Forget Twitter Threads; Write a Blog Post Instead

Posted this before (and it is a bad analogy I am sure) but I find moaning that something is in twitter is akin to moaning that someone told a story in a pub.<p>Pubs are noisy, and busy, and distracting, and I don&#x27;t like them, and they aren&#x27;t great for kids at night...<p>But it doesn&#x27;t matter - the person was there, their friends were there, they had a story they wanted to tell and they told it in a way they enjoyed.<p>End of. Great if someone videoed it so others who don&#x27;t like pubs could see it too, but mainly that doesn&#x27;t happen. Just accept that some people like different things than you, and if it bothers you - take their content and blog about it, critique it and share it. But don&#x27;t tell the story teller to change - especially if you want them to head somewhere where their friends are not... The point of a good story is to entertain an audience, wherever they may be.

I don&#x27;t think your personal reading comfort is the focus of whoever is writing threads on Twitter. Blogs are long form content, with structure and chapters and long sentences. Twitter threads are a collection of short, abbreviated thoughts that center around a subject.<p>These two rarely compete. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever seen a Twitter thread that would be better if it were a blog, and I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve seen blogs that I&#x27;d rather see as a twitter thread.<p>If you&#x27;re a blogger or website designer then you have entirely different goals than the people writing threads on Twitter. People here moan all the time about things being a Twitter thread instead of a blog but nobody cares about what you prefer. Twitter threads are the result of someone on social media deciding to talk for a bit more than one post, not some predetermined article someone wants to write. There&#x27;s no long draft being queued one by one, posts are told separately.<p>Expecting people to set up a blog and link to it is like asking a friend who&#x27;s telling you a story to stop and write the whole thing down because all of the unnecessary side details are distracting you. It&#x27;s unnecessary, rude and if they went along it&#x27;d detract from the story being told. If you dislike the way content is brought out on Twitter, don&#x27;t go to Twitter. You can block it in your Pihole, Adblocker, hosts file, you name it. Don&#x27;t tell others how to tell their stories, that&#x27;s not your call to make.<p>I&#x27;d prefer more people I follow to be on open alternatives such as Mastodon, but I&#x27;m not going to write blogs about advicing people why Twitter is bad and Mastodon is better.

I agree that Twitter is a poor medium for writing. But Twitter gives you an audience (and retweets).<p>A recent discussion on Hacker News on Medium had a number of posters say that without a presence on Medium they would not have found exposure for their writing [1].<p>If the platform gives you an audience, you can&#x27;t underestimate that appeal for authors of any topic.<p>I started writing a blog on a niche topic in 2007 and continued writing fairly regularly until 2013. Why did I stop? Simply because hardly anyone was reading the blog!<p>At first, I convinced myself I was writing for myself and an audience was not important. But over time, I came to realise that, although the size of the audience was not important to me, the interest and engagement of readers did matter (especially for a blog with a very niche topic). Hardly any readers commented on my blog posts (which was important to me).<p>Today, there are lots of blogs - mostly corporate blogs writing about their products, or single author bloggers trying to establish their &quot;personal brand&quot;. The writing style is often inflated, formal, corporate-sounding: in short, simply bland. What&#x27;s gone is the more personal voice of an author - more common when personal blogging was more prevalent. I think the heyday of personal blogging is mostly over. And that&#x27;s a shame.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28493431" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28493431</a>

I <i>hate</i> Twitter as a company and a social institution, but<p>1. &quot;People will share a random Tweet from a thread&quot; &lt;- this is a feature. You can&#x27;t easily address bits of a blog post unless the blog uses headers with easily accessible links that one can copy. Also, getting the broader context from a Tweet in a thread is pretty easy.<p>2. Blogging is hard. Not just creating a blog, but actually framing the content. Tweeting in a thread feels easier. There are rails. I can respond articulately here or on Twitter, but for whatever reason I always feel like my every attempt at blogging is miserable. I&#x27;m envious that the author of TFA finds it so natural, because it&#x27;s something I&#x27;d <i>really like to be able to do well</i>. In the meanwhile, I have Twitter threads and HN comments.

