How blogging is different from tweeting | Hacker News Reader

How blogging is different from tweeting

markcarrigan.net

127 pointsnanna87 comments

I don't think tweeting and blogging can be compared really. I would see tweeting as a form of "talking to a group of people". You often don't research, proofread, and rewrite yourself when talking. The UI to tweeting also boosts this (mostly mobile devices I assume, via a small text box).

While bloggin is for writing an essay. You may write the essay and just publish it, but in most cases you do some research and at least proofread it once. And again the blogging UI is optimized for this: you have an empty page, nothing other than your written content.

And they really complement each other: you talk to people to get ideas for your essays, and you write essays to share your ideas with people and use them as the base for your writing. I don't think you ever can replace tweeter (or similar services) with blogging.

Yeah I agree with this. Tweeting is more akin to posting to a forum or mailing list than writing a blog entry. Heck, social media in general is basically the forum/messenger equivalent of the current era.

Could some people use a social media service like a blog? Sure, in the same way some people used internet forums as the equivalent of a blog or article posting site in the 90s and 00s. But that's not really their purpose, and they're not going to be replacements for most people.

Some people write long form tweets or threads, and they can take hours to research/compose etc. Not as long as blogs, but still a decent amount of work. I personally prefer to follow people like that.

I agree, but I think they are more outlier than normal tweeter users.

I've been also trying to find these people and follow them on tweeter, but it's hard to find. Mostly either don't tweet much, or tweet a lot of noise!

The people who tweet 25% gold and 75% noise are the hardest to deal with. Probably follows aren't worth it.

If you can't find a lot of good people to follow, it just means you end up wasting less time in Twitter. It's a win-win really.

can't you just set a per-account retweet threshold for their posts to show up in your feed?

How does that work?

Blogging is writing something to change minds. Twitter is harrassing other people to change their minds.

I've seen this sentiment echoed a lot, and I find it somewhat perplexing as my own twitter experience has been mostly pleasant.

Do people simply not bother curating their follows?

It has become harder and harder to do so, because Twitter (in its default state) now insists on inserting brain-meltingly lowbrow content in between every other post from someone you actually follow. And adverts for low quality iPhone games that are themselves also simply platforms for further adverts.

This is no longer true. Twitter now has 2 browsing tabs that you can easily swipe between.

The first is a “For you” tab which contains recommended content based on YOUR browsing habits (and a “Not Interested” option to curate, just like Tiktok).

The second tab is a “Following” tab which is strictly tweets from people you follow, in chronological order.

It’s pretty great now. Twitter used to be nothing but quasi activism and rage bait. Now it’s exactly what I envisioned it could’ve been, which is nice.

But stay away from it if you have the reddit mindset of “If I don’t agree with it, it should be banned”, because your feelings will get hurt.

It feels a lot like the internet 10-15 years ago, it’s great.

But I can freely talk about sports and shoot the shit without worrying about triggering an autoban for saying the “badspeak” term or phrase which is currently flavor of the month.

Exactly. You can make Twitter what you want. Just never use "For You", unless you hate your time.

I said ‘in its default state’ because although you can try to configure it otherwise it always seems to gravitate back towards being shite. I commend you both for bothering, but I’d rather just use a service that is fundamentally less filled with rubbish. It always feels like fighting a losing battle.

If you haven’t used it recently, then you wouldn’t understand. But don’t use it if you have such strong feelings about it, it’s still a time sink.

I will say it’s one of the only services of its type that’s no longer a contrived echo chamber though. All opinions can be heard… But only if you seek them.

I’ve posted here before about how I refuse to use Twitter due to its toxicity (in the past), but its recent lack of toxicity has made it very fun and addicting lol

Now, if you’re a positive person who just enjoys tech and cat videos, that’s all you’ll see.

In the past, you could spend hours trying to curate Twitter to be good/positive, but you would still see nonsense.

The biggest improvement is the removal of the feature where completely unrelated content would be pushed into your timeline with a note at the top that said “Your follower [insert follower name] liked this”

So you were at the mercy of what the people you followed also engaged with. Now, you can follow someone who may be on the other end of the political spectrum (who may post cool tweets) - And while you don’t agree with their views on the election, you can still see their tweets without the “Pastor Bob liked this” type post appearing of QAnon bullsh*t.

Well, I’m glad it works for you. My experience is quite the opposite though and it seems like I’m not alone.

