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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

#121

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

hintymad wrote: post #110
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…

Well they kind've do. Tweet-chains. If someone replies to their own tweet to create a series of Tweets, Twitter groups them into a chain and puts a "Show This Thread" link to expand it. It's the same thing in practice.

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

#122

Post by symlinkk »

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…

You see the brevity as a bad thing, I see it as a good thing. If you can’t get to the point in 280 characters you probably don’t know what you’re talking about.

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

#123

Post by mch82 »

symlinkk wrote: post #122
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…

You see the brevity as a bad thing, I see it as a good thing. If you can’t get to the point in 280 characters you probably don’t know what you’re talking about.

How come?

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

#124

Post by cambalache »

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.

> The most important skill that you should develop to improve your life

By Genericus Portlandnius, 20, ex-barista and anthropology major, I love cats, Javascript, and React. Looking to get hired.

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

#125

Post by eitland »

More generally twitter has spent the last 14 years painting itself into a corner.

It seems the world need a massively scalable messaging backbone, and when twitter was created I thought (IIRC, this is a decade ago and I can't remember if and where I wrote it down) something like that would happen:

Basic Twitter would stay free and there would be all kinds of paid services on top:

- it could be extended to allow APIs for machine to machine communication.

- it could be improved to be used for groups and one to one messaging (WhatsApp, later Telegram took this market. Google+ had a decent chance to get a slice of another part of it.)

- they could charge for API access or for more than what clearly personal usage (more than a few groups, multilanguage distribution, near realtime machine to machine communication etc)

When I think about it now here's another one:

- paid subscriptions to feeds. Examples: news feeds (maybe you pay for access to your newspapers)

Instead they become what I would describe as a spam distribution machine where you can follow celebrities.

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

#126

Post by eitland »

herval wrote: post #108
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 t…

See https://www.jvt.me for some really interesting examples of what can be done on the indieweb now. (I found that site because he shared a link to a post I wrote.)

Edit: an earlier version of this post said I found it in the referrers log. It seems I was wrong.

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

#127

Post by eitland »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #75
buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. And then have 0 people read your blog because it’s on your random domain. Maybe your strategy works for well known bloggers, but tweeting content that people actually read beats owning content that nobody reads. And it is much harder to get people to visit your self-hosted blog than it is to get them to read your tweets.

Spread the word of your personal self-hosted blog on social media. Post about things that gets picked up by indexers like Bing or Google so that people searching the web can find your blog. Come to terms with the fact that nobody reads your blog and that's okay. Not everyone is entitled to readers or has opinions worth reading about.

> Come to terms with the fact that nobody reads your blog and that's okay. Not everyone is entitled to readers or has opinions worth reading about.

This. More people should probably blog to their perfect audience either that audience exists or not.

I used to write about stuff that I spent more than a couple of hours to and that couldn't be found on the internet. Back in the days at least that meant I'd get search engine traffic from other developers searching for solutions to that problem.

It didn't earn me any money but it was still very useful for me to learn from.

Edit: add "should probably"

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

#128

Post by TheDong »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #121
hintymad wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well they kind've do. Tweet-chains. If someone replies to their own tweet to create a series of Tweets, Twitter groups them into a chain and puts a "Show This Thread" link to expand it. It's the same thing in practice.

It is not the same thing in practice. It doesn't allow as natural paragraph formatting or sentence flow since the break-up interval for the text is dictated.

It makes it harder for people to reply to the chain (do you reply to the first or last?). The same problem exists for retweets; if someone retweets a tweet partway through the thread, it doesn't behave as neatly as you describe iirc.

Also, there's just a difference for the author. Writing a paragraph of text like this comment, where I get to go back through it and edit it as I go, add and remove paragraphs... It results in me creating a more carefully edited and thoughtful piece of writing. With the tweet threads, someone either has to write the tweets one at a time (and can't edit previous ones) with twitter dictating the breaks, or they have to do paragraph-oriented editing locally, and then figure out how to break it up correctly for tweets (which is non-trivial actually! URLs take up a difficult-to-predict-naively number of characters, so it's not naively 140 chars if you have urls, etc).

Basically, twitter's model facilitates a different sort of writing and reading than a single long post does, even if they are just both a bunch of letters.

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

#129

Post by jml7c5 »

qqssccfftt wrote: post #103
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

Well, you'd only see the first line or two. They'd be tap/click to expand.

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

#130

Post by TheDong »

symlinkk wrote: post #122
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…

You see the brevity as a bad thing, I see it as a good thing. If you can’t get to the point in 280 characters you probably don’t know what you’re talking about.

Some discussions have nuance that cannot be expressed in 280 characters.

Yes, when expressing a simple idea or an idea you understand very well, you should be able to do so concisely.

However, when providing information to someone else about a complicated subject, or trying to provide reasoning for something, it's very easy to need more words.

There's a reason that encyclopedia entries are usually much longer than 280 characters even though they're expressing a single point that supposedly the author knew very well.

When answering a question that requires referencing multiple other pieces of information and where the answers aren't certain, you even more easily overflow 280 characters. For example, saying "I started with a ballpark estimate from these facts (fact, fact fact), and extrapolating with this assumption, you get to this. However, if you extrapolate in this way, you get a slightly different answer" etc etc, expressing that uncertainty, the assumptions, and alternatives are all _very_ verbose.

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