I am one of those loonie cave dwellers who want nothing to do with Twitter.<p>I find it to be a horrible UX in almost all ways.<p>The limit of how many characters you can type in a message nearly guarantees clickbait, sensationalism, and idiocy.<p>Getting around this most fundamental part of Twitter, with &quot;threads&quot;, is a painful experience for the reader. (In my opinion).<p>If Twitter included proper support for it, it would be better. Each post on a thread would appear directly after each other and stripped of unnecessary repeated parts. Except now you have basically changed the main idea of Twitter and allow longer posts.<p>I like posting things on my blog. I know I have only 3 readers, one of whom I pay but you get a chance to build content in your own silo and can be as long winded as you feel like.<p>I would have no interest in HN if it was not for the thoughtful and high-quality long form discourse it has.<p>If a story is a link to Twitter I just click right onto the discussion.<p>I guess my blog is a barren wasteland and I might pull in 1 reader from Twitter<p>It is a horrible UX that makes it close to impossible to convey a story. (Unless its &quot;This is my headline&quot; click here

&quot;Forget First Drafts; Write Perfect the First Time Instead&quot; or &quot;Forget The Way That Happens To Work For You; Write The Way You Failed To Do For Years Instead&quot;.<p>Blog posts are probably more readable than Twitter threads; I won&#x27;t argue that. But if using Twitter is the thing that gets you to get ideas out of your head and into the written word, it&#x27;s a hell of a lot better than just thinking about that awesome blog post and then never writing it—and, as siblings have noted, the &quot;dump into Twitter, revise into a blog post&quot; flow is both common and totally reasonable.

Funny how my experience is the complete opposite. I perceive twitter threads as a superior format of consuming reading content.<p>- it&#x27;s chunked, which forces the writer to formulate more structured thought nuggets and keep the reader engaged<p>- it allows you to share specific portion of the content that you like instead of sharing a blog that people ignore because they never read past the intro<p>- instead of bashing publishing on twitter threads, I think we should focus on developing tools that allow to convert and reshare your (I don&#x27;t mean your but you get the idea) long read blog that nobody reads into twitter threads<p>I have never skipped a thread on twitter. The longer the better and more engaging.<p>I strongly believe that format is superior to most other reading formats and it aligns really well with our biological focus rhythms

Really <i>really</i> few bits of content deserve a blog post. Most written content is ephemeral and uninteresting two weeks from now. It&#x27;s perfect to be buried in Twitter never to be seen again. There is certainly content that deserves better layout, better archiving and so on. But most written content on twitter isn&#x27;t like that (at least in my feed). Also, having to leave Twitter and click a browser link is usually to disruptive for me when scrolling twitter. Information that doesn&#x27;t come on the spoon loses my attention to the information in the next tweet.

Actually, I prefer to write a twitter thread first and then blog it. My 2c on this,<p>- Yes the ux sucks but people are used to reading threads.<p>- There are tools like thread reader app that unroll threads and store for future reference.<p>- tools like Dewey help manage threads.<p>- tools like chirr.app and typefully help create threads with nice heuristics that split your post into threads.<p>- You get distribution and get to grow an audience.<p>- specific tweets can be thought of as “highlights” that are retweeted vs liked<p>- it’s easier to link other peoples tweets and threads, as well as your own to build a knowledge graph of sorts<p>- it forces you to think in small increments and build up your arguments in sequence. I’ve found it quite helpful in articulating thoughts.<p>- lastly, by publishing it on twitter and inviting debate, your audience could get you to rethink povs and also add more of them to your thinking. when you finally write a post, not only are they more likely to retweet and get you seen wider — they’ll feel an aspect of contribution to it which helps cement your relationship with them.

&gt; As someone who has only really started using Twitter in the last few months<p>Seems like a little bit of a self-report right off the bad. The OP is not very familiar with Twitter and the ecosystem and user behaviors of the platform, and is coming with (admittedly biased) perspective as a blogger.<p>For example:<p>&gt; someone that I follow re-tweeted Tweet number 47 in this ridiculously long thread.<p>This is actually highlighting one of the <i>benefits</i> of Twitter threads as a text - chunkable content. Blog posts are great for a long narrative that requires full context of the intro&#x2F;supporting&#x2F;conclusion, but Twitter threads excel in areas where the content is more a series statements&#x2F;points that can stand alone. Think more like &quot;bullet points&quot; of a topic rather than a longer-form narrative.<p>But then, the OP transitions into the quick assumption that the problem is the difficulty in setting up a blog, which is a big assumption that I think misses the actual benefits of this format vs. traditional blogging.

