[HN Gopher] Twitter Notes
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter Notes
Author : yellow_lead
Score : 245 points
Date : 2022-06-22 16:21 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| willmeyers wrote:
| I'm by no means a UI/UX expert but the article UI is no good in
| my opinion. I can't really focus on the paragraphs for more than
| a couple seconds without effort before my eyes drift over to the
| margins (could be just me though). Interested to see where this
| will go!
| midenginedcoupe wrote:
| I agree, it looks terrible and is really hard to read. Maybe
| it's the line spacing?
| wmeredith wrote:
| Well I am a UI/UX expert, and it's a pretty bad interface for
| reading. The main issue is the spacing after paragraphs. It's
| large enough to separate the main blocks of the article from
| each other almost as much as from other elements on the page.
| The central narrative content blocks don't "hang together" so
| your eye wanders at the end of each paragraph. They need to
| spend some time understanding the Gestalt principle of
| proximity:
| https://www.usertesting.com/resources/topics/gestalt-princip...
| barbazoo wrote:
| I'm getting "Hmm...this page doesn't exist. Try searching for
| something else." for every note that I click on.
| lepetitchef wrote:
| How to see this feature. I don't see Twitter Notes/Write in my
| sidebar.
| rg111 wrote:
| It's currently in Alpha. All users can't write now. And one
| cannot even view the notes outside of certain regions.
| adamrezich wrote:
| interesting how Twitter is evolving from a 140-char microblog
| platform into a mishmash of different vaguely related and
| tenuously connected services/features: - main
| timeline - direct messages - Spaces (audio
| chatrooms) - Communities (sub-timelines) -
| Newsletters (this still exists? will it, if Notes gains
| traction?) - and now Notes
|
| and probably more I forgot. I wonder if they'll eventually go
| full-circle and add a Podcasts feature. but I just use Twitter
| for its core timeline feature and rarely ever engage with the
| rest of it. I'm not sure if Notes looks like a necessarily
| appealing place to post longer-form content as opposed to
| Substack, Medium, etc.
| dariusj18 wrote:
| Every walled garden needs to plant their own flowers. It's an
| unfortunate side effect of profit motive and keeping people on
| the platform rather than integrations and openness.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Not necessarily just the company's profit motive. Individual
| careers require this sort of stuff to be done.
| adamrezich wrote:
| exactly--why is Newsletters still a thing if they're
| working on Notes now? shouldn't those two be one and the
| same?
|
| walled gardens planting their own flowers is unsurprising
| at this point, but when one goes from planting its own
| flowers to planting competing plants in the same space...
| holler wrote:
| Agree, but I don't think it necessarily has to be that way.
|
| All of these social sites have a core competency/use case,
| but once they start tacking on features as an effect of the
| profit motive, it starts to dilute the experience.
|
| Working on my own site and planning to keep it strictly
| focused on the core value prop.
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| You forgot porn, how much of their revenue is derived from
| adult content creators?
| partiallypro wrote:
| Honestly probably too little too late. How they didn't try to
| have a long form product to compete with Substack (especially)
| and Medium is astonishing. I've long held that Twitter engineers,
| etc seem disconnected from their own user base.
| boringg wrote:
| Too little too late? If they do a better job than substack or
| medium they can probably take marketshare. Instead of
| innovating on it they can emulate the effective products and
| build on top of it.
|
| It's like saying instagram's videos were too late to tik tok.
| It effectively stopped the hemorrhaging and kept market share.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Not really comparable at all. Instagram already had videos
| and stories. Twitter has had no form of long form at all.
| Even still Instagram user growth is in the tank. Based on
| this product demo in the gif, it won't be competing with
| Substack or Medium anytime soon.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Well, all the links to notes just result in "Hmm...this page
| doesn't exist. Try searching for something else." for me. I know
| it says available in "most countries" but I'm right here in
| California. Is it not available in Twitter's home country?
| junot wrote:
| I had the same thing happen to me. Page worked after refresh
| though.
| FateOfNations wrote:
| That seems to be an issue in general for Twitter,
| particularly when logged out. It often doesn't load on the
| first go around and you have to refresh to see the content.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| No dice for me in Europe. I can refresh as often as I want,
| it keeps saying "Page not found."
| joegahona wrote:
| Disabling Brave Shields rectified this for me.
| [deleted]
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| I'm not so sure this works with how I use twitter. My typical
| twitter use is when I'm on a 10 minute ride on the subway, I
| don't want longform writing in this context. If I see a link to
| something interesting I'll open a tab in safari for later
| reading, but I'm not gonna move away from my timeline just to
| read your thoughts
| sva_ wrote:
| When I click on any of these notes, I just get
|
| > Hmm...this page doesn't exist. Try searching for something
| else.
| luxurytent wrote:
| Now they just need to make the reading experience of these notes
| not abysmal. Remove the dreaded "Who To Follow" and "Trending"
| sidebars, and collapse the left pane.
|
| Right now, less than 1/3rd of the screen is for representing the
| writing.
| andrew_ wrote:
| The immediate vibe I got was; Twitter is channeling LiveJournal
| to keep users on Twitter
| Mixtape wrote:
| Pretty much every take I have on this is covered by the discourse
| here about walled gardens, but I do have two other points of
| concern: Indexability and SEO.
|
| When you want to view certain content on Twitter, you need to log
| in. If you don't want to, you're forbidden from viewing that
| content. If that happens here, I worry that the accessibility of
| long-form, blog-style content production will lead to more users
| either being onboarded to Twitter for what should be a simple
| matter of viewing an HTML + CSS page or otherwise missing out on
| content that could be valuable to them (e.g. news from prominent
| personalities, interviews with professionals, press releases from
| companies, etc.)
|
| My second concern is with SEO. If this really takes off, I worry
| that a first page of search results that once would have
| contained articles from a number of separate blogs will become
| dominated by a single, homogenous site. Perhaps grouping results
| in the way that Google does could help with that, but I'd rather
| avoid needing to append "-site:twitter.com" to my query just to
| be able to find content that I can read without being tracked.
