[Andre607]

Does anyone else find these kinds of Twitter threads incredibly hard to follow?

It's very difficult to contextualize and adapt to reading these short incremental bursts of text or 'Twitter threads'. It always feels like important context and exposition is missing. I seem to understand the gist, that Youtube seems to have promoted flat earth videos disproportionately, but the 'whistleblower' aspect is not immediately apparent.

[untog]

> the 'whistleblower' aspect is not immediately apparent

The second sentence is "I worked on the AI that promoted them by the billions." and he then goes on to discuss the internal workings of the algorithm. That feels like the actions of a whistleblower to me.

The numbers in the middle of the text and the un-expanded short URLs are annoying, but I'm struggling to see what else about this is difficult to follow. I actually think Twitter itself is better in this regard than this threading service, which tries to hide complexity but just ends up causing confusion.

[blhack]

IMO this is a bug to users of twitter, but a feature to twitter the for profit company. It encourages fuzzy communication, and usually the least charitable interpretations.

Basically it's tailored to push your emotional button.

[dallashoxton]

100% agreed.

>(If it decreases between 1B and 10B views on such content, and if we assume one person falling for it each 100,000 views, it will prevent 10,000 to 100,000 "falls") 14/

What does this sentence even mean? It's very hard to parse to the point of being incoherent.

The fact that people have gone from writing long-form essays to "twitter threads" to argue something is tragic.

[ec109685]

That given the number of views of this content and how likely a user will fall for it, there are a significant number of people who will not be tricked into believing something not true due to this algorithm change.

[itronitron]

> Does anyone else find these kinds of Twitter threads incredibly hard to follow?

Yes, although I think it accurately reflects the level of rigor that the authors apply in their thinking (and by that I mean 'not a lot').

[kinkrtyavimoodh]

It's basically stream of consciousness rambling that passes for thought leadership

[ericol]

Couldn't agree more.

[RodericDay]

I find it incredibly easy to follow.

In fact, the thread on Twitter itself is even easier to read than this ThreaderApp link that some people demand.

The incessant bloviating from people who refuse to learn how to use Twitter is far more annoying tbh, it's starting to sound like old people complaining about the music being too loud, and it always derails discussion.

[egypturnash]

I know how to read Twitter and yeah, this one is really hard to read. It's got all these numbers with slashes behind them scattered throughout. It's got a list of numbers with slashes in the middle. It's got random links. It's got the occasional sentence without punctuation

It's just kind of a mess.

I was a heavy user of Twitter for multiple years. I've pulled back on it lately and it's really amazing how much I don't miss the weird, telegraphic kind of writing it tends to encourage. It really bugs me that one of our major means of communication forces you to filter everything through tiny text boxes that only recently became big enough for a whole sentence, and strongly discourages taking time to actually consider the flow of an idea through multiple paragraphs.

[StellarTabi]

"This is why I can’t have conversations using Twitter"

http://antirez.com/news/82

I can't see how people use Twitter for anything more than shouting into the ether at each other. It's just so messy and rambly if you try.

[hokus]

haha, I looked at twitter for 5 min after it launched, I laughed really hard and closed the page. The thought process was something like "Oh, they've maximized unusability! I should now go and learn how to have a normal conversation.... I think not"

Then my life flashed in front of my eyes (by lack of better words) and I recalled a million lengthy conversations that pretty much made me who I am.

There was a funny video with a professor and a twitter "expert" where the professor argued it bad. The twitter fanboy kept interrupting him half way his first sentence until he got angry and asked if he could say something now. The twitter guy then said: But I already know what you were going to say. I laughed so hard. The conditioning clipped up his mind into 10 sec attention bursts then he had to talk to himself out loud again. Nothing of interest was said in the interview. The twitter guy thanked him and said it was a wonderful conversation. The professor frowned silently and looked at him from the corner of his eye. It was the best "what a fucking moron" face I have ever seen.

[okhuman]

+1