I&#x27;m not going to try to debate the merits of Twitter threads vs blog posts, but I will note that I, like many others, have an abandoned blog [1] but manage to post plenty of Twitter threads. The activation energy needed is just way lower on Twitter, and (as an academic) if I need to write something much more serious it&#x27;ll usually be a paper.<p>If you want people to blog more and tweet less, you probably have to find a way to make it easier than firing off a tweet thread.<p>Edit: Also, I have to say – if blogs are such an inherently superior readability experience, why is engagement so much higher for Twitter? Perhaps it&#x27;s shallow engagement, but it seems like the height of nerd-think to say that a platform actively used by hundreds of millions is &quot;unusable&quot;.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;moyix.blogspot.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;moyix.blogspot.com&#x2F;</a>

Threads are definitely a worse experience. However, I think you&#x27;re overestimating the ability of one&#x27;s audience to transfer to another platform. It&#x27;s hard enough to get someone to read something <i>on Twitter,</i> let alone get them to click through to another site.<p>Threads capitalize on the momentum of writing a good tweet, without losing a reader by making them go to another site.

I&#x27;m surprised that no one mentioned that twitter at least qualifies as bad hypertext whereas the web (and thus blogs) don&#x27;t.<p>In particular twitter has (primitive) transclusions: by manually breaking up your writing into awkward ≤ 280 char chunks you basically allow other people to quote and comment or reply to them, recursively. Although tweets can and frequently do get deleted, that is the only form these transclusions break; they don&#x27;t silently and unverifiably change content.<p>The web has absolutely no facility for quotation and commenting or even for pointing at some particular content in a way that ensures any continuity of content between the time of link creation and perusual. It is thus an abysmally bad medium for any form of discussion.

Why not both?<p>Write a blog-post, and have a brief summary + link on Twitter?<p>------<p>The main benefits to the blog-post is that you get writings in exactly the format you want. Sure, Twitter does images and videos now, but there&#x27;s still MathML, DotViz &#x2F; Javascript graphs &#x2F; etc. etc. that I can run on a blog that will never be allowed on Twitter. All possible with static-sites or low-dynamic sites (ex: low-CPU usage PHP).<p>Lets say you&#x27;re a Chess blogger. Would you really want to be making .png files (images) of chess positions and talking about them? Or would you rather have a FEN&#x2F;PGN-interpreter in Javascript on a blog-post? (First one on my search engine: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mliebelt.github.io&#x2F;PgnViewerJS&#x2F;examples.html#1102" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mliebelt.github.io&#x2F;PgnViewerJS&#x2F;examples.html#1102</a>)<p>No. You load up your favorite PGN-editor. You document the positions you think were interesting. You download the best PGN-interpreter you can find on Github onto your blog and let it rip.<p>The main benefit of Twitter is that the audience is there. Have your toxic comments spew out over Twitter, but your content remains on your site specifically.<p>------------<p>The reason why the HTML format is so powerful is because the writers can invent new formats specific to their communities (thanks to the magic of Javascript). Chess players have invented PGN to describe games. Tetris players have invented Fumen (a Javascript play-by-play of Tetris strategies). The Math community has LaTeX &#x2F; MathML &#x2F; MathJAX. Etc. etc.

I find creating a Twitter thread has a lower barrier of entry in comparison to writing a blog post. Sometimes I have contents which I&#x27;d like to get out, but then I can&#x27;t motivate myself to write a full post (where I&#x27;d also want to explore the topic in more depth to achieve a certain level of quality). Doing a quick thread is a nice way out then.<p>For instance, in this case [1] I felt it&#x27;s not worth spending the energy and time on a post, but it was still an interesting bit to share. Plus, tweet threads allow for their own kind of fun experiments like this one [2], which you couldn&#x27;t reproduce with a blog post. I.e. both have their place in my opinion.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;gunnarmorling&#x2F;status&#x2F;1271745125920759808" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;gunnarmorling&#x2F;status&#x2F;1271745125920759808</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;nipafx&#x2F;status&#x2F;1438022721066123266" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;nipafx&#x2F;status&#x2F;1438022721066123266</a>

Threads are similar to slideshows - you can put a few bullet points that sound reasonably correct, but lacking in detail and context and you mostly forget about it after you read it, it&#x27;s disposable.<p>A long-form narrative that is convincing and made to last and read repeatedly is much harder to write.

the explosion of threads is because of twitter&#x27;s algo...<p>to view a thread, you have to interact with a tweet. this interaction drives metrics that results in the tweet showing up more frequently in the algo-feed. the multi-post nature of a thread means there are more opportunities to &quot;like&#x2F;retweet&quot; - which also drive the algo-feed.<p>all this increases follower count... and an audience (that&#x27;s soon to be easily monetisable on twitter) is far more valuable than a blog... <i>unfortunately</i>

I&#x27;ll take Twitter threads over YouTube every single time.. I don&#x27;t want to spend 10+ minutes listening to some guy explain something that should take less than two minutes, but they have to prolong it to get that ad revenue

Yes, thank you for writing this. Twitter threads are really annoying. A good well thought long form article is so much better from all points of view.

