorithmic timeline after you're away for a while. You need to perform the above steps again to see the chronological timeline."

source https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-use-twitter-timeline-algorit...

wtf

Thanks, I gotta remember to mash that button if I haven't done it recently.

I wholeheartedly agree with all of what you said, but this stands out:

> And then each tweet needs to be punchy enough in 240 characters to keep people reading which produces a particularly annoying writing style.

I also find this writing style insufferable (every sentence a punchline), but though it may seem obvious in hindsight, the explanation that otherwise people won't keep reading had escaped me. I thought that was just a "Twitter" thing.

Twitter revolutionized online discourse. However, for whatever progression it brought us, it also brought with it a degeneration of interpersonal communication. Everything is a punchline, one-upping, echo chambers, Twitter mobs, brigadiering, and the half-life of a lot of information deserving of thoughtful processing has been reduced to hours.

/1 The existing Twitter limitations strongly encourage conciseness, which I often like.

/2 Blogs, articles, and HN comments like this, can ramble on and make diversions that I don’t always care for.

/3 I would like a dynamic slider control where I could contract someone’s writing to their essential point (tl;dr) or expand it (longreads).

/4 Bonus boffin round: a control to vary depth/complexity. I mostly would use simplification à la ELI5 or simple.wikipedia.org.

I'm unable to find the specific company and website in my old emails, but I have seen an example on the web of what you're describing. The reader could select whether to expand or collapse sections (e.g., I want more detail on this subsection).

The web interface was similar to a medium blog post, but the amount of work for both the writer and the reader was more than I think most folks are willing to invest.

I’ve stumbled across something similar. It was a personal portfolio / bio site. The owner wrote several versions of each section, using different styles and level of detail. The various versions were selected by the reader with some sliders or something.

I thought it was pretty neat. A huge pile of work to write all that, but neat.

It's interesting if you consider the time spent writing versus time spent reading. This post will take me less than a minute to write, you less than a minute to read, but perhaps five/ten people will read it - a 1:10 ratio.

Popular content will have a much larger ratio - if I am a popular writer I might spend a day or two on a fancy blog post like described above, but if 60,000 people spend 10 minutes reading it that's 600,000 minutes - 10,000 hours! Now spending a bit more time to make it more useful/enjoyable/readable seems worth it.

Sounds like a job for GPT-3. The author writes the long form version of each section and then GPT writes the simpler versions.

Something like this? https://quillbot.com/summarize

You already have a "dynamic slider control" for everything you read, it lives in your brain and it's called "skimming." Well-written articles already expose the essential point in an easy-to-find way, and I couldn't imagine what a "give me the tl;dr now" button would do to our already ruined attention spans. The tl;dr might exist for some articles, but most of the time, the essential point requires a lot of build-up and context to understand; you can't just take that context away.

To paraphrase you:

tl;dr: skim-read good articles, dummy.

Longer version: here’s a thoughtless snark ignoring that you said you wanted longreads and ignoring you wanted to dial complexity to 11. Society’s tuned to custard, get off my lawn.

Extended version: I really like to show I am the smartest, most condescending, person in the forum. Let me state the obvious. Nobody listens or uses their brains these days, because TikTok. Your idea of a slider is lame. Normally I would just ignore it, however I felt compelled to make a sweeping commentary on society and your inane comment was just the hook I needed. I really wanted to correct your spelling and grammar, and comment on your smell, but I did remember that is against the guidelines[1]. If would love to downvote you to oblivion, but even talking about voting is illegal on HN: long live 1A</sarcasm>. Ironic huh?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

PS: Hopefully this amuses you: I am being facetious, but I am also trying to give you the gist of how your comment comes across to me, in my opinion. I am not a bad guy, and normally I try to write higher quality comments.

Just gonna say that your original comment definitely reads like the tone that you’re pretending to have here, so it might actually just be you.

Fair point.

I was trying for a playful positive tone. I will try harder, but it is difficult, eh?

I suspect the difference I have with the person I answered is that the primary interaction I have with Twitter is links from HN, which are often short, relevant and to the point. I don’t see the flames because I’m not involved with the fire.

This "depth slider" is called the Inverted Pyramid [0]. The first paragraph has the main information (aka tl;dr). The next the secondary points. And as a reader, you just have to keep reading as you want more details. You know the next few paragraphs don't have more important information than what you've already read.

That's how the print media wrote their articles. They've already sold the paper/magazine to you, so now the goal was to make you feel like you have as much information as you would like with as little effort as possible, so you're willing to buy the next issue.

Nowadays, with the attention economy, the writing style has changed. The main objective is to keep the user reading for as long as possible.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

> the explanation that otherwise people won't keep reading had escaped me

I think you had it right the first time: the medium is the message. Twitter posts can only be 240 characters, and there is no explicit mechanism relating those "1/n" threads together; you can't even "link to a thread", you can only link to a post. Therefore, each independent thought must fit in 240 characters, which naturally leads to punchy tweets.

"Twenty-volume folios will never make a revolution. It's the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared."

-- Voltaire

Epigraph to Andrew Potter, On Decline.

I love tweet threads. It's a great way to write, forces concision, and as a reader, a quick way to get the gist of a complicated subject.

I learn a tremendous amount from Twitter and vastly prefer it to needing to buy a book that I then need to skim to get the same info, or read a news article. Blogs have some advantages, but you can't really find them anymore, and I find my Twitter feed is higher signal than my carefully curated RSS feed ever was.

Randall thought similarly: https://xkcd.com/1045/

I think there are places for both. However, reading up on a lot of business case studies, I noticed that a major tipping point for a company is often when they decide to step out of their niche.

Diversifying can handicap a company if they aren't careful, because it reduces resources to the core product.

However, it can also be a real boon (see: Microsoft + Azure, which now makes most of their revenue)

Microsoft doesn’t provide a revenue number for Azure. Their entire cloud + server division accounts for 29% of overall revenue.

My bad, I was working from memory. I probably did an s/Microsoft/Amazon/ in my head.

Amazon disclosed in its quarterly earnings announcement that AWS revenue totaled $18.44 billion in the quarter [snip]. That works out to about 16% of Amazon’s total revenue.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/28/aws-earnings-q1-2022.html

Wow, I am really getting a lesson in how inaccurate our memory can be. Thanks for the info!

Only wanted to look up etymology at first https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/concision

hmm...

1. (somewhat rare) Conciseness, brevity or terseness.

2. A form of media censorship where discussions are limited in topics on the basis of broadcast time allotments.

[...]

huh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_(media_studies)

Also see points 4. and 5. in your first link above.

> I learn a tremendous amount from Twitter and vastly prefer it to needing to buy a book

Is this "learning"? You sure get entertained, quick-and-easy-to-digest facts, good for short attention spans, and 5-10 minutes later you go back to whatever else you were doing. Or hop on the next "educative" twitter thread or somesuch. But have you actually learned something?

