Stop Writing Twitter Threads
pierre.equoy.fr
pierre.equoy.fr
People write Twitter threads because Twitter gives them distribution for what they want to say.
Sure, it may not be the perfect soapbox for what you want to say. But if you write something insightful, a zillion people may see it as opposed to your mom and best friend who read it on your blog.
If you write solely for vanity than this is great, a zillion is better than 10 so you can feel important.
The problem is that Twitter threads are incredibly ephemeral and also written, inherent to the nature of the platform, to be more engaging than informing.
I would rather a few hundred people, or even a few dozen, carefully read and consider what I've written rather than a "zillion" mindlessly click on some basically contently stream of "sounds good" blips.
Of course I've basically left twitter because the ego boost from engagement was not sufficiently worth the pressure the platform puts on your writing to eventually become pure engagement obsessed drivel, devolving ultimately into the infamous "shit post".
I've had plenty of people I really respect I've met on Twitter and they go only one of two paths in the long run: increasingly writing meaningless content for the ego-driven thrill of likes until they become an intellectual parody of themselves or they leave Twitter baring occasional updates.
There is no Twitter equivalent to a post or essay you've spent multiple days writing, tweaking, reworking and then finally publishing. I've never started a single essay with "a thread 1/?".
Twitter abhors subtly and nuance. I have nearly 10k followers, the highest upvoted tweets I've made are always the most polemical, flippant statements I make. Anything nuanced or remotely complex is ignored. Any statement that makes people a little uncomfortable or is off brand will lose followers. Twitter encourages bad writing and bad thinking.
And people don't read tweets as deeply as other content. It is extremely rare to see engagement on a tweet that is more than a few days old, yet blog posts I've written years ago get frequent revisits and rereads. I've had classes and organizations make my posts required reading, I've never heard of that happening with a twitter thread.
I write because I want to share my thoughts. Sometimes I want to persuade people, and sometimes I just want to share interesting tidbits. I think it is self evident that people who want to share their ideas publicly would rather have their work seen by more people than fewer people. It seems like the optimal solution is to write twitter threads but also link to one's own blog.
I don't think this is self-evident at all. For one thing, it's not the amount of people who see something that's important for spreading ideas, it's who they are and how much they engage with it. For another thing, the medium really is the message, and Twitter is a truly terrible place to present meaningful, long form content. Linking to one's own blog is something, but it doesn't get around those problems, or hasn't seemed to in my experience.
This is my own opinion, and nothing more than that. It's why I'm not on Twitter. If you see it differently, it makes sense that you are.
I don't disagree with your observation that the quality of who receives your ideas and how they engage with it is critical for ideas to spread. I would add on to this by asserting that having more people exposed to the content itself makes encountering such valuable reads much more likely and frequent.
>"Twitter is a truly terrible place to present meaningful, long form content"
Agreed, but up to a certain point. I contend that is a valuable place to introduce people to, or otherwise lead them to, a more appropriate venue for long form content. For example, I learned about the work of Lyn Alden through a Twitter thread someone linked, and now I follow her on her website. I am fairly confident that if someone had just linked me one of her long form essays, I would not have been intrigued enough to explore her work. I also believe that the internet has ruined our attention spans and Twitter threads can act as a hook because each tweet is much more digestible than trying to dive into an essay right away. The medium is the message, but set and setting matters as well.
I have a fairly frequented blog in my native language (lower to higher thousands readers per post, occasionally over ten thousand) and I recently deleted both my Facebook (2019) and Twitter (2022) accounts with 7000 and 5000 followers respectively.
Readership declined a bit, but not drastically. Quality of audience improved significantly. All the people with attention span of a goldfish stayed back on the social networks and no longer torment me by reading just the first paragraph of a longish essay and constructing all sorts of strawman counterarguments from it, then screaming about them into a megaphone.
Bigger audience is not necessarily better and I am happy to have got rid of my social network accounts. They do deform your thinking, no mistake about it, towards more shallowness.