The main reason to do a Twitter thread (which the author alludes to but doesn’t look at enough) is audience. Good thoughts can go viral quickly on social media. The same cannot be said for blog posts (even when shared). This could be speaking to a larger issue but still the case.<p>As an example, I published this blog post [1] in November of 2019. It was probably read by hundreds to low thousands in about a year.<p>I then made a twitter thread out of the same content a year or so later [2], it was seen by over half a million people.<p>This is not to say audience is the <i>only</i> consideration but a combination of a blog post turned thread might be the best way to get audience and an archive.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mynameisjehad.com&#x2F;making-the-case-to-decision-makers-the-presentation-format-to-follow&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mynameisjehad.com&#x2F;making-the-case-to-decision-ma...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jaffoneh&#x2F;status&#x2F;1376945166771056641?s=21" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jaffoneh&#x2F;status&#x2F;1376945166771056641?s=21</a>

<i>&gt;Honestly, I don’t get why people do it. For the likes? For the shares?</i><p>I suspect the author already knows the answer but dances around it because any low-effort search engine query[1] would point to several articles explaining why:<p>- text that&#x27;s directly on Twitter often has <i>higher engagement</i> than making people click external links[2]<p>- most people don&#x27;t want to set up a blog -- especially if it&#x27;s <i>counterproductive</i> to the 1st bullet point above<p>Yes, if they write on a true blog website, the improved readability will score points with some folks such as the author of this essay. Since variations of his argument have been repeated with no noticeable decline in Twitter threads, I think it shows that &quot;blog readers&quot; are a non-priority to influential Twitter users.<p>tldr: author lists the &quot;true&quot; reasons blogs are superior but completely misses the motivations for Twitter users to avoid blogs<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=why+do+people+post+twitter+threads+instead+of+blogs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=why+do+people+post+twitter+t...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;buffer.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;twitter-thread-experiment#the-plan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;buffer.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;twitter-thread-experiment#the-p...</a>

I understand both sides, if you have an audience on Twitter and want to quickly throw out a thread, it works for quick feedback, but at the expense of readability. If the thread is just a few Tweets long it isn&#x27;t too bad, but beyond that it&#x27;s hard to read.<p>Shameless plug: I launched Glue this year which succinctly put <i>is like Twitter and Medium had a baby</i> [1]. Glue has your standard microblogging features, but you can &quot;expand&quot; into a full blog post if you want [2]. I specifically wanted to tackle the melding of a microblogging timeline, long form writing (blogs) and the ability to use your own domain if you wish.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glue.im&#x2F;noah" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glue.im&#x2F;noah</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glue.im&#x2F;noah&#x2F;the-story-of-twitpic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glue.im&#x2F;noah&#x2F;the-story-of-twitpic</a>

&gt; Using the example above, I became aware of it because someone that I follow re-tweeted Tweet number 47 in this ridiculously long thread. Because it was a random Tweet in a very long thread, I (and I imagine most other people reading the tweet) had absolutely no context as to what the whole saga was about.<p>How is that different from taking a screenshot or posting an extract of a blog post, with a link to it?<p>&gt; I’ve some really interesting threads on Twitter that are full of useful information, but as a consumer of that content, it’s a nightmare to follow. Content creators should make content as simple to consume as possible.<p>If you&#x27;re already on twitter, reading a thread is easier than going to a blog and reading it.

Many of the responses here are missing the real reason that Twitter is preferred: time. The amount of reading to do is vast, the number of minutes in the day are few.<p>We can bemoan the extinction of blogs, long form journalism, etc. all day long but there is an information density problem that is going nowhere.<p>Along the same lines, a lot of written material is a lot longer than it needs to be. Those insisting on prose might ponder the old maxim, &quot;If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.&quot;<p>Maybe there is a comfortable medium somewhere between Twitter and prose. I enjoy long form writing sometimes, but I much more often don&#x27;t have the time to read it.