It definitely used to be a lot more 'curatable', but in the Musk era, it's become less pleasant on average.

Well, I think Twitter can actually be a normal place. But the sentiment is about the average, not what it can or can't be.

Even liking a single political post will fill the timeline with blatant political disinfo from the fringes of the political spectrum.

But it was also this bad before Musk.

Blogging is developing an argument, Twitter is having an argument.

No it isn't, to quote Monty Python.

You can't productively argue with someone by splitting your position into 280-character-long bites, each of which can be easily quoted out of context.

The problem isn't that Twitter is split into small bites. Essays do that with paragraphs and sentences as well. It's that Twitter is not structured in a way conducive to conveying an argument.

you're not conveying an argument, you're having an argument - which will never be resolved. The best you can hope for is that one of you blocks the other without wasting too many hours of life.

Blogging is brain dumping something I thought was interesting I worked on. Slight hope it boosts my career somewhere down the line.

Tweeting is brain dumping something while you were drunk. Slight chance it tanks your career somewhere down the line.

Blogging is for hit posts, tweeting is for ... something that rhymes with hit posts

You must be thinking of "bit posts", because they're so small :p

lit posts, quit posts, split posts, nit posts, hiit posts, writ posts, flit posts, reddit posts, whatchamacallit posts …

it was obviously pit posts, like posts you throw into the everlasting pit of damnation.

Tweeting is shouting into the void. You're not interested in getting a conversational response, but interested in how many impressions you make

The twitter UI is just not designed for conversation.

Don't forget grifting too. Classic example being crypto/nft/dao bullshit.

Then you have devs posting clickbait "hot takes" about the most inane thing you've ever seen or screenshots of code in order to then sell their courses or gain more social influence.

I won't give specific names, but one of these characters rhythms with prime numbers and another rhythms with thesaurus.

I feel more and more disgusted by social media like twitter nowadays. Too much shilling, too much pushing of extereme unhinged ideas, not to mention the crypto bots, and now the only fans, porn bots. You have thousands of popular accounts exaggerating stupid gimmicks like being against seed oils for some reason. There is such an absurd amount of transparent grifting that twitter looks like some sort of fish market.

The moment, twitter added monetization, engagement farming got much worse. Was Social Media always destined to be like this?

Threads is such an example of this. The first people to sign up to threads wasn't authentic people, it was a bunch of marketing departments going "well, this new social media site is live, we should put our presence on there too" and a bunch of influencers who go "hmm this new platform could be a good way to gain new followers if I post enough content before everybody else gets in on this".

Personallly, I think an anonymous social media could work better. If people view content as content without carying about who published it, then you would get good stuff trending and not a 2am selfie from some random celebrity who at this point is famous for being famous. Brands would also have a hard time because their junk wouldn't get engagement unless it was actually good.

> Personallly, I think an anonymous social media could work better.

I'm leaning hard in the opposite direction. In my mind, a social network graph that is extremely personal and reflects and behaves like an _actual social network_ is "the way".

I run my own ActivityPub node. There is no reason for anyone to want to join who doesn't know me personally and want to join in just for personal reasons.

Then I federate with nodes that I personally know, not for exposure but because I want to follow their updates and occasionally chat with them about things (e.g. I follow Codeberg because I think what they're doing, particularly with Forgejo, is interesting).

I also _do not_ federate with generic instances like the main Mastodon one because they're not focused/personal enough for my taste (that's where you get the "eh, might as well" crowd").

This does mean I have a low rate of discovery of new stuff, but that's the way real socializing goes as well. Most of your time is spent with people you already know and occasionally either you change contexts and meet someone new or your existing actual social network introduces you to someone new.

That said, there are different use cases for social networks which is more the "publishing" angle that needs a much broader but shallower network (probably same for discovery which is probably just the other side of publishing). I haven't thought as much about these use cases, but it seems necessarily fraught because once you get to publishing, bad actors get interested, even (/especially?) if it's anonymous. I'm not sure there is a solution to that problem.

Also leaning in the personal direction. The only Meta product I use is WhatsApp (bad telecom services) and status updates from your contacts is interesting enough because you know everyone.

Focused and text based platforms like Reddit’s subreddit and HN are also nice as long as you have moderation that keeps things civil. And no user specific algorithm.