If I ask you a week later to summarize your new insights, will you be able to? Will you even remember that you read about this? I sometimes find an old tab in a browser window that I had forgotten to close a while back. I skim through the contents, oh right! That thing! That was interesting! Turns out, a twitter thread, barely a week old, about something interesting, "I really learned something!", but I had already forgotten about it again, and if somebody had asked, I'd mainly have answered "Oh yeah there was this thing, don't remember the details, or the conclusion, or anything really, but I think I read something the other day", which is just hot air.

We should not treat such twitter threads as educational content. They are short-term entertainment, and good at that, but in essence not very different from a tiktok clip of some girl dancing on the beach.

If you really want to learn something, you need to invest time. By reading a book, by discussing with knowledgeable people, by trying something out yourself and/or trying to put your own words down. This takes energy, patience, time and can be frustrating at times. But twitter threads can't solve this for you.

It depends. There's a utility to accurate takes and bite-sized concepts.

> twitter thought-leaders

Real question. What even is a twitter thought-leader? An expert of twitter or an expert using twitter, or something else? If it’s an expert using twitter I would assume the way they use it would vary, so this must be something else?

The most famous got famously banned after a number of years of thought-leading.

And today's most famous is trying to buy twitter itself.

- "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."

For all the horrible UX that Twitter, is, one thing I really appreciate is that the thought-leader (or anyone, really) was forced to sit down and write Pascal's shorter letter; i.e. to take their time and think hard how to convey just the essential ideas they want to express, without fluff or narrative detours (which, if preferred, can be found in other longer form media)

But you can just write a thread of arbitrary length or take pictures of text.

You can, some people do it from time to time, but in general terms it is not a common practice in the platform, at least not among the people I follow.

Really? I like the Twitter writing style. It forces authors to cut to the chase and avoid fluff.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Counterpoint: it also rewards oversimplification and hyperbole.

It provides acres and acres of self-confirming thoughts, reminds me of:

> Hobbits delighted in such things, if they were accurate: they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.

You can go to twitter for confirmation on what you already think, and amusements, but things that go against your worldview are basically impossible to do in short tweets, so you begin to filter them into a self-reinforcing bubble. And the algorithm notices and reaffirms.

I find a Gish Gallop of misinformation is far more obvious on a platform that forces you to break up your points. It also provides more effective rebuttal on a point-by-point basis.

And the self-confirming problem is less about the 280char thing and more about allowing people to create filter bubbles, which is intrinsic to social media.

I don't see how that's the case. Misinformation thrives in low-info, high-throughput environments. You can't check everything you read, and Twitter will default to showing you all of the misinfo points in series but make you hunt for rebuttals. So most people don't see them. They see the zinger, they go "yeah that feels right", and before you know it they've incorporated it into their worldview.

Point-by-point rebuttals are extremely ineffective, because by the time you move on to the next point, they've already duct-taped the previous one back together. Nobody is keeping score, nobody goes "aha, I counted and he rebutted 7/9 of your points, so I don't believe you anymore!"

Do you know that Twitter still does not show link previews reliably? It does for big sites like Youtube, but if you link your dinky little self-hosted blog, with all the right OG meta tags, it's 50-50 whether Twitter decides to show the link preview image.

At this point, one must assume that Twitter will do nearly anything it can to disincentivize clicking out to a 3rd party site.

At least it's better than Instagram, which doesn't let you post clickable links at all in your posts.

I think ultimately you're getting to the _why_ of the equation - there is a big desire to keep you, the customer, within the app rather than let you abandon the feed. Going back from a note to scrolling through Twitter is easier than jumping back from your browser app to the Twitter app.

I haven't had issues with link previews on my own content, but that very well could be the case for other sites.

As a non twitter user but searching for my site a few times I've always wondered why that is and what I am doing wrong. I didn't know it is a general issue since I don't use it.

> Do you know that Twitter still does not show link previews reliably?

This seems like it might be a somewhat good thing, for privacy. User generated trackers could be included in topical tweets.

Is that image not just resolved once, while posting? I remember Apple solving it in a similar way for iMessage - the sender always generates the preview.

I've seen embedded videos auto play directly from external sites, in the app. Making the video fullscreen just expand what appears to be a frame, with ads and all present.

I would assume this is what they do. Places like Discord and Facebook will usually cache it on their CDN and display the image from their CDN.

Even if I direct link an image on discord, it essentially just rehosts that image on their CDN and displays it from there. Discord even allows that cached image to be hotlinked on any site. I have seen people use it like an image host for things like their "signature" on forums.

just as an FYI, someone made a tool specifically to preview what twitter was going to do for a card when you gave it a link:

https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

It seems like Twitter made a tool to specifically do this, not just an altruistic individual.

If one wants a blog with self-hosted comments, then there not so many options and those that exist are not particularly simple. For example, standalone Wordpress can do that, but setting it up and running with all relevant plugins requires skills that few authors have access to.

Comments is a _secondary_ component to the core of what I am talking about - long-form content. I can still post a link to my blog post on Twitter and have all the commentary from my audience without donating the content itself to Twitter.

What do you mean "donating the content"? Ad clicks? Subscription fee on your blog?

Is your blog making you money?

You can have your blog make you money if you want to, in whichever way you want to. "Donate content" is just that - when you write long-form on any platform that you have no direct control over, you're handing over the rights to said content. From Twitter's own ToS[0]:

> By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating).

[0]: https://twitter.com/en/tos

You lose exclusivity, but you do not lose all other rights. Nothing stops you from posting your content on 10 platforms, even if each one gets a license to your content.

Yes and no. You lose exclusivity, and the ability to manage where and how your content can be used. Once you post it on Twitter, you can see from the ToS that they can basically do what they want with it - plug it into ads, print on billboards, publish alongside other content producers, etc. This is a suboptimal position to put yourself into if you care about your content.

You still need to engage with the major social networks to build up traffic to your own domain name. Otherwise, posting on your blog is like talking to a brick wall. You can choose where you publish, but there's no escaping the leveraging of existing audiences.

My earlier comment is not contradictory to this statement. Indeed, you need to be on social media sites to reach a broader audience, but you can post links to your content that is external to those sites rather than giving it up wholesale within the network.

https://indieweb.org/POSSE is the term

I love ghost but it's always been pretty expensive for just a blog.

It seems like they've maybe shifted prices down a bit, it used to be more than $10/mo, and measured based on page views. Now they're really pushing their content creator angle.

Ghost is also just one way to do it - there are others that still allow you to have ownership of your content and the portability/domain connection that allows you, the writer, to manage your content in whatever shape you want.

What's wrong with linking to your blog? Twitter was once explained to me as short form blogging which I thought at the time was absurd but I kind of get it now.

The problem is when you try to be all things to all people you fail. I'd so much like someone like Elon Musk to take over Twitter. In the case of Musk I trust his judgement over the team running Twitter now. Can you imagine a group of two dozen people working a year trying to reinvent blogging? Knowing Twitter, sadly I can.

