Twitter penalizes links. If you post a tweet with a link only a fraction of the people will see it compared to a twitter thread. They much prefer people stay on platform.
It's not just Twitter doing this - all social networks prefer you stay within their platform. Facebook is notorious for it.
If you put all that work into a blog post and only 5 people see it versus typing it out as a twitter thread and 1000 see it, it makes it obvious which ones ie better - even if its a worse UI.
>If you put all that work into a blog post and only 5 people see it versus typing it out as a twitter thread and 1000 see it, it makes it obvious which ones ie better - even if its a worse UI.
that's not some universal truth; the method creates certain feelings within the reader.
A plane trailing a banner for "EAT AT JOES" over a metropolis gets a lot of eyes, but there is a certain group of people below that plane that don't appreciate trying to squint at a banner in front of the sun while witnessing the waste of hydrocarbons and the cloud of AVGAS for such a trivial advertisement.
Likewise when i'm being asked to read a 2000 word essay that is composed of a cloud of tweets interspersed with reply tweets and advertisement/related(s)-pushed by Twitter it's similarly angering.
Why should the reader get the shortest end of the stick possible just to nudge some marketing numbers up? "Because the numbers aren't large enough." really isn't a suitable answer as the reader.
Thank you for posting this. I have been on the anti-thread bandwagon for a long time, but something about your post really opened my eyes and convinced me to stop being so stubborn.
I had shared an article link on Twitter earlier today and it predictably didn't get much traction. So I just turned it into a thread in 5 minutes and re-posted it like that. If you can't beat 'em...
It's not just Twitter doing this - all social networks prefer you stay within their platform. Facebook is notorious for it.
If you put all that work into a blog post and only 5 people see it versus typing it out as a twitter thread and 1000 see it, it makes it obvious which ones ie better - even if its a worse UI.