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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

#131

Post by saagarjha »

throwaway8879 wrote: post #100
dlivingston wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Socrates probably didn't draw a crowd": that's how I've seen this described. Meaning, the amount of people who see your content matters much less than who sees it.

Socrates didn't draw a crowd mostly because he was super annoying. Imagine going to the marketplace to buy food and then this short and ugly man with his two sidekicks shows up to start a dialectic about the nature of forms or something goofy, while you just want to get back home and start dinner...

No wonder they asked him to kill himself.

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

#132

Post by camillomiller »

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…

This would be so cool. I would still limit it somehow, tho, like at 5000 characters, to force everyone to brevity in line with twitter micromessaging branding. Honestly, also think of the amount of subtle, non invasive and highly targeted advertising space they’d just spawn out of thin air...

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

#133

Post by aaron-lebo »

TheDong wrote: post #128
ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differe…

Just to back you up, your post is 1022 characters.

If you were limited to 280:

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

It's artificial scarcity, that doesn't really benefit the reader that much, and certainly not the writer.

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

#134

Post by aembleton »

monksy wrote: post #91
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 happen to agree with you a lot. Unfortunately I think what people will take away from this article is: How can we fix twitter. The answer isn't to fix it. It's the wrong use of the medium. The bigger problem is how can we network indepdent blogs in a federated fashion where it's easier to have responses, build audiences, etc. i.e. You can't exactly respond very easily and see the 10k view with a single blog article…

Maybe we need to bring back web rings

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

#135

Post by JSavageOne »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #65
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).

> 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.

False dichotomy, one can tweet with a link to the full blog post.

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

#138

Post by badderdash »

monksy wrote: post #91
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 happen to agree with you a lot. Unfortunately I think what people will take away from this article is: How can we fix twitter. The answer isn't to fix it. It's the wrong use of the medium. The bigger problem is how can we network indepdent blogs in a federated fashion where it's easier to have responses, build audiences, etc. i.e. You can't exactly respond very easily and see the 10k view with a single blog article…

Isn't this how Reddit works?

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

#139

Post by heroina »

nullc wrote: post #27

The infinite scroll addiction pipeline has segmented the online world largely into two parts: Drooling scroll zombies on twitter/facebook/reddit/etc, and people who don't partake at all. The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, especially with the death of many popular rss readers.

Why did RSS readers die? Was it social media?

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

#140

Post by est »

I've been writing blog for almost 15 years. I think blog died because readers can not support blogs in some way. Many readers became silent subscribers and that's it. The RSS is only a publishing protocol. It's a good format to subscribe some notification, updates and such, but it's no match for the two-way relationship of modern social network.

1. The user can not directly comment with an RSS nor contact the author in some way

2. Author can not gain profit from RSS. Nor the reader app, distributor and publishers. There needs to be a payment option in RSS style.

Twitter and Facebook are exactly opposite of this, it's built upon layers of layers of connections and there is no way to enumerate the whole graph. It gets tired pretty fast and became an echo chamber. Contents tend to get shorter to grab attention with fragmented information everywhere.

And in the era of mobile phones, making content on a small screen is painful. But making viral videos are not. I think someday if videos are just easily indexable and searchable as texts, Tiktok can become the blogging platform of next generation.

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