| I agree that Twitter is a poor medium for writing. But Twitter gives you an audience (and retweets). 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]. If the platform gives you an audience, you can't underestimate that appeal for authors of any topic. 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! 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). Today, there are lots of blogs - mostly corporate blogs writing about their products, or single author bloggers trying to establish their "personal brand". The writing style is often inflated, formal, corporate-sounding: in short, simply bland. What'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's a shame. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28493431 |
It only gives you an audience and retweets if you already have an audience and they retweet you. If I posted a Twitter thread, it would be nothing but crickets. It's extremely difficult to build up a Twitter following of 10,000 that are willing to interact with you and retweet your stuff in 2021 unless lots of people know you outside of Twitter. For the most part, the days of Twitter interaction are over. These days, it's mostly about self-promotion and existing brands.