This seems to be a tech generational issue. Blogs are the .plan files of today. Just as John Carmack now tweets and has abandoned his .plan, Twitter is the medium for thought sharing, increasingly if they are very long.

&lt;Why not both? meme&gt;<p>There is something to be said for threads that provide a few &quot;bullet points&quot; of the article.<p>I would agree with the author when the threads get crazy long, or if the tweets don&#x27;t encapsulate a single point.

Twitter gives you engagement, interaction and feedback in a way blog posts don&#x27;t. I still dream of someday figuring out how to get such engagement. I feel like I&#x27;m suffocating and it&#x27;s hurting my writing. I need engagement to know what to write about and I&#x27;m not really getting the kind of engagement I need.<p>If you are socially plugged in at work or something and somehow magically know what the pulse of some segment of society is, good for you. Different strokes for different folks.<p>For some people, Twitter is how they take that pulse. Why rain on their parade?

I am gonna go ahead and make a claim that Twitter will outlive 95% of the personal websites that Hacker News readers will set up and host.<p>Most of us developers don&#x27;t have a good habit of blogging and we aren&#x27;t good writers either. Twitter gives you a long-lasting platform to briefly express opinions without much boilerplate and structure, and still get the message across.

The thing is people write threads to write a twitter thread. It&#x27;s to increase their following. A good twitter thread will get a twitter account a few hundred new followers. This is literally just them working to increase their audience. And most of the time they&#x27;re increasing their audience to sell stuff.

No format can get me to shut the window and move on faster than a Twitter &quot;thread&quot;.<p>Just put it in a Twitlonger and tweet that post. It&#x27;s literally that simple.<p>I honestly cannot fathom why anyone thought it was a good idea to tie several tweets into a sequence as a format.<p>My reaction to Part 2s on Tiktok is almost, but not quite, as visceral.

One of the worst things about twitter is the flood of “unroll” bots in the replies for every single thread that gets any amount of attention. Personally, I don’t find threads hard to navigate or consume, but clearly plenty of users would rather just read a blog post. I can’t blame them, I miss blogging.

Finally somebody wrote a post about something that I was cursing under my breath about for years now. How comes an otherwise sane, intelligent, eloquent person, usually with supreme technical skills in one or many fields of knowledge, sometimes very relevant technical knowledge, doesn&#x27;t find any better way to write a long, detailed, very deep treatise of some topic - than using a service which forces you into tiny squawks of text and explicitly isn&#x27;t means for publishing long, detailed, deep explorations of anything? To me, it&#x27;s an analogue of giving your friend $500 for their birthday - in pennies. From one side, it&#x27;s awesome to get $500, from another - really, did you have to make it <i>this</i> annoying?<p>Yes, I know thread unrollers exist - I used them many times. Still this is a very annoying habit.

And if you&#x27;re going to write a blog post please publish it somewhere where I&#x27;m not forced to open it in a private tab&#x2F;disable JavaScript&#x2F;manipulate my user agent or whatever else is now necessary in order to not give my info to a reader hostile platform.

Two places to set up simple&#x2F;minimal blogs<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bearblog.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bearblog.dev&#x2F;</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smol.pub&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smol.pub&#x2F;</a> (shameless plug)

A lot of twitter users don’t follow links, that might be part of it too.

At least on my corner of twitter, threads gained huge popularity after a spontaneous event ran by @vgr (of ribbonfarm, premium mediocre, and gervais principle fame) at the end of 2019 called threadapalooza. It&#x27;s now being turned into a yearly affair. The history is relayed in this thread:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;threadapalooza&#x2F;status&#x2F;1309816147135492098" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;threadapalooza&#x2F;status&#x2F;130981614713549209...</a>

Isn&#x27;t the whole point of doing this over twitter for the distribution, not the medium? How many people have blogs with 20k subscribers with the built in virality?

Does anyone know how OPs blog is hosted? It looks nice.

I saw this here and was annoyed enough to [blog about it]. There&#x27;s probably a joke there...<p>[blog about it]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maya.land&#x2F;responses&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;21&#x2F;twitter-threads-chestertons-fence.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maya.land&#x2F;responses&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;21&#x2F;twitter-threads-chest...</a>

Did another @foone thread make the first page?