An anonymous social media could work if you moderate it extensively and/or restrict who can sign up in the first place. Not to mention, the need to monetize or support the site.

Creating a good Social Media site is a hard problem IMO.

For all the snark Hacker News gets, I think its not a bad attempt at creating a tech focused social media. Reddit and its many subreddits is something else that works to some extent.

I don't think complete anonymity is the way to go. It'll attract clinical psycho people with actual difficulty understanding identities and ethics. I've seen it. They'd have difficulty understanding who posted which, have too little incentives to listen to anything, and openly complain that they would have to follow rules if enforced. All in straight faces.

For a social media to work, some sort of consequences must be forced upon responsible users. Else people quits functioning. I'm guessing that the reward scoring don't have to be exposed to the public, but there has to be something, and forcing users have pseudonymous usernames is a workable implementation.

“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”

Charlie Munger

Comparing the two is a bit unfair. Don't get me wrong, I never liked twitter all that much and lately I've grown to hate it(and I wouldn't miss it one bit if it suddenly disappeared) while in principle I love blogs. But they are very different beasts: twitter is a cheap cheese and tomato frozen pre-made pizza from Lidl: it's food but that's about it. You could hand it to a professional chef and that might make it somewhat better if they add some personal touch with ingredients they have laying around but... It's still a frozen, pre-made pizza. It will never be what the chef would be able to come up with if you give them the ability to choose their ingredients and tools.

>while in principle I love blogs. But they are very different beasts: twitter is a cheap cheese and tomato frozen pre-made pizza

Some people (especially techies) like to distinguish between blogs and Twitter but we have to also acknowledge that non-tech people use Twitter as an easy-to-use blog platform. They start from the motivation of "publish some of my thoughts" and "What's the easiest way to do that?". The most friction-free and viral way to <airquotes>blog</airquotes> -- is to use Twitter. Using WordPress or self-hosting Gatsby engine isn't something they want to do.

That's why some write long-form thoughts as a multi-part "Twitter thread" as a pseudo blog post. Yes, it's hard to read but that's not the priority. They simply don't want to use a "real" blog engine. They'd rather use Twitter for the ecosystem, audience reach, and engagement. (retweets, likes, etc).

In other words, the influential people using Twitter are not swayed by "cheep cheese" analogies. They're simply not interested in bespoke blog engines.

Twitter is a feed of what's getting attention right now, a cresting wave of what people are talking about.

If you have to make an analogy with food, it's like ice cream from a street vendor on a hot day. It's not food, its value expires rapidly if you don't consume it when it's fresh, and it's a little bit addictive.

Your analogy is unfair and, from that analogy, it's quite clear you hate twitter so there was no need for the "Don't get me wrong,"

Twitter is for updates, blogs are for thoughts. The are two entirely different things, you are comparing them as if they are the same thing but one is the cheap, terrible version.

> Twitter is for updates, blogs are for thoughts

The word blog comes from "web log", a stream of updates from someone. A blog is as much for update as twitter. I think the analogy is perfect: twitter is pre-made updates, blogs need much more careful thought both to add updates and to deliver it to the audience.

> you are comparing them as if they are the same thing but one is the cheap, terrible version.

It seems that this is his opinion (which I agree). Is it wrong to think that twitter is pre-made food/fast food and blogs are home-made meals?

Someone already corrected your terminology. As for the "don't get me wrong" part: it means that I am not defending twitter. I openly hate it, which is what "I wouldn't miss it one bit if it suddenly disappeared" clearly states.

Twitter is not just for updates. People use it in a variety of ways including updates but also things like thought streaming, humour, conversations, trolling, etc

Sure, I miss Cory Doctorow's essays for instance. But mostly it was updates.

But Cory Doctorow isn't crappy, barely edible pizza.

Cory's blog posts are great, even when they're shredded into Twitter threads.

Cory's image spam is crappy, barely edible pizza.

I started blogging more once I stopped trying to make something fancy. Instead of trying to create my own markup and create a new site every time I feel like blogging again, I just create github gists now. It's portable in that I could download all my markdown gists and just put them on a simple nginx server with a gfm renderer. And it has a built-in comments section.

> create a new site every time I feel like blogging again

Relatable haha, I've rebuilt mine so many times. Some times barebones minimalist with just text documents in a list, other times with pagination and nice styling and a database, it's fun but probably no body cares about the differences.

