[gumby]

It’s not an aesthetic point by a functional one. In regular twitter, instead of reading running text you read a snippet and then have to hold the context in your head as you skip down to find the subsequent tweet. Thread reader eliminates part of that overhead but the resulting text is still choppy as a result of twitter’s constraints.

I am not complaining about twitter’s constraints per se — you can like it or not. But it works against the needs of making a coherent argument or narrative that requires context to be maintained (“on the stack” as it were) in order to understand subsequent statements.

Running text allows you to enter a brief “flow” state to get both Gestalt and detail. Sure, you can break an essay into chunks but you can also commute to work in a tank. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean using the wrong tool is effective or convenient.