Forget Twitter threads and write a blog post instead (2021)
kevquirk.com
kevquirk.com
- RSS/atom for notifications without requiring an account
- Creative Commons for establishing a legal framework to choose how you wanted your stuff to be shared
- IRC for real time messaging
- Wikipedia for knowledge
- Craigslist for local
Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website, but if we had built off these things I think the web itself could have been the platform.
I know in the last few years some of these have come back in popularity (eg RSS/atom), and for me it’s been an absolute revelation experiencing what the web could have been.
It wasn't _that_ difficult, tbh, with blogger, Wordpress, livejournal etc.
All of those people who once had thriving blogs quickly moved to Facebook after that, preferring to have them handle moderation. In exchange FB took their audiences and locked them inside. Which is why every website now begs you to sign up for their mailing list as soon as the page loads.
Also, most people who had blogs did _not_ move to Facebook. They moved, mostly, to _Twitter_, which wasn't locked up until Musk broke the logged-out view, though it was certainly less convenient for non-logged-in users to view than a blog.
The idea that Facebook replaced blogging just doesn't hold up at all, I don't think; it primarily replaced other social networks, and Craigslist and similar services.
The flood of 'normal users' led to creation of "groups" and "pages", that were effectively blogs. Discoverability of Groups and Pages was far easier compared to climbing the SEO mountain, so many moved to FB.
One of the biggest blogs/websites that moved were the webcomic The Oatmeal, and the author has written (or illustrated) what happened when he moved.
A lot of the traffic (especially in pre-Google times) was due to organic networking, i.e., not an AI algorithm for "engagement", but people on their websites recommending cool websites—knowledge, humor, and jokes (it was big things before social media), interactive experiences (especially Flash, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43225560), fun projects, personal social profiles with GeekCode, etc.
Also I don't understand how people liked IRC. Is there any reason I am missing? Surely discord has everything that IRC had.
"Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.ht...
You could easily see who can see your messages, especially on smaller channels with no lurkers or unknown bots.
The only major problem with IRC was that it requires an active TCP connection at all times. So you either had to have your Windows machine with mIRC online all the time or have a shell with either ircII/irssi+screen or a bouncer.
Modern-ish solutions like IRCCloud kinda-sorta fix that.
>Also I don't understand how people liked IRC
same as RSS: decentralization. You control the platform. As is, you're stuck with Discord servers and any alternatives require you to leave discord. You get an IRC client and you can connect to anything that implements its interface. Which could theoretically include discord servers.
Nothing is wrong on the surface until discord does something stupid in your eyes and now you need to disconnect. Same trap as all the other big tech.
Discord trap: IRC was non persistent. For that comparison you can shift away from discord quickly. If you care about persistence and search of messages then yes discord has a lock in, but again this wasn't even a feature of IRC.
At least by the Geocities stage it was incredibly easy. Probably about as difficult as making a PowerPoint slideshow. Lots of non-techy kids were doing this in the 90's and early 2000's.
Blogging was the first big degradation of the web that I noticed. There was a big shift from evergreen content to churning out quick dopamine hits matching the time sensitive nature of blogging.
Here's some popular pages from back then:
Maddox's Page[1]
Marathon Story Page[2]
Both of these could be recreated by someone who had no previous knowledge of HTML after studying HTML for one or two days.
And a lot of people's sites were even simpler - just text thrown up their with some images and links. But the thing is - people don't really need much more than that. Most Tweets, Blogs, articles, etc., are still just test and images when it comes down to it. The vehicle to deliver the content has gotten much more complex, but the content itself is usually (though not always) about the same as it was 30 years ago.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20021112205429/http://maddox.xmi... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20000815234125/https://marathon....
Even if they used Word and exported to HTML, that's just step 1 completed. How would they put that page online? What's SFTP? Why do I need SSL? Why doesn't the page look right on mobile?
I just a month ago started moving all my feeds to a self-hosted FreshRSS installation. It lets me create feeds from pages without RSS using XPath[0] or CSS selectors to pick the elements.
