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.
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.
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
> 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?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
How so? Threaded tweets are given priority over the comments and will show sorting my first in a thread chain. You have to purposely scroll past the thread to see such footnotes.
Or do you mean you hate how comments and retweets are more important than the thread itself? In that case that, to me, is just an internet thing. I got one enjoy comments about the material more than the material it self.
I never figured out how to see the comments on a tweet which was part of a thread, it seemed to just push all the comments down below the thread no matter which tweet I had selected.
you have to select the tweet, then scroll down past the rest of the thread to see replies to that specific tweet. then go back and load next tweet and do the same.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Funny, because your first example is _exactly_ what twitter threads are! "Hook -> explanation -> sell" is a pretty developed marketing technique on twitter and it's everywhere to the point where people who don't even have anything to sell are using it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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!
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
315 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadIs there any point to starting a self hosted blog now that this exists for non technical people?
Yep, personal brand & audience ownership & control
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
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?
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.
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
They probably have a fast alert based on some cache, and a real alert that takes longer to fetch the real data.
I'm very new to twitter but I love them because feedback can be given on a (near) per sentence basis.
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.
Funny how I used to be a fan of the branching structure of reddit threads, but now went on to prefer the list of traditional forums with quoting more.
Or do you mean you hate how comments and retweets are more important than the thread itself? In that case that, to me, is just an internet thing. I got one enjoy comments about the material more than the material it self.
the scrolling down in a long thread is maddening
> 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.
That's optimistic. It's really common to see people drag out a very simple story or point over dozens of tweets.
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.
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.
Overall though, interesting concept
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.
I know this because at one point it was broken in the UI and one of the side links went to a profile instead.
https://twitter.com/advanced_search
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
edit: not working for me on Android/web, but could be geo-locked since I am in Brazil.
Just an opinion.
[1]: https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/FV3mdpEXoAIrkA1.mp4
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/
Then while we’re at it, settle the pronunciation debate by picking a different one for each.