Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Notes

twitter.com

161–170 of 316 posts

Re: Twitter Notes

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Same! This is what makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic feed rather than the reverse-chron feed. Almost nobody I intentionally follow uses this awful device.

>makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic feed

Does Twitter change this setting against your will?

Re: Twitter Notes

#162
post #153
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> Do you know that Twitter still does not show link previews reliably? This seems like it might be a somewhat good thing, for privacy. User generated trackers could be included in topical tweets.

Is that image not just resolved once, while posting? I remember Apple solving it in a similar way for iMessage - the sender always generates the preview.

Re: Twitter Notes

#163
post #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,…

just as an FYI, someone made a tool specifically to preview what twitter was going to do for a card when you gave it a link:

https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

Re: Twitter Notes

#164
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same! This is what makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic feed rather than the reverse-chron feed. Almost nobody I intentionally follow uses this awful device.

>makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic feed Does Twitter change this setting against your will?

Yes

Re: Twitter Notes

#165
post #162
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you know that Twitter still does not show link previews reliably? This seems like it might be a somewhat good thing, for privacy. User generated trackers could be included in topical tweets.

Is that image not just resolved once, while posting? I remember Apple solving it in a similar way for iMessage - the sender always generates the preview.

I've seen embedded videos auto play directly from external sites, in the app. Making the video fullscreen just expand what appears to be a frame, with ads and all present.

Re: Twitter Notes

#166
post #4

I welcome this. I always hated the long multi-tweet essays and have often just given up on reading them, especially when I'm not logged in I can't even make it to the end before twitter blocks me from scrolling further. As of now it doesn't look like you can reply to a note with another note? That might go a long way for improving debate and discussion.

Well, the first 3 links from the twitter annoucement gives a "page not found". Seems that they avoided starting with the right foot.

Works for me after a page reload.

Re: Twitter Notes

#167
post #160
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 agree. However I doubt it'll be long lived. Twitter gives up on features all the time (fleets, I doubt spaces will be around in a year). They'll try this out and abandon it like most of their experiments.

I have the same hunch, to be honest. The core value proposition of Twitter, at least to me, is that it's short-form content - quick updates from the network that I care about. I don't go there to either write long-form content or consume long-form content directly (although I do get pointers to others' newsletter and blog pages).

My guess is that this is an attempt to replace long threads (1/n), but those have their own place and mechanics and I don't see how getting people to write Twitter Notes is in any way a 1:1 replacement or improvement for that.

Time will tell.

Re: Twitter Notes

#168
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 love ghost but it's always been pretty expensive for just a blog. It seems like they've maybe shifted prices down a bit, it used to be more than $10/mo, and measured based on page views. Now they're really pushing their content creator angle.

Ghost is also just one way to do it - there are others that still allow you to have ownership of your content and the portability/domain connection that allows you, the writer, to manage your content in whatever shape you want.

Re: Twitter Notes

#169
Pretty much every take I have on this is covered by the discourse here about walled gardens, but I do have two other points of concern: Indexability and SEO.

When you want to view certain content on Twitter, you need to log in. If you don't want to, you're forbidden from viewing that content. If that happens here, I worry that the accessibility of long-form, blog-style content production will lead to more users either being onboarded to Twitter for what should be a simple matter of viewing an HTML + CSS page or otherwise missing out on content that could be valuable to them (e.g. news from prominent personalities, interviews with professionals, press releases from companies, etc.)

My second concern is with SEO. If this really takes off, I worry that a first page of search results that once would have contained articles from a number of separate blogs will become dominated by a single, homogenous site. Perhaps grouping results in the way that Google does could help with that, but I'd rather avoid needing to append "-site:twitter.com" to my query just to be able to find content that I can read without being tracked.

As a whole, I'm not a fan. This strikes me as another move by a social media giant to become "the internet" in the eyes of some people. Maybe that's appealing to the masses, but it's dystopian in my eyes.

Re: Twitter Notes

#170
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same! This is what makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic feed rather than the reverse-chron feed. Almost nobody I intentionally follow uses this awful device.

>makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic feed Does Twitter change this setting against your will?

Yes
Post reply on HN