> What's wrong with linking to your blog?

Nothing, except that no one will click on your link.

i don't see that it's functionally any different than what was displayed in that gif. In both cases there's a card to the longer content that needs to be clicked on.

If your argument is that no-one will click on the card then twitter notes will fare no better because it's literally the same presentation.

You're right: it isn't functionally different. But the quantified user behaviour absolutely is.

I don't read thread, but I click on link to articles.

I believe it. Perhaps you are not representative of the general population.

you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your content.

And you never know when years of hard work will simply disappear.

I'm not even talking about being kicked out for expressing opinions that aren't trendy.

I once wrote for a large blog That just disappeared one day. It was after Google took over Blogger, and searching for help with the problem turned up hundreds of other people whose blogs disappeared. Some managed to get Blogger to admit it was a technical problem. A few for their content back. Most didn't.

If you're going to trust someone else's platform for your livelihood, make sure you have a Plan B ready to go at all times.

Medium has turned in such a unusable shitshow now, it should be a lesson for anybody who seriously considers using twitter as a writing platform.

It amazes me how Medium held the shrine for the BEST blogging platform and the best reading experience for a few years around 2015. Which didn't last long as it became one of the worst platform for writers and readers alike.

How can a company shit the bed so bad?!

Bait and switch, we see it every day. Acquire users with a good product, then squeeze the shit outta that without remorse.

Twitter itself used to be very usable. You used to be able to just open a link to a tweet, that was just rendered as HTML. Replies in thread below.

Now it loads the SPA, you get a spinner, 1/5 times the API fails to load the actual tweet data. If you're not logged in you get bombarded with signup popups. Cookie banners come up from time to time even if logged int. Instead of the replies to the tweet, you get other supposedly related tweets as in replies, you have to click "Show more replies" over and over to load more of the fucking thread you opened.

How does that follow? They are entirely different companies. Twitter will make its own mistakes. (Perhaps Musk-related, who knows?)

Same cofounders or some other strong relation, idr

I agree. However I doubt it'll be long lived. Twitter gives up on features all the time (fleets, I doubt spaces will be around in a year). They'll try this out and abandon it like most of their experiments.

I have the same hunch, to be honest. The core value proposition of Twitter, at least to me, is that it's short-form content - quick updates from the network that I care about. I don't go there to either write long-form content or consume long-form content directly (although I do get pointers to others' newsletter and blog pages).

My guess is that this is an attempt to replace long threads (1/n), but those have their own place and mechanics and I don't see how getting people to write Twitter Notes is in any way a 1:1 replacement or improvement for that.

Time will tell.

i think it's pretty easy to see the simplest motivation for this project: all the twitter users who post screenshots of the iOS notes app. they literally gave it the same name.

is this better than a screenshot of the notes app? IMHO the answer is a pretty obvious yes. how it compares to various other blogging platforms isn't super relevant. it's not a blog, it's a feature for people who are already on twitter and already using twitter to publish longer-form content in suboptimal ways.

I would generally agree, _except_ with the fact then this just defeats the entire point of Twitter - it might as well become the next Medium then. Which, let's be realistic, can be a strategy too - become a content publisher rather than an aggregator of links and short opinions. But then again, that's not why I am personally on Twitter. YMMV.

again, people already accomplish exactly this thing by posting screenshots of text. but that's less accessible, less searchable, and an overall poorer experience than letting people post actual text instead of screenshotting it first.

and if you don't personally use twitter, i'm not sure how qualified you are to judge whether or not something defeats the purpose of twitter.

I am an active Twitter user and I know what you mean by screenshots of walls of text. There is no endemic use of such modality across Twitter, with few exceptions.

I stand by the statement that Twitter moving into publishing long-form content puts it on the same pedestal with Medium and defeats the purpose of the platform. Which is OK - strategy evolves, and someone did the math that this is going to be more beneficial.

My other comments reflect my stance on their decision, but I am neither a product manager at Twitter, nor do I have any knowledge of the "whys" so take this with a boulder of salt.

I strongly agree with this comment in general.

One small nitpick: Twitter says there will not be a login wall for reading Notes[1]. "Additionally, Notes will have unique URLs that people can navigate to from outside of the Twitter platform, whether or not they are logged in to Twitter, and even if they do not have a Twitter account."

So that's nice and somewhat unexpected. However, I don't see any signs of an RSS feed, which is table stakes if you care about interoperability at all.

[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/notes

> not the best thing for those that write

I disagree. I think this is mostly meant to steal market share from other walled-gardens such as Medium. People who write on self-hosted blogs and the like will continue to do so.

If I were a writer I would post my work to make it easy for twitter users to read, but I would sprinkle the writing with enticing links back to my own hosted site.

People on internet seek engagement else why eve write a blog. Twitter is indisputably better for engagement.

> Recall the story with Medium - yes, you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your content.

Exactly and no Medium seems to be dying, I haven't read anything on that site in a few years since they added popups asking you to login before you can read.

Most blog content from companies, sad to say, are created to boost the authority of your domain in a SEO sense. I.e. if you got good content people search for and read your domain will appear higher. Posting to another platform, without a canonical link, is counterintuitive.

While it's all well and good to launch new features, I think Twitter should improve their existing service and I'm referring to low hanging fruits.

I don't understand the rationale behind cutting me off while I'm scrolling through Twitter simply because I'm not logged in. Twitter can still display Ads to me irrespective of whether I'm logged in or not. In fact cutting me off means I leave Twitter which means I don't see the Ads they're selling which in turn means less Ad money for them.

Even when logged in, Twitter will display the new message/note icon. When I click on it to read the notification, it turns out to be Twitter telling me to turn on notifications. Now normally, once you have read the message, the 'new' message/note icon is cleared. Instead Twitter displays it again almost immediately and this then goes on for the next few hours before they stop.

If they can't fix these simple things, why would someone want to read longer content on Twitter. They would still get cut off again as Twitter is doing for existing tweets

I think the message is simply that Twitter isn’t that into you.

Twitter wants people that log in, and turn on their notifications. You’d think you’re good enough for them, you can provide them ad revenue too, but you’re just not their type and they don’t find much happines with you. Ultimately it’s not you, it’s them.

Twitter doesn't care about a pair of anonynmous eyeballs not visiting their site anymore. It's not Google. Twitter's ad targeting depends on knowing what a user looks at, and how their network of connections/follows lines up with other user segments.

>> Twitter's ad targeting depends on knowing what a user looks at

But they can track which tweets are being clicked, the IP of the person and a whole bunch of things even when you're not logged in.

>> and how their network of connections/follows

But that's the problem right there. If you force people to create an account to read tweets, they might do so but they won't follow anybody or follow very few people and tweet quite infrequently. I just don't think it's feasible to expect a significant number of people (like say # of users on Facebook) to be tweeting regularly. But it's possible that I'm wrong.