|
| As a whole, I'm not a fan. This strikes me as another move by a
| social media giant to become "the internet" in the eyes of some
| people. Maybe that's appealing to the masses, but it's dystopian
| in my eyes.
| colesantiago wrote:
| It seems that self hosted blogs are out with this new Twitter
| Notes feature, I can even see that Medium is pretty much in
| trouble here as well.
|
| Is there any point to starting a self hosted blog now that this
| exists for non technical people?
| [deleted]
| rockbruno wrote:
| For starters, your content will not vanish when Twitter
| inevitably dies or decides to suddenly kill this feature.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Or when they suspend you for no reason...
| jdminhbg wrote:
| I think self-hosted blogs and Medium (and Substack) are in as
| much danger from Twitter Notes as Instagram stories were from
| Fleets.
| kulor wrote:
| > Is there any point to starting a self hosted blog now that
| this exists for non technical people?
|
| Yep, personal brand & audience ownership & control
| yellow_postit wrote:
| Adding on -- if you are building an audience you should be
| investing in platform diversification and alternative ways to
| reach otherwise you are a ranking or feature whim change away
| losing access.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| If this ends the thread unrolling apps and posts that are
| clickbait headlines for 1/x to continue it'll be good as a user
| but probably bad for Twitter's engagement volume.
| barrell wrote:
| Analytics, design, freedom of speech, durability,
| interoperability, privacy, different writing UI, monetisation,
| independence, possibly domain management and surely much much
| more.
|
| It's a nice feature to finally have but I wouldn't undercut the
| decades of work that entire teams have devoted to blogging
| tools. Network effects aren't that powerful, plus twitter's
| network effects aren't even all that strong in all domains
| dflock wrote:
| You can own the farm, or be a share cropper on someone elses
| farm.
| [deleted]
| bearcherian wrote:
| It's amazing that the micro-blogging platform is just becoming
| more like every other blogging platform
| [deleted]
| hintymad wrote:
| Eh...finally? Like 10 years after its competitor weibo.com? Says
| a lot about the culture of Twitter.
| jmartens wrote:
| Me never having heard of weibo says a lot about Twitter's
| success...
| hintymad wrote:
| It's Chinese company, so naturally few people in the west
| heard about it. It does not mean that Twitter does a better
| job in product iteration compared to weibo, though.
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| > A small group of writers are helping us test Notes. They can be
| read on and off Twitter, by people in most countries
|
| I guess I'll be the one to ask. Why would you block certain
| countries from reading notes, but not from viewing tweets?
|
| Also, I thought Twitter wasn't making any major product changes
| with the looming Musk takeover. Can we assume this means Musk is
| backing out of the deal?
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| The board recently endorsed his offer. If he backs down now it
| would look very bad on him (though with his personality maybe
| he wouldn't care).
| cube00 wrote:
| Now that Twitter have decided the solution to long form content
| is a link off the main thread hopefully more creators will feel
| more comfortable to instead link to their own blog rather then to
| "Notes". This could be a very positive thing for creators to gain
| back more control over their brand and content.
| rlopezcc wrote:
| They will probably make Notes seamless and cool inside the
| twitter app and external links slow and clumsy.
| paxys wrote:
| Is it "Twitter Write" or "Twitter Notes"? The branding is already
| confusing, and it hasn't even launched yet.
| cr3ative wrote:
| Amusingly, they're calling it "Notes" and specifically NOT
| "Twitter Notes". Which is not going to go well for them,
| judging by this submission title.
| deanCommie wrote:
| ITT: Feedback from people who don't like Twitter, or don't use
| Twitter.
| barrenko wrote:
| This is like one of those "every animal shape evolves to crab
| eventually" but for social networks.
| searchableguy wrote:
| In my experience, most people on twitter won't click to read long
| form content if it opens in a separate view. They won't read past
| few tweets either. I believe most twitter users don't want to
| read beyond 280 characters. A thread provides them an opportunity
| to comment on any 280 characters section they have actually read.
|
| They should have provided similar interface to typefully to write
| long form tweet and a button to view all tweets as an article
| like threader app while keeping the same UX/UI with little
| changes.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| >They won't read past few tweets either
|
| I believe this is because twitter is actively hostile to
| reading long threads. They'll truncate the middle of a thread,
| or show "load more tweets" for replies -- and then they'll only
| load just a few more tweets. Want to keep reading? Load a few
| more tweets at a time. It's miserable.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Yeah, a better UX would be to just make long threads more
| readable (compact tweets with smaller icons).
| idealmedtech wrote:
| I think people actually want to read longer form content on
| Twitter, just look at how often threads appear under the viral
| tweets topic! It's more fundamentally a twitter problem than a
| user attention span problem in my opinion.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| I welcome this. I always hated the long multi-tweet essays and
| have often just given up on reading them, especially when I'm not
| logged in I can't even make it to the end before twitter blocks
| me from scrolling further.
|
| As of now it doesn't look like you can reply to a note with
| another note? That might go a long way for improving debate and
| discussion.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| Well, the first 3 links from the twitter annoucement gives a
| "page not found". Seems that they avoided starting with the
| right foot.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Works for me after a page reload.
| sumy23 wrote:
| I just tried reading some of the things written by Twitter's
| test authors. I immediately missed the old format. For one, the
| old format forces succinct points. There isn't any fluff in a
| Twitter thread. First four paragraphs in the sample I read:
|
| > Hello. Hi. Do you have a moment to talk about porgs?
|
| > Yes. Porgs, the cute things seen in Star Wars Episodes VII
| and VIII.
|
| > These.
|
| > (Image of porg)
|
| > Many people might look at this face and see an adorable CGI
| workaround for the puffins on Skellig Michael, aka Ahch-To. I
| see a cute, charming, complete menace to the galaxy's ecology
| as we know it.
|
| A Twitter thread would have started out with something like:
| "Porgs, the adorable CGI workaround for puffins, are a complete
| menace to the galaxy's ecology as we know it."
