Why do people post on [bad platform] instead of [good platform]?

People posting videos is fine. People posting unedited videos is not fine. Talking heads wearing headphones in love with the sound of their own voice - no. Run those guys through speech to text conversion and have ChatGPT summarize.

"And the characters in these books and plays and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can’t communicate. I feel that if a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." - Tom Lehrer

[1] https://archive.is/pkoy8#selection-7311.100-7311.620

I think the former is pretty demoralising after a while. Am I blogging into a void? Does anyone actually read these long-form posts I'm sinking so much time and effort into?

And that leads to having to promote one's blog on short-form sites, which requries producing short-form content to build an audiance... might as well post on the short-form site to begin with.

I know I appreciate having the transcripts of all the Practical Engineering episodes, and I enjoy channels like Ben Eaters' where there is often supplemental material given.

The thing that annoys me about Twitter/Mastodon/similar is it is rare someone will post the same thoughts separately on a blog or in long form, so it can be difficult to follow a full story there, especially if you are linked into a reply to a reply (not to mention the requirement for an account to read things on some platforms).

I can see this being an issue aye, looking at my drafts I've got 45 posts in draft status currently.. eventually™

Maybe I should look into Twitter threads too

That might be the reason. I'd rather poke my eyes than "hang out" on Twitter or Mastodon. My day worsens by the minute the longer I am on those websites, with the amount of bad takes and terrible idea slogans.

I hate the Twitter style posts because I exist outside that all-consuming bubble of neurosis.

Reddit is dead, HN is alive and kicking, so this is basically my front page of the Internet (:

If you write a blog post, how do people become aware of the blog post? Relatively few people follow RSS feeds, so you also need a social media post linking to the blog post. With such a link, there's only one opportunity to go viral, one opportunity for each person on social media to see the link to the blog post. Whereas with a long thread of multiple short social media posts, there are many opportunities to go viral, one for each post of the thread.

2. Ranting vs. Research

Speaking only for myself, I consider my blog to be my "permanent record", whereas social media is my fleeting thoughts. Indeed, I frequently delete my social media posts, whereas I almost never delete my blog posts. I have blog posts going back to 2006. And I typically spend a lot more time writing a blog post: not in terms of the technical aspects of writing, e.g., typing, but rather in terms of thinking, researching, ensuring that everything I say in the blog post is accurate and well-supported, with external citations when necessary. Just look at Dan's own blog post here: you'd never see that same level of organization and citation in a social media thread.

The reality, I think, is that most people fundamentally don't like to read, and that reading more than a few paragraphs is rapidly becoming something akin to a chore for the majority of the population. Watching a video, on the other hand, is an entirely different experience and one that more-or-less comes naturally to human beings, no matter their education level or cultural background.

I run a Substack myself, but I've increasingly become convinced that text-first platforms don't have a mass-market future and at best, will exist as a niche thing. Instead, I think video-first platforms will gradually solve the advantages text still has over video – for example, search and scrolling. As such, I'd recommend any writers/content creators seriously consider adopting a video-first approach, or at least a hybrid one.

Also see a recent discussion on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38924022

It's accessible if you are logged in (and extra requirement on mobile: app installed). If not, it probably won't load or at best will be behind a barrage of popups nagging to agree, sign up, etc.

There is no point in joining either, twitter is for people that already are heavy users and have a network, or celebs. For new users it's dead.

Also. Very glad this was included. I had read it a long time ago and was pretty amazed, but couldn't remember enough to search for it.

So -> Thank You Foone. This was a good post.

You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are? (2018) (twitter.com/foone) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32303786

My feed has turned into blogspam, exam cheatsheets, crappy AWS "architecture" diagrams, and low effort cyber security guides. Did you know SMTP is port 25?

I'm not sure if it's recycled Medium posts, AI generated, or people actually create this crap. Others "like" and comment on it, so who knows.

I never managed more than 2-3 sales per album at peak when I did albums and EPs, and even a simple release with some thrown together cover art is 10x the work for basically no return. People do watch the videos[0], and enough people pay $5+/month for it--they go to YouTube later--to make it worth doing and cover new tools.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@keenkye/

I, too, find long twitter threads largely unreadable, because of how distracting it is to have after each post the retweet and reply counts, timestamp, another the user's avatar, and sometimes ads.

I can't blame the author, because twitter obviously works for them as an easy platform to post from. But the fact that I have no other means to access their content makes it inaccessible. I used to be able to use Nitter, but that's gone now.

