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.
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.
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).
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.