|
| So much more direct and to the point. Sometimes, less is more.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I think it's likelier that your first four quoted lines would
| have been compressed into a single tweet, including an image,
| followed by the second one.
| [deleted]
| TillE wrote:
| > There isn't any fluff in a Twitter thread.
|
| That's optimistic. It's really common to see people drag out
| a very simple story or point over dozens of tweets.
| rchaud wrote:
| > For one, the old format forces succinct points.
|
| Succinct points on Twitter can often feel like a
| clickbait/ragebait headline that's cynically designed to
| elicit "engagement" from as wide of an audience as possible.
| There is no guardrail protecting against clout chasers who
| have the skill to rile up online crowds and make a name for
| themselves.
|
| At the scale that Twitter operates in, I think we can all
| identify some pretty awful things that have happened because
| of the above.
| minsc_and_boo wrote:
| Yeah, part of Twitter's rise to popularity was that it was
| the response to noisy long-form content that blogs were
| spamming the internet with.
|
| Blogs are relatively rare now but it seems Twitter is coming
| full circle to enable blog-like content, in response to
| Medium and others it seems.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I still won't bother. No matter how fast of a computer you use,
| Twitter is annoyingly slow to load and seems to leak memory if
| you scroll too far.
| CyanBird wrote:
| My most despised (feature) of Twitter on desktop is that
| purposeful delay to alerts, where it blinks for a splitsecond
| and then the little colored alert icon disappears for a solid
| 3 to 5 seconds only to appear again this time correctly and
| permanently
|
| It is just so annoying that they would do such a thing, I am
| sure that they have a/b tested it, I don't care it drives me
| insane, just make it work properly tho I am sure that they
| have also taken onto account people like me whom despise it,
| yet not enough to leave the platform
|
| Just an overall worsening of user experience
| DominikPeters wrote:
| I always thought this is a bug!
| lupire wrote:
| You give them away too much credit for intent and
| competence.
|
| They probably have a fast alert based on some cache, and a
| real alert that takes longer to fetch the real data.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Try nitter.net, an alternate Twitter front-end that is much
| less gimmicky and uses dramatically less resources with fewer
| UI glitches, while also doing a better job of presenting
| 'threads' of tweets.
| danieldisu wrote:
| Don't celebrate it yet, threads have very high click through
| rate, I really doubt that these are going to replace threads
| because they won't dare to touch "the algorithm" after they see
| the decrease in interactions
| nomilk wrote:
| > I always hated the long multi-tweet essays
|
| I'm very new to twitter but I love them because feedback can be
| given on a (near) per sentence basis.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's the problem; it's like a book where the footnotes come
| to outweigh the actual text.
| layer8 wrote:
| You'd have loved inline quoting on Usenet.
| rektide wrote:
| We can cite & quote pieces of Notes too. But it wont create
| anywhere near the interesting forms of engagement an
| already decomposed thread has.
|
| In a thread there are ready made pieces of the thread to
| talk about. Each piece of the thread has it's own likes.
| Discussions can start around any piece & we know they're
| talking about the same general area.
|
| Notes feels like a severe & critical downgrade, a
| regression to a pre-connected, earlier, less capable form.
| Putting different pieces of information/content into their
| own places, giving each their own url, giving each their
| own engagement points: that has been why Twitter's been so
| remarkably unlike anything else. Ideas have to be broken
| down, and that constraint has been what's made Twitter so
| powerful & engageable as a medium.
| lupire wrote:
| Everyone is connected, but they are connected to nothing.
| We don't need more highly accessible trash.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| One of the advantages of the tweet thread is others can embed
| one of the tweets elsewhere. I've seen this done often on news
| sites. This seems to compartmentalize what you're writing,
| which I think will be unappealing for 'big names' on Twitter.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Oh my, please at least remove us from the UX context of Tweets.
| The cognitive load required to read this is entirely too high -
| my mind is looking for the 'chunks' of tweets, delineated by the
| retweet/like/etc menus. And the two side bars are entirely too
| distracting for what is supposedly a more focused and long form
| read.
|
| Overall though, interesting concept
| duxup wrote:
| I guess it makes sense that any micro blog is bound to evolve to
| have "regular blog" features and the other way around too.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Any hyperlink capability between notes? That could be pretty
| fascinating.
| wpietri wrote:
| Oh wow, this is interesting. I've been wanting this to exist for
| years. It seemed like such an obvious thing to do given the
| workarounds people have, from screenshotting blobs of text to
| tweetstorms to getting a Medium account just so they'd have a
| place to put things that were longer than a tweet.
|
| I'm excited to see how it goes! I'm personally not sure how much
| I'll use it just because I've already adapted to threads as a
| medium. Looking back at my tweets, I think it was 2018 when I
| first wrote something that started in my head as a series of
| tweets, with the specific rhythms and frequent use of images that
| goes with it:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/williampietri/status/101093172122...
|
| But I expect it will be good for quite a lot of people as a quick
| way to publish something, and maybe I'll come around in time.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| I've just tested this by clicking on one of the notes in the
| Twitter app: it opens up an ugly webview which I'm not logged
| into... and it's suggesting to download and use the app for a
| better experience (I was already on the app!).
| symlinkk wrote:
| This is terrible, the entire point of Twitter is that each tweet
| is short and easy to digest. The constraints forced authors to
| cut out all fluff. They're diluting the one thing about their
| platform that made it special.
| [deleted]
| comment500 wrote:
| Interesting feature, looks like it may be an alternative to
| writing big long tweet threads all in one go with a
| "@threadreaderapp unroll" tweet at the end.
|
| The main difference with this seems to be, you can't link to or
| highlight individual sections within the Note, if quote tweeting
| or replying. Perhaps this is a good thing, to prevent parts of
| what's written being too easily taken out of context.
|
| One downside may be that the entire Note would be targeted for
| terms of service violations, should they occur. At present, if a
| tweet in a multi-tweet thread breaks the rules, it can be excised
| without affecting the rest of what's written.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| They should definitely be using the full width of screen for
| longer form "notes." I personally would also prefer a modal as
| opposed to a completely different page.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Honestly, no.
|
| I find HN comments practically unreadable because of the lack
| of wrapping. The default render width of a tweet is perfectly
| reasonable. Maybe you could extend it out to the width of a
| substack or medium post.
|
| But there's nothing natural about stretching a sentence out
| across 800 horizontal characters. It's just miserable on a good
| monitor.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I guess I should have just said wider, not necessarily full
| width. The current experience is incredibly narrow and bad on
| desktop.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Why not use https://brianlovin.com/hn/31838049 ?
