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Notes -
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.
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