The home page of the New York Times now looks like a Twitter feed. Very little copy per story. There's an important story right now - Israel vs. Gaza may be headed for a cease-fire deal. Home page info, useless. Linked content, useful, but too much blithering before they get to the actual terms. The important content: "In the first phase, fighting would stop for about 30 days while women, elderly and wounded hostages were released by Hamas. During that period, the two sides would work out details of a second phase that would suspend military operations for roughly another 30 days in exchange for Israeli soldiers and male civilians being held. The ratio of Palestinians to be released from Israeli prisons is still to be negotiated but that is viewed as a solvable issue. The deal would also allow for more humanitarian aid into Gaza."
But is that up front? No.[1] That's the high end of mainstream media. The low end usually begins
"10 ways to ..." I want a filter for those.
People posting videos is fine. People posting unedited videos is not fine.
Talking heads wearing headphones in love with the sound of their own voice - no.
Run those guys through speech to text conversion and have ChatGPT summarize.
"And the characters in these books and plays and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can’t communicate. I feel that if a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." - Tom Lehrer
There used to be a style for journalism called reverse pyramid. The most important part is at the start and then details get filled in. Online video has turned this on its head.
That was as much a product of market circumstance as the current click-bait: Due to space constraints and the possibility of breaking news, editors would regularly cut articles from the bottom up to save space. Reporters could not know whether their story would be cut or by how much. So as a practical matter they had to front-load the most important parts.
So it isn't today, plenty of space, but space alone doesn't scale cash.
I’m sure that was part of the motivation, but it was taught to me as “readers often stop reading after one or two grafs, so put the most important information up front.”
It ends up working so that both pressures apply the same way: reverse pyramid organizes information so busy/distracted readers should get the most salient bits, and also lets editors cut the less important details for space. Whether this worked out, I think, was pretty dependent on the journalist and publication, but “most important” is usually a bit subjective so that’s to be expected.
Almost everyone who reads your stuff online is busy/distracted, because they're online. They may have 40 tabs open. You have to give them a reason to be interested in your tab, fast. If you don't give it to them in... 7 seconds? 5? 3? Then they're gone. They close your tab and move on to the next one.
They're probably not even reading your first paragraph. They're skimming it. They might skim the second. You want them to actually read your article? Give them a reason in that first paragraph. Give them more reason in the second. Keep giving it to them, paragraph by paragraph. If you don't, they're gone.
This style of journalism predated “online” by decades or longer.
Even then people skimmed print newspapers. It’s why they were in columns and grafs were short (often one sentence). All of that was designed to make articles easy to skim.
And yes, distraction/boredom was part of it but so was a lack of time for most readers. A lot of news was read over a short breakfast before going to work. A lot of conventions were designed to make it easy to get a quick and broad overview of what the editor thought was important: pyramid style, short blips before “continued on page 11”, putting important things above the fold, etc.
It’s interesting which of those aspects translate well to online journalism and which don’t.
Especially wire service copy. It let editors cut articles at a more or less arbitrary point to fill the available space. Magazine articles by contrast weren't necessarily structured the same way.
A lot of people like to worship inverted pyramid as some Platonic ideal, but it was certainly not universally used outside of situations where there were some specific constraints.
I sorely miss that kind of quality journalism. The Wall Street Journal still practices it (mostly). Everywhere else is, as you say, turned on its head by starting with click bait questions that only get answered at the end of the article, if at all.
Obligatory get off my lawn and shakes fist at cloud.
Sadly, due to being on the first floor* I don't have a lawn.
I do keep considering balcony mounts for what would've been the lawn defence cannon though.
* en_UK first floor, mind, I know en_US insists on 1-based indexing rather than 0-based for floors but I don't particularly like writing FORTRAN either.
Long-form journalism did too, where I have to wade through long physical descriptions of all the relevant parties before I begin to get inklings of what actually happened that's supposed to be so interesting.
Long-form journalism is for those who want to read, not who want to get information. And that's fine. "For those who like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like." The problem comes when long-form journalism and "news" are put in the same "list of things you might be interested in reading".
I hate it when news sites post videos, it just doesn’t work if you’re in a room with multiple people and everyone is looking at a different video with audio.
Embedded tweets are on the same level of annoyance. The introduction blurb and connecting sentences could be reduced to an <hr> tag so entire articles become a series of tweets and videos back-to-back.
I've taken Feynman's rule as the guiding star of all communication: if you can not explain your point of view understandably, you do not understand it well enough yourself. (Implication: shut the f##k up until you do, and can.) I've added the requirement from Saint-Exupéry: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away." Then I've taken that to combination to its logical extreme:
Make your point in seven words.
More recently I have learned that Cicero had the same rule for his effective communication. Although he had the upper limit at ten words.
The Finnish language has a wonderful capability to express all of that in a single word: "Asiaan!" -- to convey the same message in English you need to waste five words in total, "get to the point already".