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Thanks, no.
|
| If needed I can resize my FullHD browser window to the half-
| width.
|
| If someone decided what I can' have more than N characters on
| the line - it doesn't matter if I have a FullHD, UWXHDA or
| whatever monitor - I just CAN'T do anything (aside of Ctrl+A,
| CTrl+C, Ctrl+V in Notepad/gedit/whatever).
| NearAP wrote:
| While it's all well and good to launch new features, I think
| Twitter should improve their existing service and I'm referring
| to low hanging fruits.
|
| I don't understand the rationale behind cutting me off while I'm
| scrolling through Twitter simply because I'm not logged in.
| Twitter can still display Ads to me irrespective of whether I'm
| logged in or not. In fact cutting me off means I leave Twitter
| which means I don't see the Ads they're selling which in turn
| means less Ad money for them.
|
| Even when logged in, Twitter will display the new message/note
| icon. When I click on it to read the notification, it turns out
| to be Twitter telling me to turn on notifications. Now normally,
| once you have read the message, the 'new' message/note icon is
| cleared. Instead Twitter displays it again almost immediately and
| this then goes on for the next few hours before they stop.
|
| If they can't fix these simple things, why would someone want to
| read longer content on Twitter. They would still get cut off
| again as Twitter is doing for existing tweets
| rchaud wrote:
| Twitter doesn't care about a pair of anonynmous eyeballs not
| visiting their site anymore. It's not Google. Twitter's ad
| targeting depends on knowing what a user looks at, and how
| their network of connections/follows lines up with other user
| segments.
| NearAP wrote:
| >> Twitter's ad targeting depends on knowing what a user
| looks at
|
| But they can track which tweets are being clicked, the IP of
| the person and a whole bunch of things even when you're not
| logged in.
|
| >> and how their network of connections/follows
|
| But that's the problem right there. If you force people to
| create an account to read tweets, they might do so but they
| won't follow anybody or follow very few people and tweet
| quite infrequently. I just don't think it's feasible to
| expect a significant number of people (like say # of users on
| Facebook) to be tweeting regularly. But it's possible that
| I'm wrong.
| dorgo wrote:
| > I just don't think it's feasible to expect a significant
| number of people (like say # of users on Facebook) to be
| tweeting regularly.
|
| The probability that somebody with a Twitter account tweets
| is infinitely higher than that somebody without a Twitter
| account tweets.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Im pretty sure that the majority of twitter users has
| never posted a tweet, think 80/20 rule.
|
| See this link, although its not exactly what im looking
| for: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-study-
| shows-that-2...
| distrill wrote:
| > improve their existing service
|
| > I don't understand the rationale behind cutting me off while
| I'm scrolling through Twitter simply because I'm not logged in
|
| i mean, this really isn't a bug. this is working as intended,
| and i don't foresee them wanting to "fix" this anytime soon.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| You can tell how far a service has "matured" into a big corp by
| this kind of behaviour. Big corps need to extract their pound
| of flesh from each visitor.
|
| When you tweet you are kind of an unpaid twitter employee. But
| tweeting gives people enough benefit they don't seem to mind.
| simonsarris wrote:
| it's gotten so bad that I started an unofficial bug tracker of
| broken things and missing-per-platform features (like voice
| tweets that have been out for years on iOS but are still absent
| in Android)
|
| https://github.com/simonsarris/Twitter-Bugs/issues
| LegitShady wrote:
| its not fast but I just use nitter.net instead
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Yea i heard of nitter, i guess it would be easy to write a
| ghostmonkey script to redirect all twitter links there.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I think the message is simply that Twitter isn't that into you.
|
| Twitter wants people that log in, and turn on their
| notifications. You'd think you're good enough for them, you can
| provide them ad revenue too, but you're just not their type and
| they don't find much happines with you. Ultimately it's not
| you, it's them.
| toephu2 wrote:
| > Twitter can still display Ads to me irrespective of whether
| I'm logged in or not.
|
| Twitter only shows ads to logged in users.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The text-to-viewport-height ratio of this page on desktop is so
| low it's just astonishing.
|
| I can't imagine many people will click on a tweet to read it. If
| you're going to make me click, just link to a real website?
| hackandtrip wrote:
| I do wonder how this plays with the acquisition. IIRC, one of the
| merge agreement was for Twitter to avoid drastic changes that
| could impact the value of the company - this seems pretty big to
| me.
| mgiannopoulos wrote:
| Hopefully this will mean the end of threads especially the ones
| with the first teaser / void of any content tweet.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| So much margin on either side of the mobile layout. I can read
| like 3 words on a line. Why do we need so much white space!?
| cwkoss wrote:
| Notes should have the back button you get when you use a thread.
| First time I've used browser back button on twitter in a while.
| meibo wrote:
| Very odd of them to launch this without support in apps. The
| mobile view doesn't even load for me, just says that the content
| can't be found.
| rammy1234 wrote:
| there is a great potential.
| randommind wrote:
| I don't know, in times when account suspensions and/or removals
| for political reasons seem progressively more frequent (and
| arbitrary), it doesn't seem like a great idea to entrust the
| longer writings to them as well... It seems wiser to maintain
| separate blogs.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| 100% agree with you, but as long as they have an API you can
| access, you can always syndicate your content to Twitter.
|
| Here's an example for my potato.horse site connected to
| https://twitter.com/yay_psd:
|
| https://github.com/paprikka/yay.psd/blob/main/data/twitter/p...
|
| Most of my users are come from the site and Reddit, but it's
| one of those things you just set up and forget, so it was worth
| the hassle.