And that's OK. There are also large portions of this city that probably have all sorts of interesting and great people that I'll never meet, because I don't tend to frequent some places. I can't read all the content on the Internet; platform-based elimination saves me a lot of time.

Most of the time, I have noticed that platform quality correlates with content quality, and the things I can read only after dismissing a cookie banner, followed by a newsletter pitch, followed by a registration proposal, were not worth my time to begin with. On the rare occasion it sounds like I really want to read it, I use a helpful service such as archive.is. But most of the time, I just close the Tab, thank the platform for saving me some reading time, and move on.

None of these reasons seem to address the problem, they just offer an apologia of sorts. The practice is still poor communication in my opinion.

The reasons are largely focused on the writer, and not on the reader. It says a lot to me. Even the reason "because people are on platform X" seems still focused on the writer getting attention, and not on the readers per se.

What I've never understood about any of this is if you're going to bother to write a multiple-post thread, why not just put it on a blog, and put a link to it on a shortform platform? Then people get a summary and a link for further reading, and you get to read the content in the best form for it. This is the purpose of URLs.

I can't get over what seems to me to be this weird stockholm syndrome phenomenon when it comes to putting longform writing on shortform platforms. All of the reasons given seem like legitimate reasons to use Twitter or Mastodon for something, but not for posting longform content on there per se.

> CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT. I have ADHD.

I can relate... I have attention deficit disorder too and it's extremely difficult to start working on anything. I take top tier medication and it makes it much easier to maintain focus but getting started is still difficult.

Somehow against all these odds I managed to publish a bunch of articles. They languished unfinished for quite a while though. Wish I had a general solution for people but my advice is probably too specific to my case: it turned out the only tool that can make me productive is Termux. It gave me the ability to start working on stuff anywhere and anytime. So whenever I get the sudden motivation to do something, I make the most of it. Requires enormous effort to write any amount of text on a tiny screen made even tinier by the touch screen keyboard but it beats the alternative which is writing nothing because my laptop is too far away.

Hell I wrote my own goddamn programming language inside Termux because of all this. As far as I know it's the first and only programming language to be literally born inside a mobile device. Lots of C code, all written in a tiny 135x8 terminal emulator window. Never stopped to think about how insane that is until now.

> if I try to make a blog post, it'll end up being abandoned and unfinished, as I am unable to edit it into something readable and postable.

I felt that one too... I would worry way too much about perfection, try to make sure everything's correct and substantial. Actually felt guilty if I published before it was perfect. Which is the same thing as saying I felt guilty if I published anything at all.

It took someone here on HN telling me something like "if your comments are good enough content for this place then they're good enough content for your blog" for me to finally stop caring. I got that sort of realization that seems obvious in hindsight. It's my site, I can do whatever I want. I dunno why I ever thought otherwise. If I make mistakes I'll just fix them. If at a later date I have more to add, I'll just add it.

I'm starting to think "readability" and "postability" are very harmful concepts. It's OK to be imperfect. Actually it's probably better to be imperfect. Everything is more sincere that way, more human. Perfection is a machine's job.

> but I can do rambly tweet threads. they don't require a lot of attention for a long time, they don't have the endless editing I get into with blog posts, I can do them.

I do the same thing but with HN comments instead of tweets. The rate limiting the moderators applied on my account is actually helping stop this addiction. I've realized that over the years I discussed certain topics many times. HN has definitely helped me shape my world view but the moderators are right about the fact this isn't the place for repetitive discussions. I've resolved to turn all these thoughts into articles at some point.

No you cannot. Valuation is based on market power. There are many platforms to post longform text, which is why none of them have any significant market power. There's only one platform to post tweets.

Demographics are complicated. Being a male or female adult isn't enough to personalize content and so good content often drops in the wrong place.

For myself, I tend to write fairly long (I don’t consider them “long,” but I have had people refer to me as “prolix”) blog posts[0].

I enjoy writing. I’ve been doing it for most of my life.

But it takes time. I spend a lot of time, writing, then, just about as much time, editing.

I know that videos are far more popular, but they take even more time to make.

I have posted on Medium, as well as on my personal site, but I’m probably done with that. Medium paywalled one of my posts without my consent, and that pretty much put a sock in it.

But I’ve been very involved in a pretty sizable project, for the last couple of years, and that has affected my writing. Now that it’s shipped, I hope to get back to it.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/

I always enjoy Dan’s post, but above also drives me crazy.

But... You just did. Even the argument itself is an example of how it's false.