> I just don't think it's feasible to expect a significant number of people (like say # of users on Facebook) to be tweeting regularly.

The probability that somebody with a Twitter account tweets is infinitely higher than that somebody without a Twitter account tweets.

Im pretty sure that the majority of twitter users has never posted a tweet, think 80/20 rule.

See this link, although its not exactly what im looking for: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-study-shows-that-2...

The fact this "login bullshit" appeared right about the time Apple started cracking down on privacy is very "sus" as the kids say.

> Twitter's ad targeting depends on knowing what a user looks at, and how their network of connections/follows lines up with other user segments.

I never understood this argument for tracking users, google and twitter already know what the user is looking at as they are serving them the content directly.

Why don't they base ads on what I'm looking at now? If I am looking at posts about dogs why not try to sell me something for my dog?

Instead they seem to want to know what I was doing last week so they can serve me ads based on that, but there is no point in showing me adverts for shoes this week as I already bought them last week!

My point is as some one who works in advertising it's more effective to target people on the content they consume today rather than base your targeting off of data you gathered last week, by then its too late.

its not fast but I just use nitter.net instead

Yea i heard of nitter, i guess it would be easy to write a ghostmonkey script to redirect all twitter links there.

depending on your browser there may already be an extension

https://github.com/SimonBrazell/nitter-redirect

I use LibRedirect: https://github.com/libredirect/LibRedirect

Wow this is amazing

> improve their existing service

> I don't understand the rationale behind cutting me off while I'm scrolling through Twitter simply because I'm not logged in

i mean, this really isn't a bug. this is working as intended, and i don't foresee them wanting to "fix" this anytime soon.

You can tell how far a service has “matured” into a big corp by this kind of behaviour. Big corps need to extract their pound of flesh from each visitor.

When you tweet you are kind of an unpaid twitter employee. But tweeting gives people enough benefit they don’t seem to mind.

Great point, an ad impression revenue is like $0.001, but content could be worth $1 or way more. Someone should write an article on the economics of these free labor models.

Ostensibly even these very HN comments are like that. But HN seems like it will always be well stewarded and open. Stackoverflow is better as it has a permissive license.

it's gotten so bad that I started an unofficial bug tracker of broken things and missing-per-platform features (like voice tweets that have been out for years on iOS but are still absent in Android)

https://github.com/simonsarris/Twitter-Bugs/issues

> Twitter can still display Ads to me irrespective of whether I'm logged in or not.

Twitter only shows ads to logged in users.

> I don't understand the rationale behind cutting me off while I'm scrolling through Twitter simply because I'm not logged in.

Precisely the reason why I switched over to nitter and have a rule that redirects me to it.

You have a rule? I have a firefox plugin that does that. What is this "rule" you speak of? :)

Basically using a redirector plugin with a rewrite rule for twitter URL's to be translated to nitter.

Over the months I accumulated quite a few little, useful rules. (Like stripping out the highlight text thingie that google "helpfully" adds when clicking on search results.) I can post a few once I get home.

I like to do as much as I can with as few plugins as possible, which is why I don't have a dedicated plugin for that.

I am using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/ocgpenf...

And added the following rule:

Example URL: https://twitter.com/user/status/123456789

Include Pattern: https://twitter.com/(.*)

Redirect to: https://nitter.net/$1

Pattern type: Regular expression

You can use nitter and bookmarks to get most of the usefulness out of twitter.

I welcome this. I always hated the long multi-tweet essays and have often just given up on reading them, especially when I'm not logged in I can't even make it to the end before twitter blocks me from scrolling further.

As of now it doesn't look like you can reply to a note with another note? That might go a long way for improving debate and discussion.

Don’t celebrate it yet, threads have very high click through rate, I really doubt that these are going to replace threads because they won’t dare to touch “the algorithm” after they see the decrease in interactions

I still won't bother. No matter how fast of a computer you use, Twitter is annoyingly slow to load and seems to leak memory if you scroll too far.

My most despised (feature) of Twitter on desktop is that purposeful delay to alerts, where it blinks for a splitsecond and then the little colored alert icon disappears for a solid 3 to 5 seconds only to appear again this time correctly and permanently

It is just so annoying that they would do such a thing, I am sure that they have a/b tested it, I don't care it drives me insane, just make it work properly tho I am sure that they have also taken onto account people like me whom despise it, yet not enough to leave the platform

Just an overall worsening of user experience

I always thought this is a bug!

You give them away too much credit for intent and competence.

They probably have a fast alert based on some cache, and a real alert that takes longer to fetch the real data.

Try nitter.net, an alternate Twitter front-end that is much less gimmicky and uses dramatically less resources with fewer UI glitches, while also doing a better job of presenting 'threads' of tweets.

> I always hated the long multi-tweet essays

I'm very new to twitter but I love them because feedback can be given on a (near) per sentence basis.

You’d have loved inline quoting on Usenet.

We can cite & quote pieces of Notes too. But it wont create anywhere near the interesting forms of engagement an already decomposed thread has.

In a thread there are ready made pieces of the thread to talk about. Each piece of the thread has it's own likes. Discussions can start around any piece & we know they're talking about the same general area.

Notes feels like a severe & critical downgrade, a regression to a pre-connected, earlier, less capable form. Putting different pieces of information/content into their own places, giving each their own url, giving each their own engagement points: that has been why Twitter's been so remarkably unlike anything else. Ideas have to be broken down, and that constraint has been what's made Twitter so powerful & engageable as a medium.

Everyone is connected, but they are connected to nothing. We don't need more highly accessible trash.

I was there. Someone should've made a nice, readable interface for it.

Actually, Usenet clients (like slrn) were the most usable and efficient discussion software I ever came across.

I still use a few forums that allow you to quote other messages/parts of it.

Funny how I used to be a fan of the branching structure of reddit threads, but now went on to prefer the list of traditional forums with quoting more.

That's the problem; it's like a book where the footnotes come to outweigh the actual text.

How so? Threaded tweets are given priority over the comments and will show sorting my first in a thread chain. You have to purposely scroll past the thread to see such footnotes.

Or do you mean you hate how comments and retweets are more important than the thread itself? In that case that, to me, is just an internet thing. I got one enjoy comments about the material more than the material it self.

I never figured out how to see the comments on a tweet which was part of a thread, it seemed to just push all the comments down below the thread no matter which tweet I had selected.

you have to select the tweet, then scroll down past the rest of the thread to see replies to that specific tweet. then go back and load next tweet and do the same.

the scrolling down in a long thread is maddening

One of the advantages of the tweet thread is others can embed one of the tweets elsewhere. I've seen this done often on news sites. This seems to compartmentalize what you're writing, which I think will be unappealing for 'big names' on Twitter.

I just tried reading some of the things written by Twitter's test authors. I immediately missed the old format. For one, the old format forces succinct points. There isn't any fluff in a Twitter thread. First four paragraphs in the sample I read:

> Hello. Hi. Do you have a moment to talk about porgs?

