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Twitter Notes

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Re: Twitter Notes

#91
post #87
post #76

My reaction to this is that it's an effort to keep users within the "walled garden" of Twitter, which is not the best thing for those that write. Recall the story with Medium - yes, you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your content. I know that I am talking with an overly developer-focused lens (a-la "you can reimplement Dropbox in a weekend"), but self-hosting blogs outside…

With the "walled garden" comment, I'm wondering - nowadays, all sorts of discourse seems to depend on these types of proprietary services/platforms, that employ armies of engineers to keep them running, develop new features, etc. Attempts to make things decentralized all seem to be aggregating into central controls, i.e. "Web3/crypto" -> coinbase, kraken, etc Why aren't older decentralized "services" protocols being…

You don't need a new protocol. HTTP(S) is great for blogs and writing.

Re: Twitter Notes

#92
post #76

My reaction to this is that it's an effort to keep users within the "walled garden" of Twitter, which is not the best thing for those that write. Recall the story with Medium - yes, you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your content. I know that I am talking with an overly developer-focused lens (a-la "you can reimplement Dropbox in a weekend"), but self-hosting blogs outside…

I would just love to get rid of the obnoxious writing style that twitter thought-leaders use when they're posting a thread. They always start with a fairly obnoxious click-baitey sentence. Then usually a fairly narcissistic hook about how "i'll explain" then "a " and "/1". And then each tweet needs to be punchy enough in 240 characters to keep people reading which produces a particularly annoying writing style. Then you need to use something like threadreaderapp to make it halfway readable.

I'd rather have those posts just written long-form, where people didn't have to use weird-ly stilted language because of the post format.

Re: Twitter Notes

#93

I'm by no means a UI/UX expert but the article UI is no good in my opinion. I can't really focus on the paragraphs for more than a couple seconds without effort before my eyes drift over to the margins (could be just me though). Interested to see where this will go!

Well I am a UI/UX expert, and it's a pretty bad interface for reading. The main issue is the spacing after paragraphs. It's large enough to separate the main blocks of the article from each other almost as much as from other elements on the page. The central narrative content blocks don't "hang together" so your eye wanders at the end of each paragraph. They need to spend some time understanding the Gestalt principle of proximity: https://www.usertesting.com/resources/topics/gestalt-princip...

Re: Twitter Notes

#94
This is the most painfully obvious feature they could have added to the product. Twitter is a massive distribution network with a heavily constrained format to distribute. Allowing more blog-like content formats to latch into the same established distribution network (instead of hacky threads which suck) is a no brainer.

Re: Twitter Notes

#95
post #90

While it's all well and good to launch new features, I think Twitter should improve their existing service and I'm referring to low hanging fruits. I don't understand the rationale behind cutting me off while I'm scrolling through Twitter simply because I'm not logged in. Twitter can still display Ads to me irrespective of whether I'm logged in or not. In fact cutting me off means I leave Twitter which means I don't…

I think the message is simply that Twitter isn’t that into you.

Twitter wants people that log in, and turn on their notifications. You’d think you’re good enough for them, you can provide them ad revenue too, but you’re just not their type and they don’t find much happines with you. Ultimately it’s not you, it’s them.

Re: Twitter Notes

#96
Anything to end the tyranny of the 280 char hot take.

Longer tweets turning into threads isn't any better, because the tweets are still written such that each one can be pulled out and quoted/retweeted. So instead of greater exposition, nuance, you get a series of hot takes compartmentalized into their own tweet.

Re: Twitter Notes

#98
post #87
post #76

My reaction to this is that it's an effort to keep users within the "walled garden" of Twitter, which is not the best thing for those that write. Recall the story with Medium - yes, you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your content. I know that I am talking with an overly developer-focused lens (a-la "you can reimplement Dropbox in a weekend"), but self-hosting blogs outside…

With the "walled garden" comment, I'm wondering - nowadays, all sorts of discourse seems to depend on these types of proprietary services/platforms, that employ armies of engineers to keep them running, develop new features, etc. Attempts to make things decentralized all seem to be aggregating into central controls, i.e. "Web3/crypto" -> coinbase, kraken, etc Why aren't older decentralized "services" protocols being…

> Why aren't older decentralized "services" protocols being looked at, or developed further - i.e. UUnet/newsgroups, torrent, etc?

Where will the money come from? The only reason there's any investment in software at all is so that a monetizable product can be built on top of it. And nothing monetizes better than vendor lock-in.

Re: Twitter Notes

#99
post #76

My reaction to this is that it's an effort to keep users within the "walled garden" of Twitter, which is not the best thing for those that write. Recall the story with Medium - yes, you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your content. I know that I am talking with an overly developer-focused lens (a-la "you can reimplement Dropbox in a weekend"), but self-hosting blogs outside…

Do you know that Twitter still does not show link previews reliably? It does for big sites like Youtube, but if you link your dinky little self-hosted blog, with all the right OG meta tags, it's 50-50 whether Twitter decides to show the link preview image.

At this point, one must assume that Twitter will do nearly anything it can to disincentivize clicking out to a 3rd party site.

At least it's better than Instagram, which doesn't let you post clickable links at all in your posts.

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