I'm not so much in the "constantly rebuilding my site" territory, but as a general rule the stuff on my blog is pretty high-effort (and, I like to think, pretty high quality). I need to get in the habit of writing short quick updates every now and then.

As much as stuff like X / Twitter is annoying / harmful / bad for society / $negative_words , one thing about blogging is that the return on effort has been somewhat low for me, whereas Twitter can really increase your reach.

I recently did a pretty huge post as an extension of a comment I wrote on the /r/guitarlessons subreddit, and also made a video demo of the concept. My analytics suggest that about 10% of the people who watched the video clicked the link to my site. That netted out to about 10-15 views of the article.

I don't care necessarily, in the sense that there's not really an incentive for me to "get views" - I'm not advertising or expecting to make any money or anything - but I do, you know, want people to read my stuff after putting so much effort to make it.

That said, though, there has been a benefit to me, at least, in that I frequently reference at least one of the articles I wrote when I need a refresher in SVG. So I guess in some sense, that effort was well spent to create a high quality reference resource for myself.

This passage got me thinking:

> It’s become an ideas forest which people wander into from different directions, finding trails which I had long since forgotten about and inviting me to explore a now overgrown area to see if I should begin tending to it once more.

I'm going to spend time thinking about this. And, perhaps, blogging about it, in much the same fashion as the author.

It's nicely put.

Go for it.

It reminds me of why I've returned to reading academic papers. Not for the 'correctness', but as I've tired tripping on the twisting vines of short digestible answers endlessly immovably entwined by themselves but whose true root is no more than the thinnest topsoil.

Short, digestible content like tweets can be arranged into an ideas forest, but only if connected by lines of reasoning instead of being piled one on top of the other in reverse chronological order.

I have a first implementation. Details at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f2CftRRndH97RpAwL/how-i-got-...

You're re-inventing IBIS[1]. See also Marshall 1989[2] but be conscious of Marshall 1999[3].

1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue_mapping>.

2. <https://doi.org/10.1145/74014.74031>

3. <https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008716330212>

Thanks for the interesting references. I think I have a better data model than those had, but it's cool that people have recognized before that there's a need for something like this.

My personal approach to Twitter: when I feel like tweeting a longer opinion, I write a post and link to it. (always better than screaming into the void)

https://untested.sonnet.io/Instead+or+writing+a+comment%2C+w...

I like this approach, but unfortunately many online communities see it as self promotion. I especially want to use it on communities focused around learning a certain topic, because you might have a method that works best for you that you invested time into explaining nicely.

https://gist.github.com/JCharante/c38c0993c831581ac1e659fa19...

It's not "self-promotion" it's "we'd like your content to live on our platform where we can get the views"...

All twitter influencer posts are "self-promotion", whether they link externally or not.

This is the POSSE approach: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Which is IMO the only correct way to do things. Keep the canonical source of everything you create somewhere you actually own the content.

Interesting that social media's gamification “engagement” really seems to be influencing academia at this point. Also terrible news about LinkedIn apparently becoming an escape hatch?

Has LinkedIn enhanced its user interface to boost engagement, similar to other social platforms (likes, retweets, upvotes, etc?)?

Could self-publishing or “new” old school web-hosting platforms like Neocities offer a better UX for meaningful interactions - moving away from those quick “engagement” loops?

If so, how to best complement / extend such a very differently focused UX? What do we really need / omit to facilitate science / rational discussion?

I don't think that the problem is that users can't find sites which aren't engagement-driven.

I think the problem is that sites that aren't driven by engagement can't find or maintain a userbase.

My experience trying to market a UX designed for rational discussion is that you still need an engagement-focused part to attract users.

Twitter's purpose was short status updates, and links to longer content.

It was never an either/or proposition. Alas none of this matters because Twitter is dead spiritually, and X is dying financially and culturally, and they're adding so much random crap to it in a desperate bid for relevance (like long posts, long videos, dating, banking, LLM chat, ..., ..., ...) that it just looks like noise at this point.

Tweets are much more ephemeral than blogs. Longform writing indeed is a great avenue for working with ideas, and letting them take root.

But getting engagement from blogging is much harder. It takes much longer for blogs to get popular. Walled gardens like twitter are much more convinient for people to get into. More importantly, due to network effect, it is much harder to get engagement outside.

The ephemerality is the reverse to how it should be. A tweet from 15 years ago is probably still there. A blog's domain name might have expired, so its posts are lost.