Many of the people I follow have no problem embracing both dynamics: They write long-form blog posts, then use Twitter to add up-to-date nuance or link to the blog post in relevant discussions.
Twitter and Blogs aren't actually competing to replace each other. They're different platforms with different use cases and different formats. Trying to equate them or declare one better than the other misses the point.
I also would point out that if Twitter search wasn't garbage, the linking back to old tweets and threads would be even more common as people made "threads of threads". I never got why Twitter never put more focus on searching past tweets given that people searching for things is the best signal of what they actually care about and can be used for more targeted advertising (see Google).
The same zillion people will see your short summary and the link to your blog on Twitter.
Or heck, just tweet the whole article as a thread, but have a link to the blog version somewhere near the top. "Read in article format here ...".
No, that isn't what happens and the author of this thread's article makes the same mistake when he writes:
> do not use Twitter. Your ideas, your findings, your knowledge deserve better. Put your thoughts on your own website or blog, and share it with the World using whatever social network you see fit.
Agree that Twitter is terrible reading experience for long form text but the advice given above (by many complainers) misses a crucial issue: tweets with just a link to a blog article has less engagement and that's a penalty writers don't want pay.
https://blog.hootsuite.com/linkless-tweets-experiment/
Writers prioritize reaching maximum audience size.
Engaging with a blog post involves leaving the site, reading it, returning to twitter, and then tweeting an out of context something.
Also true: Very few of the Twitter engagements mean anything at all. Clicking a Twitter link is extremely low cost. If you're not even willing to do that, you don't care about the topic or the person that tweeted it.
Also I’m skeptical about the engagement that people think they get with Twitter. It may appear that more people are seeing your output, but they may not be actually reading or thinking about it. They won’t refer to it in one of their own articles two years from now.
What do you really want? Twenty clicks of the heart button? Or one person actually building on your ideas?
The more indirect your content, the more audience you lose.
Likewise, Twitter, if it’s good for anything, is appropriate for tweets. Less so for dissertations.
The answer to your three questions is “yes”. Other commenters have pointed out some other reasons long Twitter threads are annoying.
You get the engagement on twitter and also have the information in the open for other people to read too (you can link the blog post at the end of the inlined twitter long form post).
Eat your cake and still have it.
I don’t find Twitter threads hard to follow. You click on them, you get a sequence of 280-character tweets, with the little reply/retweet/like/share buttons between each block of text. This is not at all onerous to follow.
Compare to your typical recipe blog or Fandom (.com) site. Is that any better? I’d say the recipe blogs are and sites like Fandom are far worse, because the page is constantly trying to hijack the browser to show ads. Recipe sites are barely usable these days.
The 280-character limit also has benefits. Writers know that tweets will be viewed in isolation, so they try to make each tweet as coherent as possible, individually. This style of writing is bland and simplistic but also clear. You can’t say it in 280 characters, you rewrite it.
I wrote this comment as if it were a Twitter thread. Each paragraph fits in 280 characters—and one fits exactly! This dry style may remind you of the papers you had to read or write in college, but I appreciate the clarity.
Twitter encourages clarity and brevity, and I like it.
except when you get someone else's comment or response sandwiched between two items of the thread?
> because the page is constantly trying to hijack the browser to show ads.
Ad-blockers are amazing. Brave's Speed Reader also give you every blog or article already formatted with a clean, js-free stylesheet.
> This style of writing is bland and simplistic but also clear.
And also appealing to the lowest common denominator. It's like the McDonalds of an informational diet.
> Twitter encourages clarity and brevity, and I like it.
Twitter encourages soundbites and shallow thinking, and I think we should do better.
Can you give an example? When I look at Twitter threads, I see the main thread presented contiguously. If I want to look at replies, I have to scroll to the bottom or click on an individual tweet.
Maybe I’ve seen a sandwiched reply once or twice, long ago, but I haven’t seen it in a long time. Maybe there’s been an UI change, or maybe it’s the fact that you can post an entire Twitter thread in one click.
