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'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

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Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#101

Post by jml7c5 »

On Twitter, there is a single type of content (a tweet). With blogs, there are two types of content (posts and comments). While it seems like a small difference, it changes behavior and appeal. When Alice comments on Bob's blog post, Alice is on Bob's "territory". Her comment is not an equal blog post in response. It will primarily be seen by Bob's audience, and most of her own readers will be unaware of it.

On Twitter, there is discoverability. As you browse, you frequently jump across profiles, and are continuously recommended users to follow.

On Twitter, there is brevity. In general, blogs are not designed for hundreds of short posts.

On Twitter, you do not have to pay for hosting, nor do you have to manage anything.

So there are a mix of technical, social, and network effects. Until these problems are overcome with a single solution, Twitter will retain its stranglehold on content.

---

Personally, I wish Twitter would just remove post length restrictions and make it a proper micro-to-macro blogging service. (To be clear: I'm not a fan of a Twitter monoculture, I hate their UI, they make getting data difficult, their site is painfully slow, and they are often user-hostile. But it's been years and no micro-to-macro blogging service has overtaken them, and at this point it'd be better to have something dastardly that works, than something dastardly that doesn't.)

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#102

Post by lkrubner »

Bring back Technorati, circa 2004. I miss it very much. Decentralized blogs need some centralized point to keep track of conversations. Pingbacks didn't work because they lacked verification and therefore were immediately overrun with spam. Technorati offered validity. If I wrote something good and there were 500 pingbacks, and 490 of them were spam, Technorati made visible the 10 good ones, and let me see the reputation level of the 10 good ones. I want that again.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#103

Post by qqssccfftt »

jml7c5 wrote: post #101

On Twitter, there is a single type of content (a tweet). With blogs, there are two types of content (posts and comments). While it seems like a small difference, it changes behavior and appeal. When Alice comments on Bob's blog post, Alice is on Bob's "territory". Her comment is not an equal blog post in response. It will primarily be seen by Bob's audience, and most of her own readers will be unaware of it. On Twitt…

> Personally, I wish Twitter would just remove post length restrictions and make it a proper micro-to-macro blogging service.

I would rather not wade through 10000 word thesises and then sentence by sentence "takedowns" in the response

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#104

Post by rvz »

sergiotapia wrote: post #34
HugoDaniel wrote: post #20

What is your opinion on dev.to ?

Full of armchair experts, and top-lists-huge-landing-image ego postings. Their platform is excellent, their content not so much. >The most important skill that you should develop to improve your life This is dev.to in a nutshell.

Exactly. Lots of 'self-proclaimed senior field marshals and developers' sharing their programmer war-stories which often descends to language, library, editor or OS flamewars.

Not sure how it compares to hackernoon, but it seems they are competing well towards the nadir of technical decision making and advice.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#105

Post by freddie_mercury »

look_lookatme wrote: post #95
freddie_mercury wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are they on the right track? They've taken over $17 million in funding from VCs, meaning they need a ~$170 million exit in the next 7 years, meaning they need to monetize like crazy. Everyone loved Medium, too, in their Year 3 when they were just burning VC cash and nobody there cared about being a profitable, sustainable business.

Substack is different in that they are a kind of Patreon meets Medium (with the newsletter angle, but I think on a long enough timeline that's a gimmick). With regards to what sets them apart from Medium -- in short, they actually have a revenue story: a cut of subscriptions. Even this is phrasing is wrong though because IMO a lot of "subscriptions" in this space could effectively be categorized as "recurring donatio…

Patreon is a great comparison and, I think, supports my position. Only $35 million in annual revenue after 6 years.

Not a bad business but they've taken $160 million in finding to get there.

Actually, my bigger point was just that the tech industry is full of businesses that were hot & sexy in their early years and then people got disappointed when they tried to start being a real business in year 7 or 8 or 9.

Instead of jumping from the Medium hype train to the Substack hype train....it is probably safer just to get off all the hype trains and assume any given startup will eventually try to become profitable and screw over old time customers in the process. You're going to be about 90% right with that as your default assumption.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#106

Post by beager »

One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and constructive discourse show up as the same thing on the P&L of a social network, that dynamic of Twitter is tolerated, tacitly enabled, or even deliberately built upon.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#107

Post by buboard »

jml7c5 wrote: post #101

On Twitter, there is a single type of content (a tweet). With blogs, there are two types of content (posts and comments). While it seems like a small difference, it changes behavior and appeal. When Alice comments on Bob's blog post, Alice is on Bob's "territory". Her comment is not an equal blog post in response. It will primarily be seen by Bob's audience, and most of her own readers will be unaware of it. On Twitt…

tbh, there are two types of posts on twitter too, first-posts and replies. it's an unsolved problem.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#108

Post by herval »

joelrunyon wrote: post #13

I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).

I also deeply miss the times when people had their "sites", which had more personality/memorability than a twitter/instagram feed. Maybe the time for "personal web spaces" is past and the web will remain " short form content scattered around other people's platforms", or maybe those platforms are popular just because of the network effect?

I've been toying with ideas to bring "social" aspects into sites, as I think the most difficult component, these days, is discoverability (finding a twitter profile is a lot easier than finding a random wordpress blog) and recurrence (nobody uses RSS anymore, for instance, so how do you even know about new content to come back to?).

Or maybe we're just nostalgic, and the future is indeed shorter and shorter bits of text and 5-second vertical video.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#109

Post by duxup »

beager wrote: post #106

One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and con…

The medium is the message and the medium is trite, curt, and designed to maximize attention.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#110

Post by hintymad »

beager wrote: post #106

One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and con…

Twitter's competitor Weibo launched a feature called "Long Weibo" years ago. It's essentially a blog service, except that Weibo would display the first 140 characters of a long post as if it is a tweet, and a reader needs to click on an icon to expand the tweet into a full article. It's a really nice feature. Clean time line as before, users who hate changes won't get bothered, but those who crave for longer writings get blogs for free. Better yet, an author gets to publish her thoughts in a single place and to engage readers as usual.

Why Twitter doesn't at least try this feature in an opt-in way beats me.

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