I also did a handful of Go applications that generate and/or modify existing feeds to be actually usable instead of just the title. I run those from cron daily and add the generated feeds to FreshRSS
And with FreshRSS I can filter out the "XXX (YC xx) is hiring" posts from HN feeds automatically :)
Those protocols are "nice" to you but they're actually not nice technologies to use for most normal people who are not techies. The decentralists who evangelize RSS & IRC have to step outside of their heads to understand why normal people don't find them compelling and easy-to-use. The web couldn't have "stayed as RSS & IRC" unless it also stayed a small niche community for geeks. I tried to explain why those technologies are not useful to a lot of internet users:
Why a lot of normies don't use RSS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35861928
Why many chat groups don't use IRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42964882
If you still insist, "I don't see why regular people couldn't just adopt RSS and IRC like me" -- it means you still haven't truly stepped outside your mind to internalize why users have different preferences and priorities on how to interact with the web.
People do not want to 'hunt' for information, they prefer to be served. This opens doors to tiktoks, facebooks, and other. This opens door to feed manipulation, where big tech can decide what you see, and what not.
That is why I have little regard for "what majority" is using, as commonly it is lowest possible denominator. Often such "algorithms" are abusive, and the take advantage of you, of your lizard brain, and your attention.
I am sure there is no golden solution, no ideal. That said I use mostly RSS, but sometimes I also check the "algorithm" of reddit to check what is happening outside of my bubble.
This gives me opportunity to taste both worlds, and have some sanity and middle ground.
I also like small blogs, than let's say Facebook posts, as the latter easily turn into quarrel, shouting, and small blogs offers insight without much social media distractions.
This possibility was the theme of the (most?) recent video essay on the YouTube Technology Connections channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA
There's definitely something to the appeal of algorithmic feeds, I suspect there's a fundamental neurological mechanism* in play which encourages us to scan somewhere for novel appearances / developments, same as seeing what's in the garden or on the market or who is present at the oasis etc etc.
But there's probably more to be said for consciously directing attention.
(*There's a certain d-word that probably has a genuine neurochemical meaning when not laden by a lot of popular baggage as it's entered colloquial use that I am intentionally not using because at this point I'd suspect it encourages misunderstanding more than helps, but I'm willing to believe it's related.)
> Simply put, companies building apps have strong incentives to gain more users, even users that derive very little value from the app. Sometimes this is because you can monetize low value users by selling them ads. Often, it’s because your business relies on network effects and even low value users can help you build a moat. So the north star metric for designers and engineers is typically something like Daily Active Users, or DAUs for short: the number of users who log into your app in a 24 hour period.
> What’s wrong with such a metric? A product that many users want to use is a good product, right? Sort of. Since most software products charge a flat per-user fee (often zero, because ads), and economic incentives operate on the margin, a company with a billion-user product doesn’t actually care about its billion existing users. It cares about the marginal user - the billion-plus-first user - and it focuses all its energy on making sure that marginal user doesn’t stop using the app. Yes, if you neglect the existing users’ experience for long enough they will leave, but in practice apps are sticky and by the time your loyal users leave everyone on the team will have long been promoted.
> So in practice, the design of popular apps caters almost entirely to the marginal user.
I used to think this, and then remembered that there are hundreds of millions of people on FB liking AI slop and typing their search term into their "Update my Status" box.
The Facebook interface is absolutely unusable now, and I'm saying this as someone who signed up for it ~20 years ago. They've intentionally made it a disorienting content firehose now that they've captured however many users.
Not every technology will permeate 100% of all possible users. Even if it could, it wouldn't be desirable make that permanent. FB's design decisions suggest technology can be 'made easy', as long as its in the interest of the maker to do so. That can be rescinded at any time. That's why I'll always support interoperable protocols over proprietary.
Imagine if Facebook didn’t come along and we had 20 years of development and improvements over those base protocols instead of today’s social platforms.
They were "polite", to put it in another frame. for RSS and IRC: You controlled the platform and essentially you decided to connect to services to extend your own platform. But corporations decided that you must use their platform or leave.
> The web couldn't have "stayed as RSS & IRC" unless it also stayed a small niche community for geeks.
I don't think it needed to be. People complain so much these days about finding another streaming service or games store or... well not music these days. The model they want is the one they abandoned.
Imagined you have a "netflix" as a UI and you simply browse for services to subscribe or unsubscribe to. Then your UI controls all the sorting, filters, libraries, etc. That was essentially RSS for articles. Of course, people with Plex or Emby don't need to imagine this. But an ethical framework would have been nice. I wouldn't call Plex's UI any less intuitive than any private platform.
The only argument that may hold weight here is that "you're not gonna get a good UX scheme without someone in the private sector being paid 200k/yr to figure it out". But if that's the requirement for progress, I question how my country did anything the first 200 years.