> Yes. Porgs, the cute things seen in Star Wars Episodes VII and VIII.

> These.

> (Image of porg)

> Many people might look at this face and see an adorable CGI workaround for the puffins on Skellig Michael, aka Ahch-To. I see a cute, charming, complete menace to the galaxy’s ecology as we know it.

A Twitter thread would have started out with something like: "Porgs, the adorable CGI workaround for puffins, are a complete menace to the galaxy's ecology as we know it."

So much more direct and to the point. Sometimes, less is more.

I think it's likelier that your first four quoted lines would have been compressed into a single tweet, including an image, followed by the second one.

> There isn't any fluff in a Twitter thread.

That's optimistic. It's really common to see people drag out a very simple story or point over dozens of tweets.

> For one, the old format forces succinct points.

Succinct points on Twitter can often feel like a clickbait/ragebait headline that's cynically designed to elicit "engagement" from as wide of an audience as possible. There is no guardrail protecting against clout chasers who have the skill to rile up online crowds and make a name for themselves.

At the scale that Twitter operates in, I think we can all identify some pretty awful things that have happened because of the above.

Yeah, part of Twitter's rise to popularity was that it was the response to noisy long-form content that blogs were spamming the internet with.

Blogs are relatively rare now but it seems Twitter is coming full circle to enable blog-like content, in response to Medium and others it seems.

Also, I really like being able to read a thread of comments on a specific tweet as part of a thread. You would need to skim all comments otherwise.

Funny, because your first example is _exactly_ what twitter threads are! "Hook -> explanation -> sell" is a pretty developed marketing technique on twitter and it's everywhere to the point where people who don't even have anything to sell are using it.

Well, the first 3 links from the twitter annoucement gives a "page not found". Seems that they avoided starting with the right foot.

Works for me after a page reload.

Got the same. Classic Twitter execution, nothing ever changes.

Pretty much every take I have on this is covered by the discourse here about walled gardens, but I do have two other points of concern: Indexability and SEO.

When you want to view certain content on Twitter, you need to log in. If you don't want to, you're forbidden from viewing that content. If that happens here, I worry that the accessibility of long-form, blog-style content production will lead to more users either being onboarded to Twitter for what should be a simple matter of viewing an HTML + CSS page or otherwise missing out on content that could be valuable to them (e.g. news from prominent personalities, interviews with professionals, press releases from companies, etc.)

My second concern is with SEO. If this really takes off, I worry that a first page of search results that once would have contained articles from a number of separate blogs will become dominated by a single, homogenous site. Perhaps grouping results in the way that Google does could help with that, but I'd rather avoid needing to append "-site:twitter.com" to my query just to be able to find content that I can read without being tracked.

As a whole, I'm not a fan. This strikes me as another move by a social media giant to become "the internet" in the eyes of some people. Maybe that's appealing to the masses, but it's dystopian in my eyes.

Facebook groups and twitter has been probably the worst things to happen to preservation of our knowledge.

Discord as well. For instance the Scala community moved from gitter to discord. I couldn’t disagree more with that decision.

Well, all the links to notes just result in "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else." for me. I know it says available in "most countries" but I'm right here in California. Is it not available in Twitter's home country?

I had the same thing happen to me. Page worked after refresh though.

That seems to be an issue in general for Twitter, particularly when logged out. It often doesn't load on the first go around and you have to refresh to see the content.

No dice for me in Europe. I can refresh as often as I want, it keeps saying “Page not found.”

So many web developers at Twitter and they still can't fix SSR

Disabling Brave Shields rectified this for me.

I love that the mobile website forces me to use the app and now then you click a Note in the app it opens it in the browser.

Yeah, this was a huge benefit of threads for me! They don't break me out of twitter flow into some other website. On top of this they have barely distinguished notes from links (despite owning the platform!)

That's the only real reason threads are so successful imo. APP lock-in is an extremely toxic dark pattern and Twitter knows it.

Even better, if you've blocked the built-in browser in the app (via the app's settings) and you try to open a Note there, nothing happens, not even a message saying it can't be opened.

In the GIF, they display that the tool is available under twitter.com/write (which, obviously wouldn't be public yet unless I was invited to participate, which I wasn't). If you go there now, there is a Twitter account there already (a private "Writers Group"). Will that Twitter account disappear now with this change?

Same thing for some of the other links, which they do twitter.com/i/bookmarks for example, instead of twitter.com/bookmarks.

I know this because at one point it was broken in the UI and one of the side links went to a profile instead.

This could have been avoided if twitter had distinct URL schemes for user accounts versus site functions (like how mastodon has /@user versus /path), or it could have been avoided if they reserved enough words early on to avoid this collision. Now I wonder how they would reclaim the paths that were parked by early users. Pay these users to rename their accounts, perhaps?

Why would they pay users for this? They can just force a rename and take the path if they need it. Their house, their rules.

I've lost track of how many times i've loaded this guy's profile by mistake:

https://twitter.com/advanced_search

This is like one of those "every animal shape evolves to crab eventually" but for social networks.

Oh wow, this is interesting. I've been wanting this to exist for years. It seemed like such an obvious thing to do given the workarounds people have, from screenshotting blobs of text to tweetstorms to getting a Medium account just so they'd have a place to put things that were longer than a tweet.

I'm excited to see how it goes! I'm personally not sure how much I'll use it just because I've already adapted to threads as a medium. Looking back at my tweets, I think it was 2018 when I first wrote something that started in my head as a series of tweets, with the specific rhythms and frequent use of images that goes with it: https://mobile.twitter.com/williampietri/status/101093172122...

But I expect it will be good for quite a lot of people as a quick way to publish something, and maybe I'll come around in time.

You can tell the video is a mockup because it's missing a bunch of multi-second load times.

In my experience, most people on twitter won't click to read long form content if it opens in a separate view. They won't read past few tweets either. I believe most twitter users don't want to read beyond 280 characters. A thread provides them an opportunity to comment on any 280 characters section they have actually read.

They should have provided similar interface to typefully to write long form tweet and a button to view all tweets as an article like threader app while keeping the same UX/UI with little changes.

>They won't read past few tweets either

I believe this is because twitter is actively hostile to reading long threads. They'll truncate the middle of a thread, or show "load more tweets" for replies — and then they'll only load just a few more tweets. Want to keep reading? Load a few more tweets at a time. It's miserable.

Yeah, a better UX would be to just make long threads more readable (compact tweets with smaller icons).

I think people actually want to read longer form content on Twitter, just look at how often threads appear under the viral tweets topic! It's more fundamentally a twitter problem than a user attention span problem in my opinion.

Is it "Twitter Write" or "Twitter Notes"? The branding is already confusing, and it hasn't even launched yet.

Amusingly, they’re calling it “Notes” and specifically NOT “Twitter Notes”. Which is not going to go well for them, judging by this submission title.

