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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31957 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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The discussions are increasingly becoming about how the information is being handled over what, if anything, is being shown to us.

So you don't like how it is being handled or that everyone is talking about how it is being handled?

It's actually a pretty common political strategy. They don't want to talk about the actual topic, because it makes them look bad, so they claim everyone already knew that and change the subject to discuss the discussion. Then not only can they pretend to be above it or bored, but they can even lament the state of things and complain about the loss of focus - giving them outs that don't require any status loss.

I don't like how it's being handled because I think doing this on Twitter means authors can't expound as much as I'd like. No one is reading an 80-tweet chain, even if you might read the equivalent were it a substack post. But I also dislike how people keep using the "it's just right-wing theater" argument. I understand that for some people, there's fundamentally nothing wrong with Twitter choosing what to remove or who to ban upon nothing but their own thoughts. But I don't like the theater argument being used as some kind of substitute for actually defending this idea. Mind you, if a person is choosing to attack the Twitter Files by claiming it was theater, I wouldn't mind that argument there, because now it's an argument about motivations.

No one is reading an 80-tweet chain, even if you might read the equivalent were it a substack post.

I keep hearing things like this, but it's never actually explained or defended. What, exactly, is so onerous about reading tweet threads compared to articles? Is there a mobile device limitation I'm unaware of as a prolific desktop user? Just... scroll down as you read? I'm eternally baffled by this complaint.

My main complaint is that it slows my reading speed to a crawl. I think partly because space is used inefficiently, and it also just makes it slower/harder to parse text when you dont have paragraph structure.

The entire point of a tweet is to be small and catchy (hence the character limit which has itself been doubled from 140 to 280). There's a reason most news publishers don't wholly publish on Twitter even if their article is free - quoting a catchy portion or the title and then linking to the article seems like more intuitive.

There are definitely people who would read 80-tweet chains, but the audience for that consists of people who just like reading long-form content (people like us for the most part). A lot of media and people are turned off by having to commit a lot of time to doing something (observe the increasing trend towards short-form content when it comes to watching online videos - TikTok, Youtube Shorts, etc.)

Is that not a fully general argument against articles, too? I don't get the impression people are complaining about tweet threads because they're long; they're complaining about tweet threads because they're tweet threads, for some reason.

My frustration with tweet threads is that they're fundamentally a hack around the character limit. People want to be able to say longer things, but they can't, so they make tweet threads. But this is precisely what tweets are not meant to be used for, each one is supposed to be stand-alone. Twitter revolves around and conditions people to make shorter posts, which is why I say that people on Twitter are less likely to read an N-tweet thread even if there is an equivalent amount of text in an article. The medium conditions your attention span.

An article would be more succinct. A tweet storm has the obvious benefit of being more viral.

I don't see how an article would be more succinct. Tweet threads are basically just articles split up into chunks 280 characters long, rounded down to the nearest sentence.

an article allows you to list the most important things first. Instead of having to read 10-100+ 200-word tweets having to decide what is the most important item (assuming you do not give up), with an article you can explicitly say what it is, with evidence.

Err, Twitter threads can list the important things first. They're just... words. You can choose to put first the words that are most important.

No one is reading an 80-tweet chain, even if you might read the equivalent were it a substack post.

I'm not sure about that.

I've read multiple.

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