[linuxdaemon]

DisplayName @username Do I want to read a full length article in bite size chunks? That are sometimes arbitrarily 1/4

DisplayName @username Split across a bunch of little cards with a number to piece them together at the bottom? 2/4

DisplayName @username No, I do not. It's a bunch of extraneous crap that I have to filter out to read the actual point 3/4

DisplayName @username It is the wrong platform for that kind of content, and people are cramming it in anyway. 4/4

[pphysch]

This is a strawman. The best Twitter threads incorporate a coherent idea into ~1 tweet, sometimes accompanied by an illustrative image or link to further reading.

It turns out that forcing conciseness and having simple embedded media can make for engaging reading. It's not the right format for all writing, and not everyone knows how to use it (see your example), but it is fantastic for commentary and analysis.

[int_19h]

It's fantastic for soundbites and the flamewars that they generate. I can't think of any other use case that's genuinely enhanced by Twitter limits.

[klodolph]

Sounds kind of like a book.

You split text into arbitrary page boundaries, cut off a sentence in the middle, and then put a number at the bottom to tell you where you are in the book.

I’m honestly surprised that people have a hard time filtering this stuff out. Do you get distracted by the chapter headings at the top of a page in a book, or the page numbers? At least with a decent Twitter thread, the individual tweets will be coherent paragraphs. Some people do write Twitter threads where they simply write and place breaks wherever they run up against the 280 character limit, but I rarely see it.

[xigoi]

Books are that way because of a physical limitation. Twitter is not.

[klodolph]

Is that an important distinction?

[mattnewton]

you forgot to put extra comments in the middle of the thread and to have the link you arrived at be in the middle so you have to scroll up, click and then scroll down.

I've basically given up on going to twitter and only try to follow links that are sent to me of content I can't find elsewhere. I can't tell if there is some good reason for the user experience of the platform that I would enjoy if I pushed through, if I am just not the target user, or if it's genuinely just terrible and held afloat by network effects.