I'm by no means a UI/UX expert but the article UI is no good in my opinion. I can't really focus on the paragraphs for more than a couple seconds without effort before my eyes drift over to the margins (could be just me though). Interested to see where this will go!

I agree, it looks terrible and is really hard to read. Maybe it's the line spacing?

Well I am a UI/UX expert, and it's a pretty bad interface for reading. The main issue is the spacing after paragraphs. It's large enough to separate the main blocks of the article from each other almost as much as from other elements on the page. The central narrative content blocks don't "hang together" so your eye wanders at the end of each paragraph. They need to spend some time understanding the Gestalt principle of proximity: https://www.usertesting.com/resources/topics/gestalt-princip...

A lot of takes wrt walled gardens here and this vs threads, to which I could add my 2 cents. Facebook used to have its own things called Notes which was basically the same thing to this (longer format writing attached to your profile). In the years leading up to me launching my blog/personal website, I wrote about a half dozen of these Notes (this was like a decade ago, I was in my early 20s). It was a pretty good 'on ramp' to writing down longer sets of thoughts to share with people, much lower friction that launching a blog.

I doubt this is going to serve the same purpose for many people, but it might. Yes it is a walled garden, but I don't think it's meant as a replacement to a personal blog or Medium account (though tbh id much prefer this to Medium). I also have no doubt this will co-exist with Twitter threads, with the two having different strengths and weaknesses.

So, as someone who thinks Twitter is flawed but also very usable in a way that makes it quite good, I think it's a nice addition! We'll see if it survives - I kind of hope it does.

I have this theory that, the bigger a company is the harder it is to pivot and change things. The reason is simple: it could mean killing your own business.

With that in mind, how can a big company innovate on what they have? I believe there's two ways:

1. Keep your tool, but change the users

2. Keep your users, but change the tool

I like to sort every new company's announcement as a one of these types of innovation.

Today twitter decided to do the second: keep the users, but introduce a new tool: blogging. Interestingly, any social network companies, be it Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. can introduce these tools, and as such they can sometimes overlap. For now, twitter owns the public space, and facebook owns the "friends, neighbors, etc." space. But there's no reason that twitter couldn't create a twitter for your friends only. Facebook did try to do "facebook for the public space" but they integrated it too hard inside of the main tool instead of making it an extra tool on the side.

An example of 1 is workplace: facebook but for work.

This is a pretty well-known theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

Now that Twitter have decided the solution to long form content is a link off the main thread hopefully more creators will feel more comfortable to instead link to their own blog rather then to "Notes". This could be a very positive thing for creators to gain back more control over their brand and content.

They will probably make Notes seamless and cool inside the twitter app and external links slow and clumsy.

Alternative headline: After 12 years, Twitter finally decides to do something with Posterous

Came here to say this. I really, really liked Posterous.

Even though I have not "posted" to it in years, I still maintain my https://posthaven.com/ account.

This is terrible, the entire point of Twitter is that each tweet is short and easy to digest. The constraints forced authors to cut out all fluff. They’re diluting the one thing about their platform that made it special.

Aside, why is this shared in a very very long weird GIF and not a video. (can't pause/seek)

I was curious about this too and thought it must be a massive GIF. However it's not actually a GIF, it's an MP4 video[1], I wonder why it's mislabelled as a GIF.

[1]: https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/FV3mdpEXoAIrkA1.mp4

Calling videos without an audio track “gifs” has been done for years now.

Or, more precisely, crippled video players where you can't even rewind.

Yep. Imgur's GIFV [0] from 2014 is the earliest mainstream example I know of.

In the cultural consciousness, a "GIF" represents a particular medium and form factor, which has become decoupled from its namesake file format to deliver the same experience more efficiently.

[0] https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/

My favorite solution to this is to use GIF for the 90s encoding scheme and gif for this newer lax meaning.

Then while we’re at it, settle the pronunciation debate by picking a different one for each.

ah, yes, I see, it's the no-audio that made it a 'GIF'. Fair enough. But annoying because it automatically removes seek and pause options if it assumes it's a GIF. doh.

When things like these happen, a rehash of ancient internet idea presented as new again, makes me feel very sad, like the internet is old and dying or sth. I understand it's all about UX etc now , but i wish twitter's competitors did not just copy but instead tried to make their audience a little bit smarter. If the UX is not dumb-proof, you might not get hordes of users, but at least the ones who are there will have a bit of brains.

Long ago I thought Twitter was interesting, though at the moment I'm unable to precisely state why I thought so. I think it was perhaps the simplicity.

Twitter seemed feature-complete a long time ago. Handle scaling problems and the odd bugfixes, and you're good.

Sometimes I wonder what all their many thousands of engineers do all day.

(I understand they probably still need plenty of non-engineers to handle legal/compliance requirements etc of different countries.)

> A small group of writers are helping us test Notes. They can be read on and off Twitter, by people in most countries

I guess I'll be the one to ask. Why would you block certain countries from reading notes, but not from viewing tweets?

Also, I thought Twitter wasn't making any major product changes with the looming Musk takeover. Can we assume this means Musk is backing out of the deal?

The board recently endorsed his offer. If he backs down now it would look very bad on him (though with his personality maybe he wouldn't care).

Oh my, please at least remove us from the UX context of Tweets. The cognitive load required to read this is entirely too high - my mind is looking for the 'chunks' of tweets, delineated by the retweet/like/etc menus. And the two side bars are entirely too distracting for what is supposedly a more focused and long form read.

Overall though, interesting concept

Interestingly enough, Notes are editable (as seen by the "edited" tag on https://twitter.com/i/notes/1539613004370788352). Might be an indicator of how editing will work if/when it trickles down to normal tweets, too.

I noticed this too and thought it was the best part of the announcement. I don't personally want to write notes on Twitter, but I'm eager to be able to fix my typos in tweets!

interesting how Twitter is evolving from a 140-char microblog platform into a mishmash of different vaguely related and tenuously connected services/features:

    - main timeline
    - direct messages
    - Spaces (audio chatrooms)
    - Communities (sub-timelines)
    - Newsletters (this still exists? will it, if Notes gains traction?)
    - and now Notes

and probably more I forgot. I wonder if they'll eventually go full-circle and add a Podcasts feature. but I just use Twitter for its core timeline feature and rarely ever engage with the rest of it. I'm not sure if Notes looks like a necessarily appealing place to post longer-form content as opposed to Substack, Medium, etc.

Every walled garden needs to plant their own flowers. It's an unfortunate side effect of profit motive and keeping people on the platform rather than integrations and openness.

Not necessarily just the company’s profit motive. Individual careers require this sort of stuff to be done.

exactly—why is Newsletters still a thing if they're working on Notes now? shouldn't those two be one and the same?

walled gardens planting their own flowers is unsurprising at this point, but when one goes from planting its own flowers to planting competing plants in the same space...

Agree, but I don't think it necessarily has to be that way.

All of these social sites have a core competency/use case, but once they start tacking on features as an effect of the profit motive, it starts to dilute the experience.