>it means you still haven't truly stepped outside your mind to internalize why users have different preferences and priorities on how to interact with the web.
Sure, people don't care about ads and I vehemently hate them in my media. I understand, I just highly disagree. I don't want an easier experience at the cost of all my personal data extracted to Morgan who calls me 5 times an hour about my extended warranty. I don't want a company being the sole factor in deciding on what I want to watch, or especially search for. Yadda yadda.
But apathy reigns supreme.
EDIT: I'll also address one argument in the RSS article: I think it's a bit biased to say "people don't follow cooking recipe websites"... on a forums focused on mostly technical topics. Most people don't follow literally everything. I'm sure you can definitely find a community of cooks and find their versions of Cory Doctorow or John Carmack or Sam Altman if you engage in such cooking discourse. But if you don't engage, then some relatively slop of "how to bake a chicken" suffices just fine, similar to any slop article in tech on "how to fix blue screen" that is just telling you to reset your computer
You don't make a community out of lurkers. But modern platforms sure do profit off them.
Pepperi... I remember. I think I still have the local chat logs somewhere :D
But at one point they figured out the most valuable thing a social media site has is the content and the graph between users - and they locked it down first (APIs with limits). Then started turning off the API endpoints completely, just selling the aggregate data.
The bots and troll farms don't care, they can just use browser automation instead.
The web itself does not suggest new content.
People really want novelty. They want a feed of new and interesting stuff, without having to make too much curatorial effort of their own. So there's been generations of "link aggregator" sites: slashdot, k5, digg, reddit, HN itself. As well as that being a key part of twitter and now bluesky use. Providing a feed is also crucial to youtube and TikTok - the recommendation algorithm for TikTok is ultimately what got it "banned" in the US, and then unbanned when they agreed to change the propaganda to something more favourable to Trump.
I use bluesky, but I'm not really optimistic about it any more. It's doomed by the all-consuming US news cycle.
Anyways, I think if regulation had happened earlier then a lot of the things you mentioned would never have taken root. They should have just made it unprofitable to hoard and trade consumer data. The industry would have been so much better if the incentives required businesses to compete for consumer dollars.
I immediately thought of https://www.mywot.com . I was surprised to see it still exists.
Though not so surprised to see that it now asks you up top to
> Connect with Google to scan your browsing history and see if you've been exposed to untrusted sites.
Sigh.
i deeply miss the curating of the webrings ...
if you were reading quality content you probably never even had a fb account.
if you moved entirely to those things, i habe bad news about what demographics you really belong to.
I do wish more tech oriented communities ran off RSS/blog/etc instead of Twitter though.
considering where I am in my personal journey (discovering a ton of bloggers) this whole thread is so weird to read but increasingly I feel like I live on a different planet
They have it but are in a prison or a butchery, which sort of defeats the entire spirit of the before-tools.
>It's more "Others are participating, but not how I want to" than anything I think.
You could phrase it like that. I dont want Musk to tell me who to subscribe to. I don't want Google to hide specific articles I searched for, even when I surround with quotes. With my feeds, I would simply unsubscribe from such muck. Here, you surrender your feed to the platform. But apparently the majority love being shepherded into whatever makes the company the most money. Content is content in their eyes.
It's not how I want it. I also speak out against it because how they are doing it is dangerous. But perhaps it is too late these days.
I'll disagree a bit on this. Absolutely nothing against the broader spirit of Creative Comments but I'm pretty against the Chinese menu of no derivatives and, especially, non-commercial with even CC basically threw its hands up about defining in CC 4.x.
I'm also not sure why setting up a personal website is still a relative headache. I suspect that a lot of the designers who put together templates overly prioritize glitz over simplicity.
The website question is easy. The biggest clients are in fact webdevs who help people make the website anyway. A layman can navigate through it, but many people will just throw a few hundred to a "wordpress developer" to whip up the site in a few days. And of course, when your audience is tech, they prioritize features over simplicity.
WYSIWYG is also just really hard to do when you're making it yourself.
Of course, I’m self-aware enough to recognize that it might be because my writing is terrible or because I’m covering topics no one cares about. But the point is, I don’t blame people for posting on Twitter instead of going through the effort of setting up a blog. The vast majority of written content gets little to no reach, so choosing the platform with the lowest barrier to entry makes the most sense.
