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Comment by tempodox | Hacker News Reader

The article format is completely busted by Twitter's display rules and made unreadable. In this case, formatting the text in a readable way would probably get you sued. Those tweets belong to Twitter now and are good for nothing else but ferrying ads. I won't have my time wasted by trying to read that crap.

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Why do people insist on using that medium for blogging?

It would be better to tweet, "Guys, I updated my blog with a story about this thing (link)".

I had no idea this was a trend. How could anyone ever think this is a good idea? You'd think the editors at wired would be able to copy and paste, surely that's easier than embedding 45 tweets.

While this is technically true, you also need to adhere to Twitter's TOS if you're going to use their product.

Or Wired could do some actual journalism and, I don't know, interview the original poster plus ask her ex-boss and Google for comments plus try and track down the mysterious other man?

Journalists don't need to obey a TOS (at least in the US where it is specifically protected in the constitution "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"), watch the news sometime they don't get consent forms for all the people walking by in man on the streets segments. (Or a better example where news outlets published details from the snowden leaks)

I guess if all you want to do is post a bunch of tweets and not write any context or additional information about it this is the way to do it, but if you actually want to be a journalist TOS means nothing.

30 tweets makes 30 times the claim on attention of your followers, regardless of content. A single tweet is 30 times less likely to be read. This is a structural inefficiency of the twitter platform.

Quick and easy articles. Your effort is compiling the tweets and inserting a lead.

Yep, zero effort. And, accordingly, zero reward.

Nope, /much/ better to light up my phone 30 times. ;)

> In this case, formatting the text in a readable way would probably get you sued

Has anyone ever been sued for stringing 20 tweets together into plaintext?

They probably wouldn't sue a private person for using tweets however they want in a private context. A publication with millions (just a guess) of readers is something quite different.

That's nonsense. The person who wrote the tweets retains ownership, they have simply licensed Twitter to display them in a certain way with certain requirements.

Slight variations in legal details don't make the article any more readable. Even the reasons why it can't be formatted otherwise stay exactly the same. The difference you're pointing out makes no difference at all.

Totally disagree. The article is hard to read because the author is lazy, it has nothing to do with "Twitter's display rules." The author could have quoted the tweets or asked permission to reprint them in another format or used them as the source for original reporting instead of posting them verbatim. It's the difference between embedding the PDF of a legal ruling vs writing an article about what it means.

I see your point now. I didn't get it at first.

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