I don't try to claim it's easy in any way, but for me it is a thing to aspire for.
Nuance takes time and space. So does conveying context. Nonetheless, if there is a way to compress the core of the message into just seven words, I will try to do so. When it succeeds, it helps to hold attention long enough to actually deliver the more nuanced details.
Another commenter brought up the old-school journalists' pyramid rule. I'm very much aware that what I aim for is an extreme form of focusing on the sharp pointy end.
You are making the classic mistake of taking some good generic pieces of advice and forming them into a non-sensical and limiting rule. Do yourself a favor and let things be judged by their effect and not their limitations.
I'd be careful about modelling my communication style after Cicero. He ended up decapitated and his head put on the Senate rostrum. Seems like a pretty clear message about what people thought of his communication style, in my view.
The proposed deal seems to be the same as that suggested by numerous parties already, and where it approaches points of contention (how much aid, how many prisoners) it's not yet determined. If you had asked me to guess the structure of any deal I would guess something very close to that.
The reason the details are not highlighted is the new information is about the political process of the deal, not what its terms are.
As someone who can’t seem to post on any of the bad platforms mentioned but I find it seemingly freeing to post on my blog. I have the opposite issue, I want my blog to be read by those interested in the content and not by those who happen to be my friends. Because my writing is very different than what gets posted on Twitter/IG/Tiktok. And maybe because I find that my blog posts are sort of just personal journal entries over status updates with rich details like photos etc.
Maybe, but if you're not willing to link your blog in "social spaces", then you shouldn't be frustrated that nobody is reading your blog, as no one will ever learn of its existence
Same. And even professionally I'm not going to post everything on linkedin, so it can't be my "blog" either. And medium paywalls....so I ended up just rolling a quick blog on github pages using astro. Was pretty easy, and set it up as a repo so my partner can host her portfolio on github too -> https://github.com/ShelbyJenkins/easy-astro-blog-creator
and this is knowing very little about webdev. pretty nice until github tries to monetize pages
I think you gloss over one of the most important aspects of engagement - feedback and recognition. Publish a blog post, and a handful of long-time followers might comment. But publish an even moderately popular/contentious twitter thread, and thousands of likes and comments roll in.
I think the former is pretty demoralising after a while. Am I blogging into a void? Does anyone actually read these long-form posts I'm sinking so much time and effort into?
And that leads to having to promote one's blog on short-form sites, which requries producing short-form content to build an audiance... might as well post on the short-form site to begin with.
> I think you gloss over one of the most important aspects of engagement - feedback and recognition. Publish a blog post, and a handful of long-time followers might comment. But publish an even moderately popular/contentious twitter thread, and thousands of likes and comments roll in.
I guess he may have meant two-way interaction there, but the digital marketing folks typically measure engagement for a blog by session length and repeat visitors (rather than the like/comment/retweet counts one would measure social media engagement by).
There are many different motivations for people posting content online. Some may blog to get recognition, others may do it simply as an outlet to write what's on their mind.
Personally I'd argue that the very likes and comments you point to are what's most wrong with social media. When people are incentivized to chase engagement they'll post more often and post more extreme content.
IMO blogging into the void seems much less likely to lead to morale or anxiety issues than being in a bubble of people all trying to say whatever gets more engagement.
I think we likely both agree that the comments and upvote/downvote system here is used differently than Twitter.
For one thing, individual comments aren't algorithmically fed to us on the home page. For another, discussions here most often are just that, discussions. Assuming that my distaste for Twitter style likes/shares/comments and the culture built around it means I also dislike discussions is quite a leap.
I think Gresham's law can be generalized as "bad information drives out good information", as long as people will take any string words at face value and react to it.
Here in Russia we have a popular platform for long-form tech blogs called Habr. It's basically the go to platform for software and hardware engineers (for example, it's where Flipper Zero started). Usually, to have a good article, especially if you represent a company, you need to spend quite some time on editing your post to perfection, because the platform also has karma. Karma is important for corporate blogs - it's good for the image (Habr also has Habr Career - if readers are interested in your posts they may apply for a job at your company). Previously, when our company maintained its blog a few years ago, we even had to hire a copywriter to proof-read our posts, and a designer for the pictures. The main problem was that it took a lot of time of our engineers to write a single post (plus the back-and-forth with the copywriter/designer). We also had difficulties with finding employees who want to spend time on all of that. Not long ago Habr introduced short-form posts, exactly to allow individual writers and companies write "rambly twitter threads" without investing too much time in it (while still providing value, in small bits). This year we want to restart our corporate blog - we had a call with Habr staff a few days ago and they recommended to try the new short-form format. We haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like the both formats have their place.
just a practical question, Russian doesn't have a letter H (or rather, they unwisely decided to make it sound like N :) with the result that Hitler is called Gitler. Is Habr called Gabr? or more like Khabr with the X letter?