> Ad-blockers are amazing. Brave's Speed Reader also give you every blog or article already formatted with a clean, js-free stylesheet.
Most people do not use ad blockers. I use different browsers, different computers and mobile devices. Shall I go through all the steps necessary to configure ad blockers on every device and browser combination I have?
> And also appealing to the lowest common denominator. It's like the McDonalds of an informational diet.
Your information diet should be varied. It’s okay to eat at McDonald’s, but you will probably have a bad time if you have every single meal there. It is okay to read threads on Twitter, but you should not get all of your news there.
The content I read on Twitter is definitely not lowest common denominator content. It is generally highly technical, specialized content that is simply written for 280-character chunks.
> Twitter encourages soundbites and shallow thinking, and I think we should do better.
Blogs and journals encourage people to waste words on the page and ramble on without getting to the point. It’s sloppy writing, and I think we can do better.
I’m not trying to be cute here; this is a serious problem and you should treat it as a serious problem. You should write and consume long-form content, but you should also write and consume short-form content. Professors and grad students have a perennial problem writing abstracts and summaries for their journal articles because they have underdeveloped short-form writing skills. They often assume that their readers are fellow experts in the relevant field, and can figure out that the research is important based on its content.
The result? The research remains buried, because the professors and grad students doing the research can’t effectively summarize it or explain it to people outside the field. They give long-winded explanations that never get to the point, or assume that their audience has all of the relevant context. If they used Twitter more, they would likely find it easier to explain their research to people outside their own field. The reason is simple—brevity and clarity take practice.
This isn’t an example that I made up or picked out of thin air, this is a recurring complaint I hear from people working in communications in academia. A professor will say, “My research is important, maybe a journalist would be interested in reporting on it.” Then the communications department asks, “Can you give us a two-sentence summary of what your research is about?” It should be easy!
I like to think that academic papers can be clear and comprehensible, and don’t need to fall into the traps of traditional academic writing styles (obfuscated, incomprehensible, verbose). Likewise, Twitter threads can contain meaningful content, and don’t have to just consist of a series of quotable sound bites.
Twitter fixed this years ago.
Imagine rediscovering the purpose of a paragraph in 2022
When I open a medium link, there is a high chance ( > 50%) it will be full of uninteresting filler, just to make the point look important.
The only reason I would follow a link to a blog on a non technical topic, is if the author had already built a brand with me, in my brain. For example by writing good twitter threads.
Yes, there are various sites promoting themselves as places for long-form writing, but they have their own issues with copyright, walled gardens, etc. This is a space that needs entrepreneurial focus.
signs in
[Your account is suspended until you give us your phone number]
never signs in again
Log-in with Google pop-up | “Use the app” nag box | Cookie modal | Log-in page
When I get bombarded like that I just “nope” right out
Anyway, I highly recommend nitter.
> the only people who will find your site unless you work really hard at self-promotion
Twitter breakthroughs also need quite a bit of self promotion and luck for virality.
Tweeting a link to a blog post, no matter how interesting, generates a fraction of the engagements of direct-to-twitter content.
I write blog posts rarely, and the frequency of my blog posts dropped off dramatically once my twitter following grew.
Part of this is self-imposed rules. I hold my blog to a high standard - it is for completed and whole ideas/thoughts/projects only. On the other hand, Twitter is where I can dump my random ideas and work-in-progress.
I would love to say that all my projects are done purely for my own enjoyment, but that's not true. I do things because I want other people to look at it, to think about it, and to talk about it. Twitter is generally the best way to make that happen.
In an ideal world I would blog more, and I try to - but tweeting is easier and more readily dopamine-inducing.
It is commonly said that Twitter deprioritizes posts with links, I don’t think it’s true.
If you've used twitter for any length of time, it's plain to see.
My most recent blog post[1] has been pinned to the top of my twitter profile for almost a year. It's technically detailed and very "on-brand" for my audience (it's about rooting a smart TV)
It has 341 "likes" and 93,543 impressions (unfortunately I can't tell you how many hits the actual blog post got, I don't keep logs - but it's probably a smaller number)
Yesterday I tweeted a ~280 character idle thought midway through my morning coffee[2]. It lacks technical depth and is largely unsurprising. It has 1356 "likes" and 147K impressions already.
