I don't mind the tweet follow-up articles at all - in fact I'd hope that writers with a platform would use said platform to expound on their twitter musings more often. Twitter is perfect for taking the temperature on an issue.
That said - I felt that this article was a bit of a waste of the initial interest the tweet garnered.
Very interesting material for the bit that I read, but I think I got tired of the Twitter interface of it. Had it been a blog post I would have kept reading. I don't use Twitter much so was surprised I reacted that way to it.
On the other hand, I’m not sure I would have sat through an entire blog post on the same issue. The tweet format is a highlight reel, especially for subjects I don’t even know I’m interested in yet (this wouldn’t go looking for long form content).
It would be great if the author had just made a blog post and tweeted it. This sort of seems like useful information, which will suck to lose when this tweet inevitably disappears and isn't updated later with new information.
Tweets make excellent momentary entertainment. Let's stop using them for anything else.
Could the media please make an effort not to write articles primarily responding to tweets? This is barely one step above writing articles responding to Youtube comments (please don't get any ideas). You'll find whatever crap you want to find on Twitter. There should be plenty of actual thought out and (intentionally) publicly published opinions longer than 140 characters out there to reply to. It brings your article down in my eyes when you respond to tweets of random private individuals.
I know these people are making public tweets, but ultimately they are not public figures and scouring twitter for their tweets and then exposing them to legions of your like minded followers for public evisceration seems... unprofessional.
I'll take a contrary opinion -- forcing each thought into a tweet is a nice constraint that compels people to get to the point. This would probably be less well-written as, say, a Medium article.
I bet more people read more of the overall article if you publish it on Twitter. When you're faced with reading one big article, a lot of people would probably just skip it and not read any of it.
I would be annoyed as well, however if I tweet this instead of say write a well thought out article/blog with some references then I should expect low quality responses.
Was thinking the same. Once you exceed like 5 tweets in a thread, it becomes a small article and you would've been better off just writing an article in the first place. If you check the thread reader below you can see just how unstructured and incoherent it is compared with a simple article.
I think a blog would be held to more scrutiny than a series of tweets. The latter seems to give authors a way to rant about a topic without providing much in the way of exposition.
Do you really need a reader that is too lazy to click on your article? And from the reader point of view, I assume that whatever is written in twitter threads is not really that important, since the authors could not be bothered with writing in a proper and discoverable form.
I only read it /because/ it was a twitter thread. I wouldn't have clicked the link if it had been a blog post (unless I read the comments here and found a compelling reason)
To defend twitter: each tweet in the thread has to have a point, something compelling about it - and in this case, an image with each. The limitations of twitter force the author to write concisely (as opposed to blogs, where paragraphs can be as rambling and long-winded as the author pleases). The medium also allows persons to reply to any individual tweet - performing a similar role as threaded comments on a site like HN, but more focused. Twitter is an ideal format for short-to-medium length content like this.
Wonderful. However, a blog-post on their web-site or, say, a post on Medium would have been so much more readable than a tweet-storm you have to keep doing "Show More..." on.
IMO the problem here is that they've taken a couple of tweets and profile links and ballooned it to a ten paragraph "summary" when a single link to the tweet in question would've served better.
When an article about a tweet doesn't bother to embed the tweet, it's probably a good indication that the article itself doesn't really add anything to the topic. Firsthand accounts from _either_ of the parties here would've been significantly more valuable to us as readers.
That said - I felt that this article was a bit of a waste of the initial interest the tweet garnered.
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