It's an old rule from before the 20th century which is not really active anymore. While it's still true for old names due to convention (Harry, etc.), new foreign words with h- in it are now often rendered with kh- (letter Х). Originally, h- was rendered as g- because at one point, the educated pronunciation of "g" was influenced by Kiev's accent (as it was the capital of Rus) which always spells g- as h-. So the closest representation of h- was "the educated G". However, people outside of Ukraine were later misreading g- in such names as "hard G" because they weren't aware of the original pronunciation, hence H => G for old words.
Habr has been utter garbage, for a long time. For people who are interested in it, I highly recommend to switch to russian content in the top right button and use google translate to see what are some of the opinions average user there exhibits. Forming that kind of obnoxious audience was a long process, first "woke" people were massively downvoted and banned, then people who thought women deserve same rights as men, then anyone who criticized government. At some point into that everyone who previously wrote any interesting piece of content just... left. The current state of the platform is what happens when you go the "no politics please" route.
>"woke" people were massively downvoted and banned, then people who thought women deserve same rights as men, then anyone who criticized government
Interesting, the poster below has the opposite view:
>Owners and moderators of Habr despise Russia
>they always optimized the karma system to stimulate the authors not for posting original interesting content but to stimulate those who hate Russia and downvote those who love their country
My take would be that Habr is OK with the both views and people only notice the bans/downvotes when posts which align with their political views are banned/downvoted.
That post was a reaction to the war and a lot of people trying to talk about it and getting banned for it. It was one of the major exodus triggers after which the site was practically empty of engagement for months. Here's a link to comments, the gist is a bunch of people are mad that admins are choosing the "no politics" route:
People who like to talk politics absolutely everywhere have ruined every single social network I know. "No politics" is probably the most intelligent way to go.
> I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.
> As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?
> What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert.
> Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.
The problem is that what is considered “politics” has vastly expanded over the past decade or so. Most controversial topics today wouldn’t have been considered “politics” in the past.
In context of habr, even asking "why'd my internet/corporate vpn stopped working?" or "why did I suddenly get summoned for a medical checkup to enlistment office?" are politics.
No politics is only feasible if your life or your existence isn't considered political in itself, or maybe if you can hide how you challenge the status quo without harming yourself.
Maybe our company is not representative, but the only engineers I know of who left Russia (about 5 people out of ~150) - I wouldn't say they were the best engineers at the company. They only left after the mobilization started (feared of being drafted) and they already were a minority group of vocal Putin critics before. So to say that the best engineers left Russia is not true, from my perspective: it looks like it better aligns with people's political views, not their expertise. Maybe it's different in Moscow, which is less conservative (we aren't Moscow-based).
I live in Central Asia, and we have huge influx of Russian engineers here. I did not ask which city they are from, but they all are good. Better than average I think.
There are still a few people who try to post long form text (and appropriate code and documentation in a code repository) for any project they deliver primarily through one of the big media platforms.
I know I appreciate having the transcripts of all the Practical Engineering episodes, and I enjoy channels like Ben Eaters' where there is often supplemental material given.
The thing that annoys me about Twitter/Mastodon/similar is it is rare someone will post the same thoughts separately on a blog or in long form, so it can be difficult to follow a full story there, especially if you are linked into a reply to a reply (not to mention the requirement for an account to read things on some platforms).
I write long form paper reviews and coding example for autonomous agent tech on my substack (Encyclopedia Autonomica).
In my highly subjective experience
High velocity social like Twitter or LinkedIn (where I maintain a digest with about 350 subscribers) do not at all provide traffic to my posts.
Reddit, where content exists longer since people are discussing about it works better.
What I enjoy about Substack compared to Medium (where I am in the Partner program and was a top 5% global business writer) is that I own the distribution list and can configure the economic benefits.
Media in 2024 is changing, and we have reached a point where some established Youtubers, Podcasters, and Longform writers have established more clout than established papers like the Los Angeles Times or similar.
I think the subreddit paradigm means that you can collect groups of niche users who are interested in something a particular niche author has to offer. On Twitter everything just sort of mashes together. I don't know about LinkedIn - I don't use it.
> if I try to make a blog post, it'll end up being abandoned and unfinished, as I am unable to edit it into something readable and postable. so if I went 100% to blogs: You would get: no content I would get: lots of unfinished drafts and a feeling of being a useless waste
I can see this being an issue aye, looking at my drafts I've got 45 posts in draft status currently.. eventually™
> The engagement reason is the simplest, so let's look at that first. Just looking at where people spend their time, short-form platforms like Twitter, Instagram, etc., completely dominate longer form platforms
That might be the reason. I'd rather poke my eyes than "hang out" on Twitter or Mastodon. My day worsens by the minute the longer I am on those websites, with the amount of bad takes and terrible idea slogans.