As you started with "I enjoy writing and teaching", just do that. Not everything has to become a venture centred on growth and engagement.
(No offense, just being a bit cheeky here: your profile says you're into influencer marketing.. that might be the reason of your disappointment in your blog's performance. Fuck metrics and KPIs, man. Enjoy what you enjoy.)
No offense taken, but I had been blogging _way_ before my marketing tech startup (which itself is almost a decade old). It's not so much about the metrics, it's that there are far higher-leverage things I can do than publish articles that only a handful of people will ever see.
But putting that into the format that fits a twitter thread (or mastodon, really) is just one more effort I need to make.
Compare that to the "effort" of using a hosted blog with ghost, wordpress, or sth else... I really don't see how twitter threads are lower effort.
I've hard similar issues with you, and actually think the opposite to be the case. When I was trying to build an audience, I actually found that it was the low effort nonsense that would get the most traction. At a certain point I was attempting to try to get followers by making a lot of those, and then trying to mix some quality posts in, and had some success. But I started asking myself, to what end? What kind of community am I building that's only interested in low quality junk?
And one thing I noticed about Blogging and Twitter is that they're extremely cliquish. From what I've seen, most people would rather interact with popular Bloggers/Twitter users that they hate or say are idiots than they would with users who have a low follow count/seldom read blog. Sure, there are ways you can juice your follower count so that you're large enough that the big guys will think you're worth enough to pay attention to. But again - what's the point? When you see the complete vapidity of many of these supposed thought leaders, is it really worth it? So what, you can get into the daily Twitter slap fights that they seem to love so much?
I mostly wish their were more places were thoughtful people to find and chat with each other, without having to get involved with petty blog/Twitter vanity games.
Even this HN reply thread alone is more engagement than I would normally get on social media ;). I'm not saying this to complain, I'm okay with it and it's just the nature of the internet with all its noise. But to get back on topic, I can totally see why people don't choose to maintain a blog as much anymore.
Whenever you talk about blogging vs. more popular platforms, someone always chimes in with this "but I get so many more eyeballs on Twitter!" and I legitimately don't understand why that matters.
Sure, if you are doing it for a living and your income scales with the number of readers, then yea, of course, it's obvious why you want "engagement."
In the end I just gave up, because I realized the state of discourse in these spaces is terrible. It's a shame, though, because there are a lot of small, overlooked voices that do similar things, diving through primary source material and data and uncovering very important stuff that's gotten ignored. Occasionally, I've seen these people break stories that eventually get the attention of the national media - but it's hard, and this usually only happens for the really huge stories.
Meanwhile, the big players in these spaces are usually intellectually incurious and busy churning out vapid engagement bait.
Are you including indirect revenue in your assumption? There's lots of hopeful incentives that don't immedialy lead to money:
- you get a reputation and get professional gigs or invitations or whatnot. Fame, in a word.
- You get a reputation and that makes it easier to validate your next pitch for some dream idea you have. For better or worse, saying "a lot of people like this" is very effective pitch material.
- you want to meet other like minded people and organically network. These can lead to future opportunities you would have never considered.
- You have some larger societal mission, and that requires society. If you have some altruistic goal of say, teaching everyone to code (to pick a cliche idea), then you need people to participate to realize your goal. Something like Khan Academy still needs to advertise itself.
Your view only really applies to people who want to do Art for themselves. But we are still a social species, we have a natural urge to share our creations, for profit or not.
Sadly a lot of that moved to Discord. So, you can't really search it up. You have to simply follow a rabbit trail of people and forums until you find that community. It's tough.
But maybe that semi-elusiveness is a feature. You let anyone in and you may start to fall into that Eternal September where the low quality vapidness wins out
Not only are blogs easier for the reader. It's a more expressive medium for writers as well. To the extent writing is a reflection of thinking, writing microblog threads reflects a scattered and haphazard approach to solving problems. It poisons how we think, not just what we read.
I've said this before but it becomes more clear every year - your biggest professional advantage, the skill you need to work on more than any theory or leet code, is written communication. The number of people who simply cannot or will not write a coherent paragraph is way too high. We have people in top professional positions that are functionally illiterate.
Hard to find a perfect example, but here’s one I learnt developed bits of: https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/1800291897245835616?s=4...
I feel this deeply in my day-to-day at a mid size public tech company.
