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Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

- "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.

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.

“Let me explain”

No thanks.

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

> 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.

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!"

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