| randommind wrote:
| Yes but simply linking makes it more difficult to
| automatically censor content. Aside from the problem of
| redundancy (sorry, old school here, redundancy must have a
| reeeally good reason for me), as I have already mentioned,
| this would get your readers used to reading you ONLY on
| twitter, while by linking to an external blog your readers
| will already be used to read you elsewhere, in case your
| account suddenly disappears.
|
| Of course I imagine that in addition to the intent to expand
| outward control (and let's call it aggressive "moderation"?
| the infamous dangerous "unfettered conversations" come back
| to mind ;)) of content as an alternative to blogs, there is
| also the intent to offer it as an alternative to long
| threads, which to me, however, does not seem like a good idea
| as well, because it is known that the average reader is more
| likely to read in chunks rather than deal with long text (as
| others have already said). Not to mention that with threads
| you can reply point by point, to individual tweets, which as
| I see it is smoother and neater.
|
| Maybe I'm biased (that's why I started out with "I don't
| know") but I see it as more of a political move than a
| functional one, that's all. And by the way, if one really
| doesn't want to think about censorial and narrative control
| intentions, in the least worst case scenario to me it looks
| like a push toward increasing the already troubling monopoly
| of a few giants on content, data, attention, etc.
| dend wrote:
| My reaction to this is that it's an effort to keep users within
| the "walled garden" of Twitter, which is not the best thing for
| those that write.
|
| Recall the story with Medium - yes, you get broader reach with
| less effort, but at the cost of giving up control of your
| content.
|
| I know that I am talking with an overly developer-focused lens
| (a-la "you can reimplement Dropbox in a weekend"), but self-
| hosting blogs outside the "walled gardens" is not super
| complicated even for non-power users. Ghost has existed for years
| and is a very user-friendly experience. Want to be a bit more
| technical - go the static site route.
|
| It might be a lost battle to convince the majority of the social
| media audience of this (after all, can't beat the convenience and
| the cost of $0), but I really do not see this as beneficial to
| those that deeply care about their long-form writing
| accessibility and sustainability.
|
| Twitter already has login walls to just read tweets, so I'd
| imagine the same is likely to apply to long-form content as well.
| rchaud wrote:
| Do you know that Twitter still does not show link previews
| reliably? It does for big sites like Youtube, but if you link
| your dinky little self-hosted blog, with all the right OG meta
| tags, it's 50-50 whether Twitter decides to show the link
| preview image.
|
| At this point, one must assume that Twitter will do nearly
| anything it can to disincentivize clicking out to a 3rd party
| site.
|
| At least it's better than Instagram, which doesn't let you post
| clickable links at all in your posts.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| As a non twitter user but searching for my site a few times
| I've always wondered why that is and what I am doing wrong. I
| didn't know it is a general issue since I don't use it.
| dend wrote:
| I think ultimately you're getting to the _why_ of the
| equation - there is a big desire to keep you, the customer,
| within the app rather than let you abandon the feed. Going
| back from a note to scrolling through Twitter is easier than
| jumping back from your browser app to the Twitter app.
|
| I haven't had issues with link previews on my own content,
| but that very well could be the case for other sites.
| nomel wrote:
| > Do you know that Twitter still does not show link previews
| reliably?
|
| This seems like it might be a somewhat good thing, for
| privacy. User generated trackers could be included in topical
| tweets.
| manmal wrote:
| Is that image not just resolved once, while posting? I
| remember Apple solving it in a similar way for iMessage -
| the sender always generates the preview.
| nomel wrote:
| I've seen embedded videos auto play directly from
| external sites, in the app. Making the video fullscreen
| just expand what appears to be a frame, with ads and all
| present.
| masukomi wrote:
| just as an FYI, someone made a tool specifically to preview
| what twitter was going to do for a card when you gave it a
| link:
|
| https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
| 88913527 wrote:
| You still need to engage with the major social networks to
| build up traffic to your own domain name. Otherwise, posting on
| your blog is like talking to a brick wall. You can choose where
| you publish, but there's no escaping the leveraging of existing
| audiences.
| dend wrote:
| My earlier comment is not contradictory to this statement.
| Indeed, you need to be on social media sites to reach a
| broader audience, but you can post links to your content that
| is external to those sites rather than giving it up wholesale
| within the network.
| fpoling wrote:
| If one wants a blog with self-hosted comments, then there not
| so many options and those that exist are not particularly
| simple. For example, standalone Wordpress can do that, but
| setting it up and running with all relevant plugins requires
| skills that few authors have access to.
| dend wrote:
| Comments is a _secondary_ component to the core of what I am
| talking about - long-form content. I can still post a link to
| my blog post on Twitter and have all the commentary from my
| audience without donating the content itself to Twitter.
| lupire wrote:
| What do you mean "donating the content"? Ad clicks?
| Subscription fee on your blog?
|
| Is your blog making you money?
| dend wrote:
| You can have your blog make you money if you want to, in
| whichever way you want to. "Donate content" is just that
| - when you write long-form on any platform that you have
| no direct control over, you're handing over the rights to
| said content. From Twitter's own ToS[0]:
|
| > By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or
| through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-
| exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to
| sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt,
| modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such
| Content in any and all media or distribution methods now
| known or later developed (for clarity, these rights
| include, for example, curating, transforming, and
| translating).
|
| [0]: https://twitter.com/en/tos
| warkdarrior wrote:
| You lose exclusivity, but you do not lose all other
| rights. Nothing stops you from posting your content on 10
| platforms, even if each one gets a license to your
| content.
| dend wrote:
| Yes and no. You lose exclusivity, and the ability to
| manage where and how your content can be used. Once you
| post it on Twitter, you can see from the ToS that they
| can basically do what they want with it - plug it into
| ads, print on billboards, publish alongside other content
| producers, etc. This is a suboptimal position to put
| yourself into if you care about your content.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Medium has turned in such a unusable shitshow now, it should be
| a lesson for anybody who seriously considers using twitter as a
| writing platform.
| emadabdulrahim wrote:
| It amazes me how Medium held the shrine for the BEST blogging
| platform and the best reading experience for a few years
| around 2015. Which didn't last long as it became one of the
| worst platform for writers and readers alike.
|
| How can a company shit the bed so bad?!
