I am endlessly fascinated by how twitter has now become a dumping ground for complex topics that are difficult to read and follow. But what happened to the old blogs?
I have a really high standard for my blog posts. They go through several rounds of rewrites, with feedback from friends, before I'm happy with them. That plus the length (median ~2000 words) means that most of my blog posts take weeks or months to write. I can hammer out a tweetstorm in 20 minutes.
(Also, tweets are a fun format! I want each tweet to be a complete idea, which is hard when you have only 280 characters.)
It's lower effort to make a stream of consciousness post one sentence at a time, and as a bonus, there's a built in audience / discovery network where they're posting.
Lower effort for whom? Back when I were a lad, we were told to write so that our readers did not have to work to understand us. The point of writing is to be understood. Old man yells at cloud.
I think it's helpful to keep in mind that with most of examples that get shared around, the choice for the author was not a string of tweets vs blog post, but rather a string of tweets vs not sharing at all.
How does one go back and edit a stream of consciousness like that into an actual coherent thought later though?
I was just having a conversation similar to this where it was explained "this is just how people my age do things". While attempting to avoid boomer/millennial tropes, this does make me wonder how much different schooling is now vs then (hoping to avoid those memes too).
I was always getting in trouble for just saying whatever came to mind vs slowing down to think if it really needed to be said or more specifically how it was said.
Nothing has happened to them. I have a few hundred distinct bookmarked blogs, if not over a thousand, and obviously my bookmark collection is a tiny fraction of what actually exists. They're still there.
(Also, tweets are a fun format! I want each tweet to be a complete idea, which is hard when you have only 280 characters.)