Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgs_sgd | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com