I hate the Twitter style posts because I exist outside that all-consuming bubble of neurosis.
Reddit is dead, HN is alive and kicking, so this is basically my front page of the Internet (:
Reddit still holds a lot of value for me only in the subs I join. The smaller the community (niche) the more likely politics or social topic of the week will not get inserted into a post.
Stay off /r/all and the main politics-esc subs (There are many now) and it is fine.
When the Reddit strike started, I tried Lemmy for a few weeks.
Absolutely the only content that got any discussion was posts about how Reddit was bad or about Lemmy itself (both criticizing the owners and extolling the platform). I was interested in programming posts but there was almost nothing interesting there :( so I was quite happy when Reddit came back (it seems to have come back to normal levels now).
> Absolutely the only content that got any discussion was posts about how Reddit was bad or about Lemmy itself
I call this the new social death spiral. When meta-discussion dominates for too long, it kills the community. I'm surprised Mastodon has lasted for as long as it has for precisely this reason.
Yeah, this is kind of a problem with a lot of 'alternative' social media sites and platforms. They become places where the majority of discussion is "why the existing site/service is trash and why the people using it are idiots/wrong"
But that's not an interesting topic to discuss, at least not for very long. A community based on negativity towards an existing community is built on sand, and probably isn't going to last very long.
So they need to find a way to attract people who discussing 'normal' things, and don't spend every waking moment of their life being obsessed with the platform/the old platform.
Looking at https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy The Reddit exodus brought "active users" from ~0 to 70k. Half of them have left again since then.
That matches my subjective perception. Activity has significantly waned again. Larger communities are good (e.g. !europe@feddit.de). Smaller ones (e.g. !rpg@ttrpg.network) were good but are dying now.
It would be good timing for another exodus scandal by Reddit now.
If you write a blog post, how do people become aware of the blog post? Relatively few people follow RSS feeds, so you also need a social media post linking to the blog post. With such a link, there's only one opportunity to go viral, one opportunity for each person on social media to see the link to the blog post. Whereas with a long thread of multiple short social media posts, there are many opportunities to go viral, one for each post of the thread.
2. Ranting vs. Research
Speaking only for myself, I consider my blog to be my "permanent record", whereas social media is my fleeting thoughts. Indeed, I frequently delete my social media posts, whereas I almost never delete my blog posts. I have blog posts going back to 2006. And I typically spend a lot more time writing a blog post: not in terms of the technical aspects of writing, e.g., typing, but rather in terms of thinking, researching, ensuring that everything I say in the blog post is accurate and well-supported, with external citations when necessary. Just look at Dan's own blog post here: you'd never see that same level of organization and citation in a social media thread.
> If you write a blog post, how do people become aware of the blog post?
There are other solutions to the readership problem with independent blogs. I am trying to start blogging this year and am using Ghost as the CMS. I pay for the hosted solution that is $11/mo and provides readers the ability to subscribe for email updates. This isn’t a unique feature to Ghost, several other platforms support this too. I can say Ghost makes supporting this trivial.
I've never heard of Ghost, so I'm not sure how much that would help with readership.
In any case, external hosts undermine the goal of having the blog be a permanent record. External hosts are fleeting. They can shut down. Even Twitter itself could shut down due to massively declining ad revenue. And even though Twitter is still operating now (well, technically, "Twitter" did stop operating and was replaced with "X"), the site has started to put content behind a login wall that was previously public. Self-hosting is the only way to keep control of your content.
That's a bizarre question. Luu's blog post is about longform primary content: blog posts, YouTube videos, and long Twitter threads. HN comments are neither longform nor primary. In this case, Luu's blog post is the longform primary content, and these HN comments are short, secondary content.
I don't actually delete all of my social media posts. The point about deletion was to emphasize that they are fleeting thoughts. The crucial distinction is between spur-of-the-moment hot takes and carefully crafted, researched essays.
Obviously this isn't a blog, but since we can't delete comments does he (and others likeminded) steer more towards blog-type writing and less social media (which HN is).
One of the problem with blogs is that a lot of remaining bloggers are technical people and they have these weird hangups about styling their posts so they are actually readable. They seem to think that because design has an element of personal preference it has no importance. As much as a I dislike platforms like Twitter and Medium, the content is a least readable by default.
Some personal blogs are unreadable because of shoddy CSS choices, but I need them to have a little personality for me to spend a second on them. The most memorable ones for me are those that I can distinguish visually (they don't have to be necessarily beautiful)
And Medium is a good idea in a vacuum, in practice with nag screens and article limits the association I make when I land on it is "fuck this place, and whoever write it only cares for engagement, not reader experience." And it's true. If you care about your readers, you won't subject them to Medium or Substack's silliness. I literally don't know a single good blog hosted on those platforms. At least on blogspot we had Steve Yegge.