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Bait and switch, we see it every day. Acquire users with a
| good product, then squeeze the shit outta that without
| remorse.
| skybrian wrote:
| How does that follow? They are entirely different companies.
| Twitter will make its own mistakes. (Perhaps Musk-related,
| who knows?)
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Same cofounders or some other strong relation, idr
| caycep wrote:
| With the "walled garden" comment, I'm wondering - nowadays, all
| sorts of discourse seems to depend on these types of
| proprietary services/platforms, that employ armies of engineers
| to keep them running, develop new features, etc.
|
| Attempts to make things decentralized all seem to be
| aggregating into central controls, i.e. "Web3/crypto" ->
| coinbase, kraken, etc
|
| Why aren't older decentralized "services" protocols being
| looked at, or developed further - i.e. UUnet/newsgroups,
| torrent, etc?
| dend wrote:
| You don't need to look far for this. To be fair, my comment
| was much less about decentralization and more about the
| existence of tools for content portability and control. For
| example, you can have Markdown + Ghost + custom domain. Worst
| case scenario, you move to another hosting platform, but
| you're not locked to one particular service and its own goals
| of growth.
| caycep wrote:
| distribution/eyeballs is the issue with having your own
| site/self hosting though. Albeit I feel like if there were
| momentum in that direction, someone should do the RSS
| reader killer app for that. I.e. something like Reeder w/
| Overcast/Apple's podcast directory...
| dend wrote:
| You could also still post links to your content wherever
| your audience is - it's just a matter of being able to
| maintain control over the content itself.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| You don't need a new protocol. HTTP(S) is great for blogs and
| writing.
| saurik wrote:
| > Attempts to make things decentralized all seem to be
| aggregating into central controls, i.e. "Web3/crypto" ->
| coinbase, kraken, etc
|
| Coinbase and Kraken are not "central controls" as you not
| only can use either and they are exactly fully
| interchangeable, but you can use any number of other similar
| services--or even deal directly with another user and keep
| your credentials locally-- _all_ of which are exactly fully
| interchangeable.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Why aren't older decentralized "services" protocols being
| looked at, or developed further - i.e. UUnet/newsgroups,
| torrent, etc?
|
| Where will the money come from? The only reason there's any
| investment in software at all is so that a monetizable
| product can be built on top of it. And nothing monetizes
| better than vendor lock-in.
| lupire wrote:
| Government, universities, hobbyists.
|
| That's how we did it the first time.
| fullshark wrote:
| The tools are available to them right now, nothing's
| stopping them except the fact that people want to spend
| their time in walled gardens.
| notatoad wrote:
| i think it's pretty easy to see the simplest motivation for
| this project: all the twitter users who post screenshots of the
| iOS notes app. they literally gave it the same name.
|
| is this better than a screenshot of the notes app? IMHO the
| answer is a pretty obvious yes. how it compares to various
| other blogging platforms isn't super relevant. it's not a blog,
| it's a feature for people who are already on twitter and
| already using twitter to publish longer-form content in
| suboptimal ways.
| dend wrote:
| I would generally agree, _except_ with the fact then this
| just defeats the entire point of Twitter - it might as well
| become the next Medium then. Which, let's be realistic, can
| be a strategy too - become a content publisher rather than an
| aggregator of links and short opinions. But then again,
| that's not why I am personally on Twitter. YMMV.
| MAGZine wrote:
| I love ghost but it's always been pretty expensive for just a
| blog.
|
| It seems like they've maybe shifted prices down a bit, it used
| to be more than $10/mo, and measured based on page views. Now
| they're really pushing their content creator angle.
| dend wrote:
| Ghost is also just one way to do it - there are others that
| still allow you to have ownership of your content and the
| portability/domain connection that allows you, the writer, to
| manage your content in whatever shape you want.
| natly wrote:
| I agree. However I doubt it'll be long lived. Twitter gives up
| on features all the time (fleets, I doubt spaces will be around
| in a year). They'll try this out and abandon it like most of
| their experiments.
| dend wrote:
| I have the same hunch, to be honest. The core value
| proposition of Twitter, at least to me, is that it's short-
| form content - quick updates from the network that I care
| about. I don't go there to either write long-form content or
| consume long-form content directly (although I do get
| pointers to others' newsletter and blog pages).
|
| My guess is that this is an attempt to replace long threads
| (1/n), but those have their own place and mechanics and I
| don't see how getting people to write Twitter Notes is in any
| way a 1:1 replacement or improvement for that.
|
| Time will tell.
| lamontcg wrote:
| I would just love to get rid of the obnoxious writing style
| that twitter thought-leaders use when they're posting a thread.
| They always start with a fairly obnoxious click-baitey
| sentence. Then usually a fairly narcissistic hook about how
| "i'll explain" then "a <thread>" and "/1". And then each tweet
| needs to be punchy enough in 240 characters to keep people
| reading which produces a particularly annoying writing style.
| Then you need to use something like threadreaderapp to make it
| halfway readable.
|
| I'd rather have those posts just written long-form, where
| people didn't have to use weird-ly stilted language because of
| the post format.
| joegahona wrote:
| Same! This is what makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic
| feed rather than the reverse-chron feed. Almost nobody I
| intentionally follow uses this awful device.
| andai wrote:
| >makes me realize I'm on the algorithmic feed
|
| Does Twitter change this setting against your will?
| laylomo2 wrote:
| Yes
| JMKwins wrote:
| Yes
| wenderen wrote:
| Yeah. "Twitter reverts back to the algorithmic timeline
| after you're away for a while. You need to perform the
| above steps again to see the chronological timeline."
|
| source https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-use-twitter-
| timeline-algorit...