But how do you turn this into an advantage when your audience (colleagues and leadership) are either functionally illiterate as you describe, or simply refuse to read?
I don't get that feeling after I put out a post on Bluesky.
This is an awesome attitude to have! I also don’t like this idea going around that unless your blog gets popular, builds your brand or makes you money, it’s pointless. Blogging can be so much more than for just shallow career-related reasons.
I'm interested in seeing if the sentiment is different now that Twitter has ... changed.
Probably was done to prevent scraping, but still.
If I recall correctly it was done pre-Musk.
For example here’s a mention from 2021 where some people report getting the login wall and others don’t:
It was sporadically AB tested, IIRC, for _years_, but it was certainly _rare_.
One gets the impression that the first thing Musk did on arrival was demand that every feature flag Twitter had for experimental changes be turned full on; a lot of early Musk changes were things that Twitter had flirted with in the past.
I'm not clicking a link without a preview, why would I?
People can rant all they want about the way information is presented these days, but we’ve come to do things this way because it works.
Depends on your lens. If you're reading on twitter it's a nightmare (and is why I never really got into twitter). If you are just focused on engagement it probably doesn't matter. I only accepted how twitter works in my head when I realized it's just like its namesake: a bunch of birds all cheeping in a cacophony. Not necessarily to each other, just in a way to become known and try to stand out.
>Same reason every long YouTube video starts with a flash-forward “coming up” clip now
Not really a fan of those either. If it's <10 minutes, I'm going to see it soon, if it's more than like, 30 minutes, then the en media RES better strongly resonate with the thesis, otherwise it's just a strange proprechy I'll forget long before it comes true.
>People can rant all they want about the way information is presented these days, but we’ve come to do things this way because it works.
We do it this way because coporate billionaires shoved ads down everyone's throats to pretend it works. I've never heard anyone say Twitter is efficient, not even in its heyday. Twitter wasn't meant to be this facade of a forum/community center, it was meant to emulate a tickerboard you see on the side.
But as I've seen from 3 decades of Javascript, people will in fact hammer a square peg into a circle hole rather than migrate to the actual square hole. As is, we do things this way because we're selfish and all want to be noticed. And Twitter has a lot of eyeballs.
So I really, really recommend self-archiving and having a working copy (I admit, I am biased here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137616). With current LLMs, asking it to edit it for a blog post is easy. I mean, it's not even rewriting, just a minimal edit, so it works as a separate blog post. You can link both ways to get the best of both worlds.
Again, posting is easy. If you like tinkering, there are many great static site generators. If not, Substack looks like the way to go as of 2025.
Also, I often hesitated to post otherwise outstanding content here on the HN, as it was a chaotic mess. Should I post to the core tweet (which is unclear without the context) or to the root one (which does not yet indicate that the content is worth reading)?
The problem is most of the web is trash. And a link might be stupidly slow to open, and then require the user to click away cookie banners, sign up forms and ads before getting to the content.
This is a problem on HN as well and imho why so many comments without reading the article.
There’s a few more mechanics specific to twitter threads. The format pushes the author to end every paragraph with a hook for engaging the reader to read the next. And the format also baits the reader to continue because “it’s just one more tweet”
As to what to post to HN, write a short blog post about the exchange. Summarizes the context, link and quote the core, sprinkle a bit of opinion and save everyone on HN a click to twitter
Same goes for Twitter link. If you are not logged-in (like most people are not). You meet nag-ware just after it loads - if it loads at all.
no no no. The web is great, and despite my numerous complaints, the base web framework of HTML/CSS/JS is more than fast enough for web.
Corporate chose to make it trash because they care nothing for optimization nor decent-mindedness. Even on template blogs you may have defaults jammed with trackers, ads, invasive cookies, and just plain bad code. As well as locking content behind account servers.
Those are all man-made problems. That may be another reason why many hackers want a metaphorical "return to form" of web 1.0, before all this junk ruined the free web. Some of those marketing tools can still be put in, but they absolutely cannot bloat the load times by 10,000x+. If you gonna make hooks, make them as subtle as possible.
Nothing from Xitter is visible to not registered people, only the top post. Media from the top post is only visible in previews. Lately I don't even bother using xcancel to read linked threads, I just consider xitter a black information hole and never interact with the site, regardless of the supposed quality of the post or the author.
I think they start doing it mainly because it's their best shot to get a large audience anywhere.