Nerds like you and me know about reader mode, but I would bet at least 90% of web users don't and even if they do it's another step in the way of accessing content.
Any impediment you put in the way of readers is going to lose a certain percentage of them. Even nerds who know about reader mode are sometimes going to see a badly formatted blog post and just close the tab.
Stupid question: but why does video monetize so much better? Is it because of sponsorships that are harder to skip than just jumping a text paragraph? Or it's the normal ads?
Video adds are much harder to ignore. Compared to banners. Maybe we should develop some sort of unskippable add on articles. Like lot of text and then multi-choice questionnaire, kinda in style of captchas. Those could be real value.
He briefly hints at it, but I think the author makes a mistake common to well-read, intellectual-type people: he assumes that people like to read as much as they like watching video, and therefore that the blog vs. video decision is one made on "proper format."
The reality, I think, is that most people fundamentally don't like to read, and that reading more than a few paragraphs is rapidly becoming something akin to a chore for the majority of the population. Watching a video, on the other hand, is an entirely different experience and one that more-or-less comes naturally to human beings, no matter their education level or cultural background.
I run a Substack myself, but I've increasingly become convinced that text-first platforms don't have a mass-market future and at best, will exist as a niche thing. Instead, I think video-first platforms will gradually solve the advantages text still has over video – for example, search and scrolling. As such, I'd recommend any writers/content creators seriously consider adopting a video-first approach, or at least a hybrid one.
Admittedly, I'm a "well-read, intellectual-type" person, but I find videos of people talking to be exceedingly boring. I can't stand podcasts or talk radio either. To me they're just tedious, and whenever I try to watch or listen, I have to turn them off after a few minutes. The S/N ratio is so low. The speakers take 10 minutes to say something that could be read in 1 minute. It's a giant waste of time. And you're forced to sit through all of the filler: the "ums", the "ahs", the pauses, the idle chit-chat.
I don't deny that talk media is massively popular. I don't get it, though. It's not for me. I would guess that maybe viewers/listeners want to identify with the speakers and consider them friends.
I can sometimes tolerate them at 1.5x or 2x speed.
Generally though I hunt around for a transcript (even a shitty automated transcript is often just about readable -enough- if I'm interested) or google up articles on whatever the topic of the video is and read those instead.
I'm not sure what the percentage split of preferences is, but I -do- strongly suspect that "liking text more than video" is rather more common amongst developers than amongst humans in general.
> reading more than a few paragraphs is rapidly becoming something akin to a chore for the majority of the population
I agree with that part. Some people will do anything to avoid reading articles: they watch shallow videos with 10 minutes of advertisement-friendly padding, they ask ChatGPT to hallucinate something. But I don't see that those people become better informed as a result of those tools. It's not working, it's only a simulation of knowledge acquisition.
> text-first platforms don't have a mass-market future
They never had. High-information media have always been a niche. It's when economic effects cause them to die out completely that we get a problem as a civilization.
> High-information media have always been a niche.
I don't doubt that, but how much of the text one reads daily can honestly be described as "high information"? In the normal course of reading things, one encounters a dozen ways in which long-form text can have abysmal information density.
Think of the stereotypical 5 paragraph article retelling a 1 paragraph press release. The official document containing pages of magical incantations designed to protect the writer from lawsuits. The "thinker" who has a single, simple idea, but is under contract to publish a book, not an article. The novel where nothing happens at all.
>The reality, I think, is that most people fundamentally don't like to read, and that reading more than a few paragraphs is rapidly becoming something akin to a chore for the majority of the population.
Agreed.
I grew enjoying reading, I still enjoy reading, I'm here reading too many comments. Despite that, of the thousands of "pages" I read last year, most were video with the screen off or proper audio. And that's been the case ever since I became employed in jobs that lack downtime. Reading demands eyeballs, but so does coding, driving, digging, doing dishes, cleaning, etc. Video or rather the implied audio does not.
That is a major contributing factor to TFA's observations. It's also a vicious cycle -- younger people get pulled into information ecosystems that encourage, or only support, short text and video content. They then get used to those formats and find longer forms off-putting. I see this happening with my kids, who won't read anything longer than a paragraph online.
I have found that buying them physical books and cajoling them to read eventually works. They tell me they're surprised they enjoyed reading a novel. Then they go back to Twitter and TikTok.
I wonder if and how schools are contributing to this.
That's also ignoring how miserable the text reading experience is online. Go to a random news site. What fraction of the screen real-state will be content vs ads? Not just ads, but intrusive pop ups, pop unders, scrolls, videos, newsletter subscriptions, whatever dirty trick du jour to count as an ad impression.
The siren song of ad revenue is too strong to ignore, so any platform with content enters a death spiral where the content takes a back seat to ad delivery.