| ckastner wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree with all of what you said, but this
| stands out:
|
| > _And then each tweet needs to be punchy enough in 240
| characters to keep people reading which produces a
| particularly annoying writing style._
|
| I also find this writing style insufferable (every sentence a
| punchline), but though it may seem obvious in hindsight, the
| explanation that otherwise people won't keep reading had
| escaped me. I thought that was just a "Twitter" thing.
|
| Twitter revolutionized online discourse. However, for
| whatever progression it brought us, it also brought with it a
| degeneration of interpersonal communication. Everything is a
| punchline, one-upping, echo chambers, Twitter mobs,
| brigadiering, and the half-life of a lot of information
| deserving of thoughtful processing has been reduced to hours.
| robocat wrote:
| /1 The existing Twitter limitations strongly encourage
| conciseness, which I often like.
|
| /2 Blogs, articles, and HN comments like this, can ramble
| on and make diversions that I don't always care for.
|
| /3 I would like a dynamic slider control where I could
| contract someone's writing to their essential point (tl;dr)
| or expand it (longreads).
|
| /4 Bonus boffin round: a control to vary depth/complexity.
| I mostly would use simplification a la ELI5 or
| simple.wikipedia.org.
| rapind wrote:
| > twitter thought-leaders
|
| Real question. What even is a twitter thought-leader? An
| expert of twitter or an expert using twitter, or something
| else? If it's an expert using twitter I would assume the way
| they use it would vary, so this must be something else?
| ryantgtg wrote:
| "Let me explain"
|
| No thanks.
| tern wrote:
| I love tweet threads. It's a great way to write, forces
| concision, and as a reader, a quick way to get the gist of a
| complicated subject.
|
| I learn a tremendous amount from Twitter and vastly prefer it
| to needing to buy a book that I then need to skim to get the
| same info, or read a news article. Blogs have some
| advantages, but you can't really find them anymore, and I
| find my Twitter feed is higher signal than my carefully
| curated RSS feed ever was.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Only wanted to look up etymology at first
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/concision
|
| hmm...
|
| _1. (_ somewhat rare _) Conciseness, brevity or terseness.
|
| 2. A form of media censorship where discussions are limited
| in topics on the basis of broadcast time allotments.
|
| [...]_
|
| huh...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_(media_studies)
| Qub3d wrote:
| Randall thought similarly: https://xkcd.com/1045/
|
| I think there are places for both. However, reading up on a
| lot of business case studies, I noticed that a major
| tipping point for a company is often when they decide to
| _step out of their niche_.
|
| Diversifying can handicap a company if they aren't careful,
| because it reduces resources to the core product.
|
| However, it can also be a real boon (see: Microsoft +
| Azure, which now makes most of their revenue)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _you get broader reach with less effort, but at the cost of
| giving up control of your content._
|
| And you never know when years of hard work will simply
| disappear.
|
| I'm not even talking about being kicked out for expressing
| opinions that aren't trendy.
|
| I once wrote for a large blog That just disappeared one day. It
| was after Google took over Blogger, and searching for help with
| the problem turned up hundreds of other people whose blogs
| disappeared. Some managed to get Blogger to admit it was a
| technical problem. A few for their content back. Most didn't.
|
| If you're going to trust someone else's platform for your
| livelihood, make sure you have a Plan B ready to go at all
| times.
| rmason wrote:
| What's wrong with linking to your blog? Twitter was once
| explained to me as short form blogging which I thought at the
| time was absurd but I kind of get it now.
|
| The problem is when you try to be all things to all people you
| fail. I'd so much like someone like Elon Musk to take over
| Twitter. In the case of Musk I trust his judgement over the
| team running Twitter now. Can you imagine a group of two dozen
| people working a year trying to reinvent blogging? Knowing
| Twitter, sadly I can.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > What's wrong with linking to your blog?
|
| Nothing, except that no one will click on your link.
| masukomi wrote:
| i don't see that it's functionally any different than what
| was displayed in that gif. In both cases there's a card to
| the longer content that needs to be clicked on.
|
| If your argument is that no-one will click on the card then
| twitter notes will fare no better because it's literally
| the same presentation.
| meowface wrote:
| The only thing I don't get is why they didn't try this many years
| ago. I'm guessing because they might've thought it would break
| the "core conceit" and the aesthetic and unique differentiator,
| but in practice everyone has always already been using absurd,
| unreadable and/or inconvenient workarounds to accomplish this.
| madrox wrote:
| I have no basis for this other than human insight, but I
| suspect it didn't happen sooner because Jack didn't want to
| compete with Ev. It makes sense too if you believe that the
| internet is an ecosystem and you want to support complimentary
| products in yours rather than roll your own.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| I get why they have been working on this (ppl's thread posting
| out of control) but making longform posts content live on /
| inside the platform reaks of Facebook walled garden, or Medium
| etc. Should be encouraging ppl to have blogs or post on urls and
| just link to them. I dunno, it's annoying direction.
| mistermann wrote:
| I have a feeling that one aspect of it is that with Musk
| potentially coming on board, they realized that the pathetic
| absence of new features is going to have high visibility drawn
| to it soon.
|
| Just an opinion.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Twitlonger has been around for ages and is pretty nice to use.
| Writers seem to prefer just making threads because users will
| read them there. Every time you add a link or some other
| barrier in front of your content, you are reducing your
| readership.
| ghaff wrote:
| That ship has sailed unfortunately. Most people are going to
| post in walled gardens--and, if Twitter is that walled garden,
| I'd much prefer they encourage longer form posting than long
| threads.
| __ryan__ wrote:
| Twitter should be encouraging my grandma to leave twitter and
| go to random websites to view long tweets?
| vincvinc wrote:
| Any other similar platform (weibo, facebook, G+) just allows the
| post/tweet to be long and editable.
|
| It's a proven concept. It leads to many people sharing their
| thoughts in a more readable way than a thread of tweets, and has
| a lower barrier than having a blog.
|
| What I see here feels overspec'd and convoluted, as if hundreds
| of people had to have a say on what could be a very simple and
| singular product.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Aside, why is this shared in a very very long weird GIF and not a
| video. (can't pause/seek)
| cube00 wrote:
| I was curious about this too and thought it must be a massive
| GIF. However it's not actually a GIF, it's an MP4 video[1], I
| wonder why it's mislabelled as a GIF.