Working on my own site and planning to keep it strictly focused on the core value prop.

You forgot porn, how much of their revenue is derived from adult content creators?

Ha. This is so dumb. People can already easily link a Medium page / github gist / whatever. The reason people write threads is that people don't like to click links that get them out of the Twitter flow. Many reasons for this, but basically it's friction and Twitter is very flaky with keeping your position within the timeline (at least on Android).

Keeping it in app should be a step forward, but a clickable "read more" that expand *within the timeline* (same way it works for threads within the timeline, though unfortunately not within list) is the only thing that will kill threads.

Now they just need to make the reading experience of these notes not abysmal. Remove the dreaded "Who To Follow" and "Trending" sidebars, and collapse the left pane.

Right now, less than 1/3rd of the screen is for representing the writing.

Interesting feature, looks like it may be an alternative to writing big long tweet threads all in one go with a "@threadreaderapp unroll" tweet at the end.

The main difference with this seems to be, you can't link to or highlight individual sections within the Note, if quote tweeting or replying. Perhaps this is a good thing, to prevent parts of what's written being too easily taken out of context.

One downside may be that the entire Note would be targeted for terms of service violations, should they occur. At present, if a tweet in a multi-tweet thread breaks the rules, it can be excised without affecting the rest of what's written.

I do wonder how this plays with the acquisition. IIRC, one of the merge agreement was for Twitter to avoid drastic changes that could impact the value of the company - this seems pretty big to me.

Text is so cheap to store and distribute, yet they can monetize so well. Much cheaper than images, or video.

Adding a way to get more content in their distribution network makes complete business sense. (whether it's good for the internet as a whole is another discussion; personally I prefer the weird internet of the early 2000s)

Wonder why the margins are so tough for a company like twitter. Seems like they should be able to make money hand over fist with their existing product. 0 innovation in years, should be low maintenance.

https://twitter.com/i/notes/1539613004370788352

https://twitter.com/i/notes/1535469588846092288

https://twitter.com/i/notes/1534297736597618689

Any other similar platform (weibo, facebook, G+) just allows the post/tweet to be long and editable.

It’s a proven concept. It leads to many people sharing their thoughts in a more readable way than a thread of tweets, and has a lower barrier than having a blog.

What I see here feels overspec’d and convoluted, as if hundreds of people had to have a say on what could be a very simple and singular product.

I don't use Twitter because of its character limit on posts, trolls, spammers, ridiculous censorship, privacy-invasive phone number verification, and laughable customer support service. Twitter used to be cool. But now it's become a joke that I avoid like the plague. I feel so much better because of that.

I guess it makes sense that any micro blog is bound to evolve to have "regular blog" features and the other way around too.

The only thing I don't get is why they didn't try this many years ago. I'm guessing because they might've thought it would break the "core conceit" and the aesthetic and unique differentiator, but in practice everyone has always already been using absurd, unreadable and/or inconvenient workarounds to accomplish this.

I have no basis for this other than human insight, but I suspect it didn't happen sooner because Jack didn't want to compete with Ev. It makes sense too if you believe that the internet is an ecosystem and you want to support complimentary products in yours rather than roll your own.

Cant see any of the notes because it wants me to login. As a third party why would I want to post on a platform that hides my content from every one that isn't in your walled garden?

Why not just write on my wordpress blog and then post that on twitter like I have always been doing? I get the twitter audience and the non twitter audience.

Just like all twitter stuff, is this demo only for iOS?

edit: not working for me on Android/web, but could be geo-locked since I am in Brazil.

I'm getting "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else." for every note that I click on.

I’m not so sure this works with how I use twitter. My typical twitter use is when I’m on a 10 minute ride on the subway, I don’t want longform writing in this context. If I see a link to something interesting I’ll open a tab in safari for later reading, but I’m not gonna move away from my timeline just to read your thoughts

This is the most painfully obvious feature they could have added to the product. Twitter is a massive distribution network with a heavily constrained format to distribute. Allowing more blog-like content formats to latch into the same established distribution network (instead of hacky threads which suck) is a no brainer.

I get why they have been working on this (ppl's thread posting out of control) but making longform posts content live on / inside the platform reaks of Facebook walled garden, or Medium etc. Should be encouraging ppl to have blogs or post on urls and just link to them. I dunno, it's annoying direction.

Twitter should be encouraging my grandma to leave twitter and go to random websites to view long tweets?

I have a feeling that one aspect of it is that with Musk potentially coming on board, they realized that the pathetic absence of new features is going to have high visibility drawn to it soon.

Just an opinion.

That ship has sailed unfortunately. Most people are going to post in walled gardens--and, if Twitter is that walled garden, I'd much prefer they encourage longer form posting than long threads.

Twitlonger has been around for ages and is pretty nice to use. Writers seem to prefer just making threads because users will read them there. Every time you add a link or some other barrier in front of your content, you are reducing your readership.

Anything to end the tyranny of the 280 char hot take.

Longer tweets turning into threads isn't any better, because the tweets are still written such that each one can be pulled out and quoted/retweeted. So instead of greater exposition, nuance, you get a series of hot takes compartmentalized into their own tweet.

It’s weird seeing Twitter build this after they acquired and shut down Posterous almost a decade ago.

What’s old is new again.

Idea is good however implementation is horrible specially on desktop web. The narrow width of the content makes it hard to read, not to mention all the distractions on left and right side of the page. They should make the notes full screen without distractions if they want people to read them.

I can see the logic behind the narrow presentation. If most people use this on pocket computers, the writing will likely be tailored to that format e.g. with generally shorter paragraphs so as not to tower. Keeping the presentation consistent might help with readability.

For an example of what Twitter might be trying to avoid, look no further than this website, which has driven me to inject `.comment { max-width: 70ch; }`, among other things.

It's amazing that the micro-blogging platform is just becoming more like every other blogging platform

I don't know, in times when account suspensions and/or removals for political reasons seem progressively more frequent (and arbitrary), it doesn't seem like a great idea to entrust the longer writings to them as well... It seems wiser to maintain separate blogs.

100% agree with you, but as long as they have an API you can access, you can always syndicate your content to Twitter.

Here's an example for my potato.horse site connected to https://twitter.com/yay_psd:

https://github.com/paprikka/yay.psd/blob/main/data/twitter/p...

Most of my users are come from the site and Reddit, but it's one of those things you just set up and forget, so it was worth the hassle.

Yes but simply linking makes it more difficult to automatically censor content. Aside from the problem of redundancy (sorry, old school here, redundancy must have a reeeally good reason for me), as I have already mentioned, this would get your readers used to reading you ONLY on twitter, while by linking to an external blog your readers will already be used to read you elsewhere, in case your account suddenly disappears.