I wish it weren't so but it appears to be. Even when timing is at a disadvantage - I.e. most of my friends will rather watch a 10min video with data content of a 3 paragraph article (how entertaining is that 10min video, is a matter of personal judgement :)
I definitely don't want to disparage reading – I generally prefer reading to video, at least for some topics. But I do recognize that it's not a common attitude to have and it does require more "buy in" than video.
The main reason in relation to the "why" could still be that those users are completely oblivious to the degree of inaccessibility of their content.
It's accessible if you are logged in (and extra requirement on mobile: app installed). If not, it probably won't load or at best will be behind a barrage of popups nagging to agree, sign up, etc.
There is no point in joining either, twitter is for people that already are heavy users and have a network, or celebs. For new users it's dead.
Say what you will about the content of the rationalism movement, but they read and comment on each others’ long form writing- no twitter or reddit needed.
The short form, information in chunks, is good also because it forces the author to make a point per post. In a long blog post or book, authors might get lazy and ramble on and not come to a defined point. But if it is multiple short tweets, they do have to think about the subject enough to get to a point. A good author should be doing this for each paragraph in a long peace, but it is easier to meander, or loose the thread. (edit: I mean 'good' only as a 'practiced' writer, as post points out, some 'good' writers just work better in different formats, it doesn't mean they are 'bad').
Also. Very glad this was included. I had read it a long time ago and was pretty amazed, but couldn't remember enough to search for it.
I can tell you where the bad content is being posted now. LinkedIn.
My feed has turned into blogspam, exam cheatsheets, crappy AWS "architecture" diagrams, and low effort cyber security guides. Did you know SMTP is port 25?
I'm not sure if it's recycled Medium posts, AI generated, or people actually create this crap. Others "like" and comment on it, so who knows.
People create it (possibly with AI generation) and have it liked and commented in part to try to game the metric of "lots of posts/activity on Linked in on {subject}" to make themselves appear more impressive when either applying for a position ("1000 applicants, here are the top 5% for activity in cyber security") or increase the likelihood of having a recruiter noticing them and including their resume in the batch that gets sent to some company.
The quality of the content is not of primary concern if there is too much content out there to be able to spend time evaluating it in an effort to differentiate between applicants.
Back in the day I used to collect sysadmin guides/documentation over at debian-administration.org.
I've lost track of the number of times people would copy/paste who articles and series, posting it on linkedin as their own work. Usually Indians, but the second-most common nationality was Americans.
I used to report it, but it happened often enough that I just gave up.
My site is long-dead now, which tells you how long this has been going on, definitely 10+ years. No doubt now "AI" is commonplace it has gotten easier, but that's nothing new.
The MBA brainworms are trying to co-opt technical fields. Nonsense accreditation, get-rich-quick schemes laundered through misunderstood CS101 terminology.
If I was interviewing one of these people and checked their linkedin and saw it was full of blogspam, I would assume they're likely lying about their skillsets and ask them to explain any of their buzzwords.
I deleted my LinkedIn profile. Don’t know if I’ll regret it later. Realized that I didn’t use it at all to get my last few jobs— that was all done by networking IRL and having a good resume. The feed was garbage, the inbox was completely full of spam… what was the point of LinkedIn again?
This is basically why all my music is in the form of screen recordings of Live these days. Rendering is effort! And no one listens to it anyway. If someone actually asks for a FLAC or MP3, I'll do it, but no one has.
I never managed more than 2-3 sales per album at peak when I did albums and EPs, and even a simple release with some thrown together cover art is 10x the work for basically no return. People do watch the videos[0], and enough people pay $5+/month for it--they go to YouTube later--to make it worth doing and cover new tools.
Why do people write up great pull review descriptions and then merge them as lame duck “Merge major-security-vuln-oops into 'main' / Fixes #1624”. Can someone explain that?
You seem to be agreeing with me as well as not agreeing? Even though you don’t track everything inside the repo, you can still keep the most relevant commit context inside the repository by using the pull request description in the commit message. That’s what commit messages are for.
(As for issue tracking: I use git-bug sometimes when the project doesn’t have an issue tracker or if I want to make my own issues. The issues are tracked in the same repository.)
I view the comments as a mis-targeted criticism of the poor accessibility and content lock-in of these platforms.
I, too, find long twitter threads largely unreadable, because of how distracting it is to have after each post the retweet and reply counts, timestamp, another the user's avatar, and sometimes ads.
I can't blame the author, because twitter obviously works for them as an easy platform to post from. But the fact that I have no other means to access their content makes it inaccessible. I used to be able to use Nitter, but that's gone now.
And that's OK. There are also large portions of this city that probably have all sorts of interesting and great people that I'll never meet, because I don't tend to frequent some places. I can't read all the content on the Internet; platform-based elimination saves me a lot of time.
Most of the time, I have noticed that platform quality correlates with content quality, and the things I can read only after dismissing a cookie banner, followed by a newsletter pitch, followed by a registration proposal, were not worth my time to begin with. On the rare occasion it sounds like I really want to read it, I use a helpful service such as archive.is. But most of the time, I just close the Tab, thank the platform for saving me some reading time, and move on.
