| HN Mirror

To be clear, I’m not suggesting someone write for some other audience or site first and then share the results on Twitter. I’m suggesting that someone write for Twitter, starting off by writing essentially the tweets they were going to write, but offline in a text editor; then edit the resulting paragraphs for readability/flow; then slap that prose into a Gist and take the https://gist.io/ view of it (or do any other equivalent "pastebin to clean, unlisted-but-linkable HTML page" flow); and then publish the first of those tweets, as a link to that HTML page.

In other words: maintain a blog on Twitter, where the tweets serve as the blog’s chronological index / human-readable RSS-feed and interactive comments section; and floating text pages hosted in arbitrary other places serve as the blog’s content. This idea is what “microblogging” was supposed to mean, before the media re-interpreted it as being equivalent to “really enjoying this poop I’m taking”-style life-logging.

I’ve always been surprised that Twitter itself doesn’t have a built-in first-party workflow for this. Tumblr, the other 20-year-old microblogging platform, does: you can publish a post with an embedded “Read More” break, that will hide everything below it in your feed but show it when the static-HTML version of the page is viewed, with the “Read More” link at the bottom of the post in the feed, linked to said static-HTML page. It would make a ton of sense to me for Twitter to have something that’s half this, and half Reddit’s approach to text posts: giving you the ability to create a tweet that, instead of having a linked URL to go with the tweet, has a longform text body to go with the tweet.

Think about the fact that you can “attach” a multi-minute-long video to a tweet as a first-party workflow, and Twitter will host the video for you — but you can’t “attach” a multi-minute-long blob of rich prose text, where Twitter will host the text for you. Seems silly when I say it that way, doesn’t it?