Comment by sumy23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sumy23 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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