Whether twitter explicitly has code to downrank external links is irrelevant - the effects are obvious and quantifiable[3]. It's probably just a second-order effect of boosting posts that generate further in-app engagement - but that doesn't really matter either way.
[1] https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1475670055627247619
[2] https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1584462389977939968
Why should I have an opinion on what medium someone else chooses to express themselves? It's on the same level as being snobby about music style.
And for what it's worth, I dislike Twitter. I also dislike hip-hop, and Marvel movies, and a lot of other things. But if that's how people want to express themselves then more power to them. No one is forcing any of that on me.
Threads can also create new conversations — just like the comments here on Hacker News — but what's better is that each Tweet (like a paragraph) can have comments and discussions corresponding to that Tweet. There's a finer level of detail in the overall conversation.
It's just fine and posts like this read like oldheads struggling to adapt.
Twitter conversations are marginally less vacuous and pointless than YouTube comments, but not significantly so.
>what's better is that each Tweet (like a paragraph) can have comments and discussions corresponding to that Tweet. There's a finer level of detail in the overall conversation.
So there are people out there in the wild who actually unroll those mid-thread tweet replies and read them? Huh.
Both tbh. The snippets being marketing for the whole video, which itself is marketing for the rest of the channel.
I'd wang it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and even LinkedIn too if there's a biz link.
i thought people wanted their ideas out there and for people to be delighted to read them. naive.
If I didn't care about the information I wouldn't bother making a video about it in the first place.
If nobody sees your information, does it inform?
I'm not. I never have had an active account. I get linked to a Tweet and I'm not sure whether I'm at the beginning or the end. Is the embedded tweet a quote of someone they're jumping off of? Or a continuation of an active thread. Where does the thread start and end? Why are other names interjected between the parts? Is there more I'm missing in context?
The UI sucks. It's probably fine if you're familiar with it, but for outsiders trying to figure out what the latest hubub being talked about in the link is, it's pretty unapproachable.
Could just end the conversation here.
Some people have a much easier time writing one paragraph at a time and then replying to themselves. It's a self-editing technique. It can be especially useful to neurodivergent folks, but some neurotypical folks find it easier too.
Twitter is really good for stream-of-consciousness regular thought updates as the thoughts come to you. A blog post is usually expected to be a complete topic crafted as one piece.
In general I think all of the possibilities that you mentioned with threads making new conversations etc. are true. For me, the issue is more in the UI/UX of both the Twitter website and the Twitter mobile applications and how threads are presented.
DisplayName @username Split across a bunch of little cards with a number to piece them together at the bottom? 2/4
DisplayName @username No, I do not. It's a bunch of extraneous crap that I have to filter out to read the actual point 3/4
DisplayName @username It is the wrong platform for that kind of content, and people are cramming it in anyway. 4/4
It turns out that forcing conciseness and having simple embedded media can make for engaging reading. It's not the right format for all writing, and not everyone knows how to use it (see your example), but it is fantastic for commentary and analysis.
You split text into arbitrary page boundaries, cut off a sentence in the middle, and then put a number at the bottom to tell you where you are in the book.
I’m honestly surprised that people have a hard time filtering this stuff out. Do you get distracted by the chapter headings at the top of a page in a book, or the page numbers? At least with a decent Twitter thread, the individual tweets will be coherent paragraphs. Some people do write Twitter threads where they simply write and place breaks wherever they run up against the 280 character limit, but I rarely see it.
I've basically given up on going to twitter and only try to follow links that are sent to me of content I can't find elsewhere. I can't tell if there is some good reason for the user experience of the platform that I would enjoy if I pushed through, if I am just not the target user, or if it's genuinely just terrible and held afloat by network effects.
Call me old, fine. If that's the line that needs to be drawn, go for it.