I appreciate addressing this question directly from the perspective of arguments in favor of the practice. It basically answers the question of "why". However:
None of these reasons seem to address the problem, they just offer an apologia of sorts. The practice is still poor communication in my opinion.
The reasons are largely focused on the writer, and not on the reader. It says a lot to me. Even the reason "because people are on platform X" seems still focused on the writer getting attention, and not on the readers per se.
What I've never understood about any of this is if you're going to bother to write a multiple-post thread, why not just put it on a blog, and put a link to it on a shortform platform? Then people get a summary and a link for further reading, and you get to read the content in the best form for it. This is the purpose of URLs.
I can't get over what seems to me to be this weird stockholm syndrome phenomenon when it comes to putting longform writing on shortform platforms. All of the reasons given seem like legitimate reasons to use Twitter or Mastodon for something, but not for posting longform content on there per se.
I think the best way to use "social media" is to pull eyes to your own platform, eventually people will transition (Myspace -> Facebook -> Reddit -> Twitter -> Mastodon) and each time they move the likelihood that they eventually use "RSS" increases.
I'd like to address some of the citations in that post, they really stood out to me.
> CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT. I have ADHD.
I can relate... I have attention deficit disorder too and it's extremely difficult to start working on anything. I take top tier medication and it makes it much easier to maintain focus but getting started is still difficult.
Somehow against all these odds I managed to publish a bunch of articles. They languished unfinished for quite a while though. Wish I had a general solution for people but my advice is probably too specific to my case: it turned out the only tool that can make me productive is Termux. It gave me the ability to start working on stuff anywhere and anytime. So whenever I get the sudden motivation to do something, I make the most of it. Requires enormous effort to write any amount of text on a tiny screen made even tinier by the touch screen keyboard but it beats the alternative which is writing nothing because my laptop is too far away.
Hell I wrote my own goddamn programming language inside Termux because of all this. As far as I know it's the first and only programming language to be literally born inside a mobile device. Lots of C code, all written in a tiny 135x8 terminal emulator window. Never stopped to think about how insane that is until now.
> if I try to make a blog post, it'll end up being abandoned and unfinished, as I am unable to edit it into something readable and postable.
I felt that one too... I would worry way too much about perfection, try to make sure everything's correct and substantial. Actually felt guilty if I published before it was perfect. Which is the same thing as saying I felt guilty if I published anything at all.
It took someone here on HN telling me something like "if your comments are good enough content for this place then they're good enough content for your blog" for me to finally stop caring. I got that sort of realization that seems obvious in hindsight. It's my site, I can do whatever I want. I dunno why I ever thought otherwise. If I make mistakes I'll just fix them. If at a later date I have more to add, I'll just add it.
I'm starting to think "readability" and "postability" are very harmful concepts. It's OK to be imperfect. Actually it's probably better to be imperfect. Everything is more sincere that way, more human. Perfection is a machine's job.
> but I can do rambly tweet threads. they don't require a lot of attention for a long time, they don't have the endless editing I get into with blog posts, I can do them.
I do the same thing but with HN comments instead of tweets. The rate limiting the moderators applied on my account is actually helping stop this addiction. I've realized that over the years I discussed certain topics many times. HN has definitely helped me shape my world view but the moderators are right about the fact this isn't the place for repetitive discussions. I've resolved to turn all these thoughts into articles at some point.
> I have attention deficit disorder too and it's extremely difficult to start working on anything. I take top tier medication and it makes it much easier to maintain focus but getting started is still difficult.
What helps me is logseq journaling.
I put everything into journal with tags. Some time latter I move all tags into separate page. If doc grows enough, I reorganise it, I run it through ChatGPT to polish it and hit publish.
I never "start" writing, just filling random notes and when it grows, I have a lot of material to work with.
I write quite a lot of code sat in beer gardens using an 80x17 or so terminal on
an 8" tablet* plus a Thinkpad Tablet 2 bluetooth keyboard*.
Usually have a temporary screen/tmux session while doing so to let me have my usual multiple-shell setup (on a laptop I tile 2x2 80x24 terminals) and it ... pretty much works fine.
(and I found your lisp from your bio page and while I'm probably never going to try it (I have too many lisps to try already, I accumulate as-yet-untried lisps just like I do as-yet-unread books), it's a really rather neat concept and I hope you have much joy continuing to hack on it)
* When my second Nexus 4 died I tried to find a sensible sized phone, discovered the modern ones were usually phablet sized, stuck the SIM card into my actual tablet and haven't felt the need for a second device again since.
* I am one of the handful of people in existence who actually likes the "optical trackpoint" design.
> you can see this in the valuations of these companies
No you cannot. Valuation is based on market power. There are many platforms to post longform text, which is why none of them have any significant market power. There's only one platform to post tweets.
