
Show HN: Chirr App  splits text into tweets and posts it as a thread - kossnocorp
https://getchirrapp.com
======
danirod
Why are Twitter threads so common? What makes them better than a real and
accessible blog post? I don't condemn threads, but the user interface and
reading experience is so awful that I cannot like them as they currently are.

It's difficult to navigate forward or backward in a thread, specially when
there are a lot of tweets, as every few tweets it has to load more. Plus,
every tweet can have its own replies, so it's hard to read comments or
reactions.

The only thing I find useful in threads is that, since every sentence is a
separate tweet, it's easy to share a particular point in a conversation by
sharing the URL for that particular tweet.

~~~
cormacrelf
#1 reason has to be the low overhead. You could say having to include a
counter is overhead, but it's still less than setting up your own blog and
fragmenting your online presence into some other platform that wants you to
publish there all the time.

#2 is that your followers are much more likely to read a thread, since a
thread of length N will appear in your timeline at least N times. I often
scroll through my feed and see a (28/30) marker, view the thread and read the
rest of it. (Yes, 30 whole tweets!) If you tweeted out a link to an article
you wrote 30 times, nobody would follow you. Some people will tweet twice for
people in other timezones, but that's all you can get away with for out-of-
band links.

#3 is that a thread often evolves out of discussion that's already on Twitter,
and must participate where that discussion is happening at the time. Reacting
to fast-paced news is a key one. Take this example: Josh Chafetz (the
constitutional law professor, not the Congressman) watches Twitter respond to
the Arpaio pardoning, and tweets a thread on why people are hot-taking it
wrong[^1]. The next day, he turns it into an op-ed[^2]. But what good is an
op-ed about rushed hot-takes a day late?

[^1]:
[https://twitter.com/joshchafetz/status/901244717115080706](https://twitter.com/joshchafetz/status/901244717115080706)

[^2]:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/26/the-
problem-with-joe-arpaios-pardon-isnt-the-process-the-problem-is-joe-
arpaio/?utm_term=.4a2c23f83c80)

Edit: I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter made thread counters a first-class
feature. People use the platform how they want, and it will stretch to do what
is needed.

~~~
icebraining
Regarding #1, you could post it to some site like JustPaste.it (no
affiliation, just found it via Google) and tweet the link. Chirr App itself
could publish it on its servers and tweet the link with a single button.

#2 and #3, fair enough, though both of them sound like anti-features (spam,
and fast soundbites over longer explanations) to me.

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CommieBobDole
I guess stuff like this is the heart and soul of geekery "Look! I wrote a tool
to use Imgur image descriptions as a very slow and unreliable filesystem!",
but this just seems like a perfect example of why the ability to do a thing
isn't necessarily a reason to do that thing.

Twitter threads are objectively terrible - they are hard to post, hard to read
and hard to share; not because of some technical limitation, but because the
people who built the tool designed it to resist being used in that way.

As long as there's a million places you can post text that's over 140
characters and then link to it from Twitter, this will remain a bad idea -
because it's a misuse of a tool that makes it harder to use for both the
creator and the consumer, while ignoring that there are trivial ways to avoid
the problem entirely.

~~~
tuxxy
Sorta unrelated, but I wrote a tool that allows me to use Bandcamp for
filestorage haha.

[https://medium.com/@__Tux/using-bandcamp-as-a-backup-
solutio...](https://medium.com/@__Tux/using-bandcamp-as-a-backup-
solution-3b6549d24579)

------
Kpourdeilami
Twitter threads are somewhat broken and often in a chain of tweets, it shows
only the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 8th tweet and then you have to go digging under each
individual tweet to find the rest of the threads.

That happens when the 3rd tweet is a reply to the 1st and 4th a reply to the
2nd which breaks the whole thread

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kossnocorp
Hey, everyone! I’ve built Chirr App to scratch my own itch: it’s tedious to
plan and post Twitter threads (aka tweetstorms).

It’s built with Preact on top of Firebase. It’s free and open-sourced:
[https://github.com/kossnocorp/chirrapp](https://github.com/kossnocorp/chirrapp).
Check it out!

~~~
okramcivokram
The numbering is broken when using the manual splitter, see
[http://imgur.com/a/HcHZd](http://imgur.com/a/HcHZd)

------
Sujan
I really dislike Twitter threads.

~~~
preinheimer
I'd rather read something scrawled in blood on a bathroom stall wall than a
twitter thread.

(I understand some apps make this easier than others, mine appears to be in
the harder category)

------
sassyboy
I had built the same thing and posted to HN a couple of years ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10706270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10706270)

Didn't get any upvotes so shut down the site. Made the same functionality
available as a Chrome extension as well.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tweet-
smart/cidmaf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tweet-
smart/cidmafpjjhaajnpfefgfpnnalhkepppf)

The source code :
[https://github.com/singhshashi/tweetsmart](https://github.com/singhshashi/tweetsmart)

Built it as I was learning React.

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joelrunyon
I think this would be really cool if you could take this text, tweet storm it
out, then publish it as a blog post (on wp or someplace else).

Often, a tweet storm pulls me in, but twitter's functionality is always a bit
wonky.

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egypturnash
My tweetstorm tool is Mastodon.

1\. Post something approximating a complete thought on Mastodon.

2\. Screengrab it.

3\. Tweet this image, along with a link to it, and text like "Thread".

(Today I learnt that HN ignores emoji in your comments.)

~~~
kossnocorp
Posting a thread as an image is on my todo list. It's good to know that there
is a demand!

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triptych
Dave Winer created something like this 3 years ago:
[http://scripting.com/2014/06/06/theEasiestWayToTweetAStorm.h...](http://scripting.com/2014/06/06/theEasiestWayToTweetAStorm.html)

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alex_lfw
If you can't say it in 140 chars it does not belong on twitter.

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petercooper
Can also be used as a quick way to get people to unfollow you :-D

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goshakkk
It's good. One thing I feel is missing is embedding images into the tweets.
Are there any plans for that?

~~~
kossnocorp
Yup, it's on my todo list!

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sullichin
great idea