Of course I imagine that in addition to the intent to expand outward control (and let's call it aggressive "moderation"? the infamous dangerous "unfettered conversations" come back to mind ;)) of content as an alternative to blogs, there is also the intent to offer it as an alternative to long threads, which to me, however, does not seem like a good idea as well, because it is known that the average reader is more likely to read in chunks rather than deal with long text (as others have already said). Not to mention that with threads you can reply point by point, to individual tweets, which as I see it is smoother and neater.

Maybe I'm biased (that's why I started out with "I don't know") but I see it as more of a political move than a functional one, that's all. And by the way, if one really doesn't want to think about censorial and narrative control intentions, in the least worst case scenario to me it looks like a push toward increasing the already troubling monopoly of a few giants on content, data, attention, etc.

Twitter wants to introduce everything without solving fundamental distribution problems. The constraint writing is what is powerful about Twitter but now also wants to have a voice and blogs. They really need to be bought out and injected with intelligence

Twitter got where it is cause the character limit helped people overcome writer’s block.

I think that the effect of this feature is that some people will start writing longer articles, never to finish them. So all in all less people tweeting. And that’s a good thing :-)

Good thing I never did much with Revue--which this is replacing if I understood the account's bio right--after Twitter bought it. I'm sure all the portability will vanish in the name of "better integration" or some other weak CEO-speak.

Honestly probably too little too late. How they didn't try to have a long form product to compete with Substack (especially) and Medium is astonishing. I've long held that Twitter engineers, etc seem disconnected from their own user base.

Too little too late? If they do a better job than substack or medium they can probably take marketshare. Instead of innovating on it they can emulate the effective products and build on top of it.

It's like saying instagram's videos were too late to tik tok. It effectively stopped the hemorrhaging and kept market share.

Not really comparable at all. Instagram already had videos and stories. Twitter has had no form of long form at all. Even still Instagram user growth is in the tank. Based on this product demo in the gif, it won't be competing with Substack or Medium anytime soon.

I definitely will need a "Jump to the recipe" button for Twitter notes.

You've found an interesting topic and decided to use that to practice your medium-long form writing - but have you actually discovered anything unique worth discussing?

I've just tested this by clicking on one of the notes in the Twitter app: it opens up an ugly webview which I'm not logged into... and it's suggesting to download and use the app for a better experience (I was already on the app!).

I hope they keep it at 280. The value of Twitter is that it has limits, it keeps things focused and isn't trying to be everything for everyone. If someone needs to write a diatribe they can post a link to a blog.

https://twitter.com/Corey5771/status/1539645330328657920?s=2...

It seems that self hosted blogs are out with this new Twitter Notes feature, I can even see that Medium is pretty much in trouble here as well.

Is there any point to starting a self hosted blog now that this exists for non technical people?

> Is there any point to starting a self hosted blog now that this exists for non technical people?

Yep, personal brand & audience ownership & control

Adding on — if you are building an audience you should be investing in platform diversification and alternative ways to reach otherwise you are a ranking or feature whim change away losing access.

You can own the farm, or be a share cropper on someone elses farm.

For starters, your content will not vanish when Twitter inevitably dies or decides to suddenly kill this feature.

Or when they suspend you for no reason...

If this ends the thread unrolling apps and posts that are clickbait headlines for 1/x to continue it’ll be good as a user but probably bad for Twitter’s engagement volume.

Analytics, design, freedom of speech, durability, interoperability, privacy, different writing UI, monetisation, independence, possibly domain management and surely much much more.

It's a nice feature to finally have but I wouldn't undercut the decades of work that entire teams have devoted to blogging tools. Network effects aren't that powerful, plus twitter's network effects aren't even all that strong in all domains

I think self-hosted blogs and Medium (and Substack) are in as much danger from Twitter Notes as Instagram stories were from Fleets.

The text-to-viewport-height ratio of this page on desktop is so low it's just astonishing.

I can't imagine many people will click on a tweet to read it. If you're going to make me click, just link to a real website?

or, "As a part of our strategy review, we've decided to test Clickbait articles, including the outraged and counter-outraged responses you've come to know and love. All on one platform!!!" ...

Any hyperlink capability between notes? That could be pretty fascinating.

They should definitely be using the full width of screen for longer form "notes." I personally would also prefer a modal as opposed to a completely different page.

Honestly, no.

I find HN comments practically unreadable because of the lack of wrapping. The default render width of a tweet is perfectly reasonable. Maybe you could extend it out to the width of a substack or medium post.

But there's nothing natural about stretching a sentence out across 800 horizontal characters. It's just miserable on a good monitor.

Why not use https://brianlovin.com/hn/31838049 ?

I guess I should have just said wider, not necessarily full width. The current experience is incredibly narrow and bad on desktop.

Thanks, no.

If needed I can resize my FullHD browser window to the half-width.

If someone decided what I can' have more than N characters on the line - it doesn't matter if I have a FullHD, UWXHDA or whatever monitor - I just CAN'T do anything (aside of Ctrl+A, CTrl+C, Ctrl+V in Notepad/gedit/whatever).

Hopefully this is the death of the practice of posting long text on Twitter as an image with no alt text. I can't believe it took Twitter this long.

They iterated on long-form UI/UX and what they came up with is just a link to a separate post that doesn't provide any additional integration?

Very odd of them to launch this without support in apps. The mobile view doesn't even load for me, just says that the content can't be found.

Apparently 7500 employees is not enough to implement a basic cross platform blog viewer.

Notes should have the back button you get when you use a thread. First time I've used browser back button on twitter in a while.

The first note I read on Twitter was about the ecological impact of porgs on the Galactic Empire.

I feel like I will remember that for a long time.

So much margin on either side of the mobile layout. I can read like 3 words on a line. Why do we need so much white space!?

Hopefully this will mean the end of threads especially the ones with the first teaser / void of any content tweet.

Eh...finally? Like 10 years after its competitor weibo.com? Says a lot about the culture of Twitter.

Me never having heard of weibo says a lot about Twitter's success...

It's Chinese company, so naturally few people in the west heard about it. It does not mean that Twitter does a better job in product iteration compared to weibo, though.

I'm pretty sure it has been a limitation by design, and not a technical challenge they needed to solve.

When I click on any of these notes, I just get

> Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.

The immediate vibe I got was; Twitter is channeling LiveJournal to keep users on Twitter

Will Twitter simply evolve into allowing users to post anything Facebook-style?

ITT: Feedback from people who don't like Twitter, or don't use Twitter.

So glad to see Twitter finally innovate its way to becoming Livejournal!

> Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.

Nice! A Medium-like UI is more readable than a "tweet storm".

Apparently the Twitter app (android) doesn't support them. Nice.

The desktop web version also doesn't seem to support it for me. Just shows me "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else."

Welcome back blogger ! I was getting tired of only seeing headlines

Personal blogs were invented for exactly this purpose.

Looks like Medium 2.0

How to see this feature. I don't see Twitter Notes/Write in my sidebar.

It's currently in Alpha. All users can't write now. And one cannot even view the notes outside of certain regions.

there is a great potential.

isnt this like tumblr?

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