I guess I just prefer reading long-form things without the visual distraction of an avatar every few lines, a forced 'page-gap' that has nothing to do with the reality of paper pages, page margins and view space that are entirely dynamic to the device and uncontrolled by the author, moving status notifications in the corners, unrelated authors speaking in the middle of the 'cohesive' thread, etc.
Here's a new definition for 'oldhead' that just struck me : "Those that have witnessed better."
- Twitter forces people to log in to read it. The... dozens?... of us who have a burner account but don't use Twitter regularly and have no interest in doing so probably can't be bothered to log in to read what you're writing.
- Twitter could delete your posts for any reason, or no reason, at any time(*). Given the ongoing Twitter-Musk struggle and Twitter's generally dubious financial outlook, this is not idle alarmist speculation.
(*): The content on your blog could also disappear at any time, however, unlike your Twitter thread (1) the material will be archived by the Internet Archive and (2) you have full control over your data and if/when to stop hosting it.
- Any third-party service can delete your post. Keep a copy of the source material. OTOH possibly more people lose interest in their blogs and stop keeping them online than old but important Twitter threads get deleted.
- There are apps that create nice blog-like pages from Twitter threads. If you re interested mostly in reading, they do a really adequate job of turning a Twitter thread into a compact page not overburdened with heavy / slow scripts.
I agree with you that this is true for now. However I expect that in the not-so-distance future, all Twitter threads will get deleted.
Public-square distribution without login has been one of Twitter's key differentiators from Day 1 -- it is the reason that reporters/news-channels like it so much. You can cite it and everyone can see the same thing in real time.
It's not really public-square distribution in any general sense. Hence the popularity of proxies like nitter.
This right here is why this doesn't matter. Those "dozens?" of people are a drop in the bucket relative to the overall distribution these people are getting on Twitter.
> Twitter could delete your posts for any reason, or no reason, at any time(*). Given the ongoing Twitter-Musk struggle and Twitter's generally dubious financial outlook, this is not idle alarmist speculation.
This also misses the point of Twitter. Twitter threads aren't meant to be blog posts. They're meant to be ephemeral and in-the-moment. They're passed around for a few days or weeks and then mostly forgotten, with a few exceptions. Blog writers will scoff at the idea, but Twitter writers have embraced this dynamic and made the most of it.
I think the core error is trying to equate Twitter threads to blog posts on a different platform. They're not. They're different formats with different use cases and different target audiences. Dropping a blog post into a Twitter thread wouldn't make for great reading, just as dropping a Twitter thread into a blog template usually looks out of place and incomplete.
People write to their audience and they write for the platform. There's a place for both Twitter threads and blogs, but we don't have to pick one or the other as the sole source of distribution.
But regardless of what they're meant to be, in practice, they are also used as blog posts (as in the three examples linked to by the OP). I don't think the OP is complaining about Tweets raving about the new sandwich place down the block.
It's not just Twitter doing this - all social networks prefer you stay within their platform. Facebook is notorious for it.
If you put all that work into a blog post and only 5 people see it versus typing it out as a twitter thread and 1000 see it, it makes it obvious which ones ie better - even if its a worse UI.
that's not some universal truth; the method creates certain feelings within the reader.
A plane trailing a banner for "EAT AT JOES" over a metropolis gets a lot of eyes, but there is a certain group of people below that plane that don't appreciate trying to squint at a banner in front of the sun while witnessing the waste of hydrocarbons and the cloud of AVGAS for such a trivial advertisement.
Likewise when i'm being asked to read a 2000 word essay that is composed of a cloud of tweets interspersed with reply tweets and advertisement/related(s)-pushed by Twitter it's similarly angering.
Why should the reader get the shortest end of the stick possible just to nudge some marketing numbers up? "Because the numbers aren't large enough." really isn't a suitable answer as the reader.
I had shared an article link on Twitter earlier today and it predictably didn't get much traction. So I just turned it into a thread in 5 minutes and re-posted it like that. If you can't beat 'em...