|
| [1]: https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/FV3mdpEXoAIrkA1.mp4
| hgazx wrote:
| Calling videos without an audio track "gifs" has been done
| for years now.
| mintplant wrote:
| Yep. Imgur's GIFV [0] from 2014 is the earliest mainstream
| example I know of.
|
| In the cultural consciousness, a "GIF" represents a
| particular medium and form factor, which has become
| decoupled from its namesake file format to deliver the same
| experience more efficiently.
|
| [0] https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| ah, yes, I see, it's the no-audio that made it a 'GIF'.
| Fair enough. But annoying because it automatically removes
| seek and pause options if it assumes it's a GIF. doh.
| aendruk wrote:
| My favorite solution to this is to use _GIF_ for the 90s
| encoding scheme and _gif_ for this newer lax meaning.
|
| Then while we're at it, settle the pronunciation debate by
| picking a different one for each.
| throwamon wrote:
| Or, more precisely, crippled video players where you can't
| even rewind.
| [deleted]
| Kye wrote:
| Good thing I never did much with Revue--which this is replacing
| if I understood the account's bio right--after Twitter bought it.
| I'm sure all the portability will vanish in the name of "better
| integration" or some other weak CEO-speak.
| allenleein wrote:
| Nice! A Medium-like UI is more readable than a "tweet storm".
| jeanlucas wrote:
| Just like all twitter stuff, is this demo only for iOS?
|
| edit: not working for me on Android/web, but could be geo-locked
| since I am in Brazil.
| LightG wrote:
| or, "As a part of our strategy review, we've decided to test
| Clickbait articles, including the outraged and counter-outraged
| responses you've come to know and love. All on one platform!!!"
| ...
| tantalor wrote:
| Apparently the Twitter app (android) doesn't support them. Nice.
| Bigpet wrote:
| The desktop web version also doesn't seem to support it for me.
| Just shows me "Hmm...this page doesn't exist. Try searching for
| something else."
| jedberg wrote:
| The first note I read on Twitter was about the ecological impact
| of porgs on the Galactic Empire.
|
| I feel like I will remember that for a long time.
| dchuk wrote:
| This is the most painfully obvious feature they could have added
| to the product. Twitter is a massive distribution network with a
| heavily constrained format to distribute. Allowing more blog-like
| content formats to latch into the same established distribution
| network (instead of hacky threads which suck) is a no brainer.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| You can tell the video is a mockup because it's missing a bunch
| of multi-second load times.
| rchaud wrote:
| Anything to end the tyranny of the 280 char hot take.
|
| Longer tweets turning into threads isn't any better, because the
| tweets are still written such that each one can be pulled out and
| quoted/retweeted. So instead of greater exposition, nuance, you
| get a series of hot takes compartmentalized into their own tweet.
| olalonde wrote:
| It's refreshing to see large companies innovating and pushing the
| edge of technology.
| lr wrote:
| Alternative headline: After 12 years, Twitter finally decides to
| do something with Posterous
| drusepth wrote:
| Interestingly enough, Notes are editable (as seen by the "edited"
| tag on https://twitter.com/i/notes/1539613004370788352). Might be
| an indicator of how editing will work if/when it trickles down to
| normal tweets, too.
| jmartens wrote:
| I noticed this too and thought it was the best part of the
| announcement. I don't personally want to write notes on
| Twitter, but I'm eager to be able to fix my typos in tweets!
| bradgessler wrote:
| It's weird seeing Twitter build this after they acquired and shut
| down Posterous almost a decade ago.
|
| What's old is new again.
| simlevesque wrote:
| I love that the mobile website forces me to use the app and now
| then you click a Note in the app it opens it in the browser.
| dnissley wrote:
| Yeah, this was a huge benefit of threads for me! They don't
| break me out of twitter flow into some other website. On top of
| this they have barely distinguished notes from links (despite
| owning the platform!)
| onychomys wrote:
| Even better, if you've blocked the built-in browser in the app
| (via the app's settings) and you try to open a Note there,
| nothing happens, not even a message saying it can't be opened.
| capableweb wrote:
| In the GIF, they display that the tool is available under
| twitter.com/write (which, obviously wouldn't be public yet unless
| I was invited to participate, which I wasn't). If you go there
| now, there is a Twitter account there already (a private "Writers
| Group"). Will that Twitter account disappear now with this
| change?
| [deleted]
| twic wrote:
| I've lost track of how many times i've loaded this guy's
| profile by mistake:
|
| https://twitter.com/advanced_search
| simonlc wrote:
| Same thing for some of the other links, which they do
| twitter.com/i/bookmarks for example, instead of
| twitter.com/bookmarks.
|
| I know this because at one point it was broken in the UI and
| one of the side links went to a profile instead.
| omoikane wrote:
| This could have been avoided if twitter had distinct URL
| schemes for user accounts versus site functions (like how
| mastodon has /@user versus /path), or it could have been
| avoided if they reserved enough words early on to avoid this
| collision. Now I wonder how they would reclaim the paths that
| were parked by early users. Pay these users to rename their
| accounts, perhaps?
| zorr wrote:
| Why would they pay users for this? They can just force a
| rename and take the path if they need it. Their house, their
| rules.
| suyash wrote:
| Idea is good however implementation is horrible specially on
| desktop web. The narrow width of the content makes it hard to
| read, not to mention all the distractions on left and right side
| of the page. They should make the notes full screen without
| distractions if they want people to read them.
| aendruk wrote:
| I can see the logic behind the narrow presentation. If most
| people use this on pocket computers, the writing will likely be
| tailored to that format e.g. with generally shorter paragraphs
| so as not to tower. Keeping the presentation consistent might
| help with readability.
|
| For an example of what Twitter might be trying to avoid, look
| no further than this website, which has driven me to inject
| `.comment { max-width: 70ch; }`, among other things.
| emkee wrote:
| https://twitter.com/Corey5771/status/1539645330328657920?s=2...
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