I know how to read Twitter and yeah, this one is really hard to read. It's got all these numbers with slashes behind them scattered throughout. It's got a list of numbers with slashes in the middle. It's got random links. It's got the occasional sentence without punctuation
It's just kind of a mess.
I was a heavy user of Twitter for multiple years. I've pulled back on it lately and it's really amazing how much I don't miss the weird, telegraphic kind of writing it tends to encourage. It really bugs me that one of our major means of communication forces you to filter everything through tiny text boxes that only recently became big enough for a whole sentence, and strongly discourages taking time to actually consider the flow of an idea through multiple paragraphs.
Well, not all discourse needs to happen on twitter.
Sure, it is nice when there is something you can actually convey in just a few sentences but I have a hard time reading this.
It is hard to follow because my reading gets interrupted, and I need to focus on where I am instead of what information I am receiving. I donno. I just think it's hard and it's very annoying so I'm rather inclined to stop reading because honestly I don't care enough to make the hassle worth it.
There is a serious disconnect between medium and message when people find it necessary to manually number every message, and stoop to doing so on a regular basis. You might still find it readable but the absurdity of that behavior should at least be a glaring red flag. Twitter's layout is designed around the assumption that discrete posts will be distinct thoughts or status updates, but this breaks when people force even a paragraph through. I find it grossly unreadable to sift through so much whitespace, redundant usernames, redundant time stamps, numerous like and share icons, etc. that interrupt the text when it's broken into tiny chunks in this manner--I can read it, but I hate doing so.
IMO this is both Twitter's fault for existing, since the prevalence of this kind of posting seems to indicate that microblogging is a failed concept, and the userbase's for insisting on using it for content which is obviously unsuitable. Obviously a lot of people are willing to put up with this format but I see it as a huge mess and I avoid Twitter links whenever possible.
I guess I'm just an old man but I truly do not understand why people use twitter for long-form content like this. It's like using the handle of a screwdriver as a hammer. You can do it but it sure isn't optimal. I understand there are a few tools to make it a little better to read, but that's a band-aid on the problem.
What an extraordinary pain to read. This really demonstrates why Twitter is awful for debates. This can be made readable, but you'd have to rewrite the entire thing, more or less, to pull out the individual points, consolidate broken up thoughts, and create consistent formatting per author so you can follow it instead of being a sea of text with occasional implicit author switching.
(It also demonstrates why you shouldn't have light-gray text on gray background, pale green links, and dashed underline links.)
slightly OT but clicking at all those twitter threads, and not being a twitter user myself, I'm having an extremely hard time understanding how the conversation(s) flow. What a terrible interface !
It’s strange I have no issue reading posts like these but every time they come up someone complains about the format of twitter and I still have no idea what makes it so difficult for people and I definitely did not grow up with it.
Twitter threads don’t bother me. The brain quickly adapts to skipping the irrelevant parts (username, like buttons, etc) and to expecting the cadency of tweets.
I believe it is harder to write (due to the character limit of each text block), but, far from “unreadable”, I can read it fairly easily.
Twitter is ridiculous in that way. Absolutely ridiculous. I'm constantly baffled just how badly the site is layed out and how they keep making it worse. I still never understand who replied to who, where multi-part tweets start and end, why some text is larger than other, where I have to click to get a perma-link, how those blue lines/separators group tweets and how in the world I enlarge embedded content. When I'm way down a page and click on an image and close it, I'm thrown back to the top of the page.
Apparently, there was a real need to reduce blogging to one-sentence text messages. Alright, they got that market for now. But their interface is straight from hell and they'll pay for that, eventually. You already see people moving away (Instagram, etc). They might be where myspace was before facebook.
Interestingly, I think you just managed to help me figure out why I dislike Twitter so much for these sorts of things. I'd never thought about it so much, but everything just snapped into focus with your comment.
Too simplified, no nuance, and a looming suspicion that each individual portion has been slightly 'improved' to fit the criteria you mentioned. While perhaps fairly acceptable individually, I can't shake the feeling that the sheer scale of their sum might surprise even the author sometimes.
As a result it makes me increasingly uncomfortable as I read more.
Toss in the UI, and yeah. I think this is precisely why I dislike Twitter so much for these things.
I had the same feeling. It is awkward to read. Supposedly, they are working on longer form entries that can follow the short form entries. Some seem to think that would ruin twitter.
Dave Rubin did a thread recently after being invited in to twitter. He claims the twitter codebase is so bad that its hard to understand what is going on. They are seriously considering just rebuilding from scratch. It might be easier, considering some of the changes they want to do.
I don't understand how to read Twitter threads. It's like instead of someone handing you a book, they tear up all the pages and throw the pieces at your feet.
What a painful format to read a presumably thoughtful statement
I see this sentiment posted often on HN and I'm hoping you can help me understand this. I never use Twitter so am not familiar with its interface. When I click on the link in the OP I see a very easy to ready list of 13 contiguous statements.
I'm using Microsoft Edge on Windows 11. I'm curious what you see that makes the format so painful to read?
It's just kind of a mess.
I was a heavy user of Twitter for multiple years. I've pulled back on it lately and it's really amazing how much I don't miss the weird, telegraphic kind of writing it tends to encourage. It really bugs me that one of our major means of communication forces you to filter everything through tiny text boxes that only recently became big enough for a whole sentence, and strongly discourages taking time to actually consider the flow of an idea through multiple paragraphs.
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