The fact that speech is interrupted every 140 chars is ridiculous.
20 seconds load time - though readable before that. But you don't want to do that on a metered connection.
We're forgetting the technology only marginally slower than it took to get here and enter the public consciousness.
The problem is that the audience is on Twitter/FB/Insta/TikTok/etc. That's the first place people look/search/find things.
I still host my own blog, email, etc but... the reader numbers are about what you'd expect: next to zilch.
Because I don't post that often, I actually use an add-on to automatically redirect from Twitter to a Nitter instance. Makes life just that little bit betterer.
You write punch-lines of 280 characters because of the platform's constraints, while you'd certainly not do so in a blog.
Also, don't give me the proverbial "constraints drive creativity", please.
/s (but not really)
If/when that stops working I'll stop following twitter links. Done, now I can focus on some other soapbox. Semi-linear commits for example (anyone at github: pretty please?)
The good (and bad) aspect of Twitter Threads is that, adapted appropriately to the medium, individual points can be individually addressed and pulled from their original context to start new discussion, or to emphasize the most important part of the essay. I think this is probably good for sparking additional discussions, though of course it can have the down side of removing context.
I think it’s relevant to consider content bloat, especially when it’s 100x more than is actually needed.
Telling me and other users to just suck it up and pay more isn’t a good solution. $15 vs $50 is a big difference for a monthly fee for 2GB vs unlimited.
It does take some courage to post things like threads or your own videos online for the whole world to witness. It's not for the faint of heart given the whole world now becomes your stage because the content can now be explored when various algorithms think it's best to do so. (The whole notion of explore vs. exploit)
It gives the reader power to more easily share the part they’re interested in sharing.
I like that Twitter threads force people to be concise and doesn't allow for giant paragraphs.
Put a link to the long-form blog post at the top of the Twitter thread as an alternative. Still put the whole thread on Twitter for those who prefer it. Everyone wins!
Rarely do I go on twitter and if I do I have firefox plugin that will filter out all the extra click bait features, such as you should follow...
If it's worth reading about then, then the author should take the time to construct an paragraph/article.
Full Disclosure: I suffer from Attention Surplus Disorder.
Ease of use & distribution supersedes ownership of content and compiled legibility. Same reason people used Medium and now Substack... and in another way patreon for paywalls etc.
Threads are really great for distribution. I hate that it's true, but it's true. You can write a huge, wonderful article and tweet the link to it and very few people are going to retweet it. You can write a thread and get hundreds of retweets. It sucks, but it's reality.
This post sets up a false dichotomy though, he's saying not to write threads because your content deserves better. Well... just do both? I mean if your content really "deserves better," then it deserves the best chance of being read, and on Twitter that means a thread (currently!)
I personally don't like a particular kind of thread. The thread that's like "I read a Wikipedia article and I'm gonna pretend it's some groundbreaking thing." I try to find a middle ground with my threads.
The first thing I do is write the article. Write the article, flesh out the idea, give it a permanent home, put in a lot of work. Then I publish the article. Then, as a part of distribution I do a tweet thread about the article. I usually always put the link to the article in the very first tweet and then thread out the main concepts.
I have some data on the fact that Twitter won't promote tweets with links in them as much as tweets without, but putting the link in the first tweet drives more clicks and is less annoying, so I do it that way.
I wish things were a bit different on Twitter, but they aren't! I think using threads as a distribution mechanism for longer form content is a nice compromise.
Here are some examples of articles I've written that I've then turned into threads. There is just no way I would've gotten the same traction with a single tweet, no matter how good the tweet (or article!) was.
- 200 RTs: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1582797305404542976
- 120 RTs: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1577325434248757249
- 250 RTs: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1556327342955438082
- 100 RTs: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1458117107183497219
- 165 RTs: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1483127141675978760
- 120 RTs: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1545106513227923459
Let's say 2% of the people read the article, but the thread gives people something to read, understand, and share without reading the full article. It gives me a chance to reach more people, 2% of whom might read the article.