The article itself is solid ... but my favourite part is probably the fact it has a collection of Foone thread links and it seems I'd missed some of them at the time.
I hate that "content" now has become "content we want people to engage with so that we can get likes and clicks and become thought leaders and such". Likely unrealistic, but I hope the internet can get back to where it was 15 years ago, but keep the good stuff.
> Personally, I don't really like video as a format and, for 95% of youtube videos that I see, I'd rather get the information as a blog post than a video
For myself, I tend to write fairly long (I don’t consider them “long,” but I have had people refer to me as “prolix”) blog posts[0].
I enjoy writing. I’ve been doing it for most of my life.
But it takes time. I spend a lot of time, writing, then, just about as much time, editing.
I know that videos are far more popular, but they take even more time to make.
I have posted on Medium, as well as on my personal site, but I’m probably done with that. Medium paywalled one of my posts without my consent, and that pretty much put a sock in it.
But I’ve been very involved in a pretty sizable project, for the last couple of years, and that has affected my writing. Now that it’s shipped, I hope to get back to it.
The edit fundamentally changes the meaning of the title. With the brackets, it's clear that the title is a paraphrase/quote and that the article will probably be an answer to that question. Without the brackets, I was actually expecting a rant about people using the "wrong" platform to post content - the exact thing that the article is actually replying to.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Other comparable platforms that don't have such anti-features yet? How do I know they won't in the future? Or creating a static blog or renting a VPS to deploy a wordpress site? That's obviously a lot harder then posting something on twitter.
Blogging platforms that you pay for hosting your blog, like wordpress.com, write.as, ghost.org (not sure about popups there). The best assurance regarding future changes is always using your own domain, so that you can use it with a different platform in the future.
While self-hosting isn’t as easy as posting on Twitter, it isn’t exactly hard either. You can also pay a service to do it for you, like bluehost.com for wordpress.org instances.
I have ADHD myself, but I can’t stand the sobs the ADHD people leave everywhere, makes me despise them. Learn to work with your impulses instead of whining all over the place about it.
‘I can’t write longer than a tweet.’ Here is a hundred tweets for you. Yeah, thank you very much.
They're posting thoughts as they flow on Twitter in threads. It's not a single tweet, it's a thread of many tweets.
Think of it as a livestream vs an edited video. In their case doing the content live is less resistance than cutting and polishing an edited video.. but in text form.
What's the difference between a twitter thread that requires more than one tweet, because of its length, and writing it in something that accepts the message as a whole?
Or hell, just a plugin that tweets a picture of the whole message?
I'm not suggesting that they hire an editor, do multiple passes, get a proofreader to give suggestions, etc...
This is actually what they said:
> Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of getting posted on hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE TIME there's one highly-ranked reply that's "jesus man, this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets when you can make one blog post?"
> CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT. I have ADHD. I have bad ADHD that is being treated, and the treatment is NOT WORKING TERRIBLY WELL. I cannot focus on writing blog posts. it will not happen
> if I try to make a blog post, it'll end up being abandoned and unfinished, as I am unable to edit it into something readable and postable. so if I went 100% to blogs: You would get: no content I would get: lots of unfinished drafts and a feeling of being a useless waste
> but I can do rambly tweet threads. they don't require a lot of attention for a long time, they don't have the endless editing I get into with blog posts, I can do them. I do them a bunch! They're just rambly and twitter, which some people don't like
^^ that doesn't fit in a tweet. Yet their ADHD didn't prevent them writing it. Why is it a tweet?
In fact, the thread continues for several more statements. It's basically a blog post already, yet denying that they are able to write a blog post.
You seem to be quoting their reasoning but either not reading or accepting it, I'd just be quoting the tweets you've cited in your comment which seems like it'd just waste both of our time as you're already aware of them.
I'm not sure there's any further discussion to be had on this one.
> You seem to be quoting their reasoning but either not reading or accepting it,
I'm not accepting it, no. Because it's a self-contained contradiction. People are wrong all the time. I don't find it as baffling as you seem to.
If someone goes on a long tirade, in English, about how they can't speak English, and answers followup questions about it, then no I don't take them at their word. It'll be clear very quickly (in interactive questions) whether or not this is merely memorized sounds.
I've had a guy (on drugs) get afraid and argued to try to convince me that he did not have a pulse. I didn't need to check for a pulse to know he had one. He finally accepted my argument that "if you did not have a pulse then you would not be sitting here talking to me".
People posting videos is fine. People posting unedited videos is not fine. Talking heads wearing headphones in love with the sound of their own voice - no. Run those guys through speech to text conversion and have ChatGPT summarize.
"And the characters in these books and plays and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can’t communicate. I feel that if a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." - Tom Lehrer
[1] https://archive.is/pkoy8#selection-7311.100-7311.620