So bloggers should copypaste the other blog posts they like into their own blog.

True. I was mistakenly confusing how the blogs/tweets ought to be Vs How they actually are

I find that there's too much cruft to filter through to get to the valuable discussions. And lately, it feels like a lot more effort is required to get to anything worth spending your time on the platform for. I don't spend anywhere near as much time on twitter as I once did. I've been given substack more time lately.

There is a torrent of completely unrelated memes under every mainstream, popular tweet now. Completely unsubale.

At this point I am seriously considering subscribing to a local newspaper to get news.

Well, in the early posting, it is quite clear a lot of people both hate even the idea of twitter and were using it wrong.

I say "were" since, like many others, I've be off twitter for a while. It's devolved into the things that people have always said it was.

But it wasn't always like that.

I was on twitter for breaking news updates, links to long form posts from people I followed, new book announcements from authors I followed, insightful thoughts from journalists, scientists, etc. Follow good people and cull/block everybody else. Kind of like real life; if you go to the local nazi bar and talk to the racists, it's going to be unpleasant. I could always tell when twitter had switched me back to "For You" ... it became a cesspool.

Under Musk, it is always just a cesspool.

Has this submission title been auto-mangled by HN? The article title is "How blogging is different from tweeting".

Yes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes.

Thoughts are somewhat like electric current: prefers lower resistance paths to the ground.

Twitter succeeded because it is the least resistance path to an audience. Blogs in comparison are kiloohms of resistance.

The good thing about twitter is people of expertise chiming in to deconstruct or fortify an argument. The whole process is like having a peek into a writer's draft of a book and get a feel for the process (word choices, flow, rewrites) rather than just reading the final finished "perfect" chapter. In blog scenario, the writer is embodying all these distinct positions and forging a path from premises to conclusions to make a case. Being a fallible human, he will prefer a path which makes his pre-decided conclusions stand out best.

On twitter, the replies that deconstruct or fortify an argument are interspersed with a lot of junk. I've built https://en.howtruthful.com/ as a tool specifically for deconstructing and fortifying arguments. I see a lot of potential to succeed where twitter failed.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" — F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Infact we can generalize this to N ideas cases.

Take two ideas. A and B. Give weight ∆ and 1-∆ to them. Multiple the positions of those ideas with the weights. This gives you a new interpolated position. Now repeat this with new position and idea C. And so on. You will quickly cover the area of convex hull of these ideas.

I think with future advanced LLMs the above scenario is achievable.

When Twitter first came out, I thought it would be RSS for the masses. The character limit made it useless for conveying anything but a headline, so that's what it would be used for: a headline with a link pointing to content elsewhere. People wouldn't consume content on Twitter, they'd find content on Twitter.

Alas, i was very wrong.

I have personally obtained unmesurable amount of relevant info from twitter; lots of true experts in every area in real time. Blogs were more like reading a published magazine article - for something not time sensitive.

Different things are different.

Related, the same thing is different to different people, and can even be different to the same person at different times.

Also related, everything is more than one thing depending on the context in which it is evaluated.

My opinion is different to your opinion

I believe different things are different, but in a different way

"how blogging is different from tweeting" sounds like "how is a raven like a writing desk" -- these are two different things; a nonsensical title.

The author acknowledges they are different by pointing out, well, how they are different:

> I care about the reaction a tweet gets because it is self-standing and immediately public whereas a blog post is an element of a large whole. It is a contribution to growing my ideas garden, for my own later use and whatever enjoyment others find in it, rather than something I have expectations of receiving a reaction for.

Twitter was at one time commonly referred to as "microblogging". So it seems reasonable to ask what the similarities and differences are.

https://upcomingkoshurmahraz.wordpress.com/

I write an anonymous blog detailing my struggles of getting married. I am pretty sure I would not be able to explain 1% of this on tweeting

Wish we could go back to the glory days of blogging

Isn't it X'ing now?

(May 2023)

Devil’s advocate:

1. Despite the platform’s unsuitability for long form writing, you often do get multi-part tweetstorms that are basically blog posts, that you then need to unroll with threadreaderapp. HN loves to hate on the practice, but people do often treat Twitter as a blog service.

2. Isn’t Twitter supposed to be a microblogging platform? Or maybe that’s tumblr. Nanoblogging, then.

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