The kind of archival you describe is tedious for anyone not skilled enough to set up an appropriate automation, and getting audiences to move en masse is also hard.
Blogging is better in so many ways, and if you have built up a community of people who visit your blog and engage with it, it can be very fulfilling and fun. Even without an audience it can still be fun.
But what the author seems to miss is that people like doing things where their community is. When I used to use Twitter regularly, I loved posting stuff there as I had friends (both real world and online) who I knew would engage and talk to me there. It felt like being in a busy pub where I could chat to loads of different people, and while sometimes something I shared would get no traction, other times we could chat for days.
That is why I posted things there, not because blogging is beyond me, but the effort to build an manage a community of your own is so much harder, than piggybacking on a social network.
----
Actually it seems my point was a little different last time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945797 - I still agree with it though (though I have totally bailed on Twitter now as it is terrible.
This is one of the best descriptions of how social media feels (when it's at its best, anyway) that I've seen
And if someone doesn't like you, they can - free of charge - go through years and years of that CCTV material to find something you said and take it out of context to use it against you.
Case in point: James Gunn. He was on Twitter in its infancy, before it was mainstream, and did some typically edgy humour for an indie horror director that was ok-ish at the time. Then a decade later some right-wing people didn't like him and they dug through his old stuff and blasted it out, resulting him from getting suspended/fired from Disney.
When I was on Twitter I had a 6 month auto delete running on all my tweets just because of that. Me 5 years ago isn't me of today and today me doesn't want to suffer from brain farts 5 years ago me had in public.
I ended up using this on my iPad for the posts I wrote over the Christmas break.
So if you use Twitter threads I, and many others, can no longer read it.
It's one of the few cases where a platform knows with absolute certainty that its userbase is expressing a certain behavior but they do nothing to encourage it.
If there's a single long post, people only argue under that post.
But if your long idea is split into 10-20 tweets, you can have a different argument under every tweet, and every tweet under that can again have another thread of arguments.
Resulting in: engagement.
Twitter is not, and has never been, a platform for discussion. It's either for shouting your stuff into the universe or arguing.
There are platforms like Substack where it's easier to set up a blog, but X makes it easier to build an audience as well.
I currently write on my personal blog, but I have to spend time syndicating my posts to other platforms in order to get any visibility. I'm thinking about moving the whole thing to Substack or just use X premium because I can't be bothered to go though that every time I post something.
Everyone can see your blog. People who don't have a Twitter account will either get an error message, get redirected to your profile, or will get the first post only, on Twitter, depending on phase of moon. Unless you're catering exclusively to an audience of Twitter users it's a pretty horrendous user experience.
But at the same time, I get it. Setting up a blog may not be hard, but it's still more work than starting a Twitter thread. And there are some people who have claimed they just don't have the attention span to write a blog post, so if they were forced to do that (instead of form their thoughts as a series of tweets), they just wouldn't write at all. I think that (if true) is a bit sad, but it is what it is, and I have a lot of respect for people who find something that works (for them), rather than continuously banging their head against something that doesn't, just because it's "the right way to do things".
Nowadays, though, considering the direction Twitter has gone in, I frankly find it a little gross that left-leaning people still use it.
It’s also worth noting that social networks like Twitter tend to discourage just sharing links, whereas a thread that sucks someone in REALLY engages them. It’s interesting that he chose to cite Doctorow here, who is probably one of the more aggressive thread-sharers around. On Mastodon, where he still does it, it can clearly feel like a lot, especially given that there’s no algorithm.
On Bluesky, threads are honestly a little less effective because links are not downranked. But the downside is that people may never click the link, leading to context collapse. Some of that is on you, the creator, to set the expectation. Some of that is on the end user. But the algorithm (yes, Bluesky has one) can make it hard for you personally to set that tone.
As a blogger/newsletter guy with a decent-sized audience, I tend to favor Kev’s stance. But I think you have to consider what social networks are doing—and how much it reshapes/misshapes what you create. I don’t post on Threads because I find its algorithm too aggressive and believe it harms context (and it also discourages linking). But Bluesky and Mastodon are pretty good at avoiding that issue.
In other words, I see it both ways.
Needed feature (partially why they acquired Revue) but implementation was botched. Also now many individual tweets in a thread are too long and expanding and scrolling through them is busted UX as well.
So, really, this is a case of writing a blog post and cross posting it to twitter.
(now there are obviously other writers who don't do this, but Doctorow always does)