Gotta disagree with the title.. A twitter thread forces the author to condense key points thoroughly and present it in a way where fluff talk has no place due to character limitations. Even if it just consists of links, I prefer consuming good threads rather than poorly structured &amp; fluff-stuffed blog posts.

&quot;I’ve tried posting a couple of Twitter threads myself, but both times I did it I found it awkward and confusing. Honestly, I don’t get why people do it. For the likes? For the shares?&quot;<p>This seems quite disingenuous, you clearly &#x27;get why people do it&#x27; you just iterated the reasons you tried it yourself ;p

From a UX standpoint, for the writer, threads a great way to spin off thoughts without caring about the long-format.<p>Maybe there&#x27;s an opportunity for existing blogging platforms to pick up this cue. Provide an app or experience that makes punching in a bunch of thoughts quick and easy then publish it as one post.

There&#x27;s a Twitter bot for that:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;threadreaderapp?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;threadreaderapp?lang=en</a><p>From any tweet in the thread, mention us with a keyword &quot;unroll&quot;<p>@threadreaderapp unroll<p>And it converts the entire thread into a blog post on their site.

Get back to me when your blog post has the same engagement level as my Twitter thread.

Or what about using a newsletter like Revue instead of a blog? Some benefits from Twitter, like getting exposure and subscribers a bit easier, easy to setup, and good for some longer form content?

The problem is that you can get more page views on Twitter for something that takes a day to write than you&#x27;d be able to get in an entire year of blogging full time.

The ability to retweet, react, and respond to individual tweets within a thread is a feature, not a bug. It also forces the writer to value brevity and getting to the point, and valuing brevity means valuing the reader&#x27;s time. You need to be able to fit a thought into 240 characters in any platform for simple readability, Twitter has just enforced that.<p>Obviously it&#x27;s the responsibility of the retweeter to choose tweets to retweet that make sense in isolation, or provider context as a quote-tweet.<p>But the fact that Twitter allows people to interact with each component of a story or argument in isolation is a good thing. For example it makes a Gish Gallop visibly awkward.<p>Also, in general the web usability has gotten so bad that clicking strange links is ... a bit risky. Paywalls, autoplay videos, chumboxes... I&#x27;ll stay here, thanks.

Except that my blog doesn&#x27;t have followers and stuf...

i love tweets because they&#x27;re short. most writers write too much. for example, op&#x27;s post could have fit in a single tweet.<p>&quot;i dislike twitter threads because they&#x27;re hard to follow. it&#x27;s hard to find a tweet&#x27;s context in a long thread like &lt;link&gt;. unfortunately, people use threads because they get followers from threads. they should host a blog instead.&quot;

This is good advice given that Twitter should be violently shut down. It will make things significantly easier to archive.

There <i>must</i> be an automated tool for transforming twitter threads into blog posts and posting them.

Blogs will be reborn, I&#x27;m sure.

Maybe this person should subscribe to Cory Doctorow&#x27;s blog then.<p>Cory Doctorow published a blog post <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pluralistic.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;16&#x2F;sociopathic-monsters&#x2F;#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pluralistic.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;16&#x2F;sociopathic-monsters&#x2F;#all...</a> with the same content of the thread cited in the article.<p>A case of &quot;get off my lawn&quot; ?

Since this is the Nth+1 blog-not-thread post I&#x27;ve seen...<p>I&#x27;m gonna call it:<p>The &quot;blog&quot; is dead.

&gt; For example, this thread is 50 Tweets long. Fifty. Tweets. Long!<p>You should check out the blog post instead, then.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pluralistic.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;16&#x2F;sociopathic-monsters&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pluralistic.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;16&#x2F;sociopathic-monsters&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s weird to use Doctorow as an example for someone who should blog instead of use Twitter.

There are 2 points:<p>1- a big percentage of threads are just mediocre blog posts<p>2- what is good about twitter threads? they are written for humans. as opposed to articles and blog posts that are written for search engines.

The problem with twitter threads isn&#x27;t that they&#x27;re broken up into chunks, it&#x27;s still relatively easy to read. The problem is what a cancerous, user hostile, and bloated website twitter is that won&#x27;t even let you open the pictures without logging in. Nitter or threader fix this but at the point you&#x27;re switching to a different website, why not just make it a blog.

Disagree as an end users blogs are an inconsistent dump. I know what to expect from a twitter thread every single time. Its the same experience, no matter what.

&gt;Forget Twitter Threads; Write a Blog Post Instead<p>Exactly my thinking too.