Nice Threads

https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/nicethreads.html

by davidbarker • 9 years ago

88 50 9 years ago

blog.twitter.com

jdpedrie• 9 years ago

Next they should address the nightmare of navigating conversations had via quote tweets. It's like going down the rabbit hole, trying to find the beginning of an exchange. Never know how deep it is. Then once you've found the beginning, it's a long trek of hitting the back button in the browser or app to follow the conversation in context. Quote tweets were a good addition, but the current implementation does not work with the way people use them.

paulgb• 9 years ago

A free-time project of mine has been building a browser extension[1] for navigating conversations. Quote-tweets are hard because they turn the conversation into a DAG instead of a tree. Would love to know if you have any thoughts on solving this.

[1] https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse

joelrunyon2• 9 years ago

I was actually thinking that there should be something that "mind-maps" different branches of a tweet thread. The normal UI gets confusing fast.

The problem in general is a bit tough - since it's a little "choose-your-own-adventurey", but this is an interesting concept. Nice.

eyelidlessness2• 9 years ago

In which Twitter acknowledges that the entire concept of their product is fundamentally incompatible with the way a large portion of their user base uses their product.

mark212• 9 years ago

and yet, mysteriously, many millions of people are absolutely addicted to this product.

I say that without snark, just wonderment at how resilient it is even thought it's so totally ill-suited for the actual use.

tomjen32• 9 years ago

Twitter is very useful to broadcast to the world your thoughts and it forces you to take the extra time to make it short (lots of people disagree here, but my opinion is that if you cannot put your thoughts in a tweet or 2, you need to spend more time thinking about it).

There is a time and a place for long-form text, but that should never be because the writer has not taken the time to make the text short.

Ganz7• 9 years ago

That's too harsh. People don't go to twitter for lengthy paragraphs or op-eds. They go there for concise humor, news and generally just to find out what is happening with the world.

You're ignoring the real-time connectivity that twitter offers to the entire world. No other platform comes close.

And sometimes, this concise thought platform is not enough to share an in-depth thought. Hence, this.

My only complaint here is that this took way too long. Things must move really slow at twitter.

minikites3• 9 years ago

People don't go to twitter for lengthy paragraphs or op-eds.

If this was true, don't you think people would stop posting tweetstorms that are 50-100 (sometimes more) tweets long?

smacktoward• 9 years ago

At least they are finally coming to grips with this fact that has been obvious to every sentient person on Earth who does not work at Twitter for at least five years now.

jawns• 9 years ago

"We saw this approach (which we call 'threading') as an innovative way to present a train of thought, made up of connected but individual elements."

An innovative way to present a train of thought? (1/8)

Publishing multiple tweets because the character limit prevents you from keeping the "connected" elements (i.e. sentences in a paragraph) in a single tweet? (2/8)

Trust me, nobody who uses threading wants to be using threading. They want to be able to write a paragraph. (3/8)

The limitations of the platform prevent them from doing so, but the reach of the platform prevents them from publishing elsewhere. (4/8)

Sentences in tweets tend to be about the same length, so there's a distinctly wooden cadence to the writing as a whole. (5/8)

The Twitter format makes editing your work laborious, especially when the edits go beyond just fixing a typo. (6/8)

For the reader of multi-tweet writings, the Twitter format is like having to open and read a series of telegrams STOP. (7/8)

And yet, here we are at the end of 2017, where a tweetstorm has the potential to get more eyeballs than a blog post. (8/8)

skybrian2• 9 years ago

You say "limitations" like it was a bad thing. But Twitter has a history of turning arbitrary limitiations into interesting social media experiments.

Breaking it up allows each sentence to be reshared more easily, which seems like it has interesting possibilities. (A simple variation on Ted Nelson's "transclusion" back in the day.)

Anyone wanting to write an essay in the traditional way could post somewhere else (perhaps Medium) and share the link. They don't do it, suggesting that maybe that's not what they wanted to do?

jlg23• 9 years ago

The limitations are not arbitrary but an artifact of its original purpose and design. A lot of those "interesting social media experiments" have been conducted before, with the same outcomes - at a time when SMS was still free and SMS-boards were thriving.

edmccard• 9 years ago

Breaking it up allows each sentence to be reshared more easily, which seems like it has interesting possibilities.

That's not a result of the length restriction; it's how quoting works -- right here in this very comment, I've chosen to only "reshare" one sentence from your comment.

As for the interesting possiibilities that could arise from mixing and matching transcluded tweets: either the mixing and matching are going to be done manually by someone assembling a series of quotes (a process not unique to twitter) or it's going to be the result of whatever order they show up in your timeline -- I think the results of that could be interesting if it was a random process, or if there were any way to influence the order apart from whatever twitter thinks will maximize user engagement.

taeric• 9 years ago

I'd argue it isn't Twitter with this history, so much as society.

Good thing about extreme limitations is it also makes exploitation harder. Though, there is money in exploiting social channels, so I'd expect that to follow quickly.

berberous• 9 years ago

You make valid points, but I have to say that tweetstorms do have interesting benefits:

1. Each sentence is its own tweet, and thus can be starred or retweeted on its own. This lets certain 'key ideas' or 'best lines' in a tweetstorm go viral, and brings interested readers to the full tweetstorm that otherwise wouldn't have bothered if they weren't hooked by the best part of it and had to see a full paragraph or blog post. When scrolling, you can also see the parts of the tweetstorm that got the most likes.

2. People can reply to different parts of the tweetstorm, creating subthreads, allowing useful discussions to branch off of different parts of the tweetstorm.

3. By forcing people through a clunky UX, you still force them to condense their ideas. Most writing is much longer than it needs to be. For example, I think most books I've read would improve by being 10-50% shorter. Twitter for sure has downsides, but it is nice to have at least one writing platform that errs on forcing people to the side of 'too short' rather than 'too long'.

ChuckMcM• 9 years ago

Sort of Tumblr meets Genius :-)

BinaryIdiot• 9 years ago

So, arguably, you could achieve the same effect with better UX around quotation, no? Hmm

IIIUwe299• 9 years ago

People can reply to different parts of the tweetstorm

You mean like this?

dilap• 9 years ago

3. is huge and underestimated. also the fact the you are strongly encouraged to make it up as you go along, rather than trying to edit and make it fit.

the "all at once" thing twitter is adding thus seems a likely misfeauture.

zaarn• 9 years ago

Each sentence is its own tweet, and thus can be starred or retweeted on its own.

Or misinterpreted on it's own. I have witnessed several cases in which a out-of-context sentence in such a tweetstorm lead to some shitstorm until the original author cleared it up.

People can reply to different parts of the tweetstorm, creating subthreads, allowing useful discussions to branch off of different parts of the tweetstorm.

And it also leads to fragmentation where people begin to discuss subparts of the entire thread in separation and probably reurgitate the same topic twenty times in twenty different threads.

By forcing people through a clunky UX, you still force them to condense their ideas.

Which IMO is bad since the condensed ideas I usually see on twitter lack substance (or even citations), people just throw out condensed stuff without context.

1123581321• 9 years ago

You forgot that your first tweet should be: "So, I'd like to talk today about threading."

rayalez• 9 years ago

Sounds like you don't like twitter's limitations and want to express your thoughts in a longer format. I think that has been invented before(you may have heard of blogging, news websites, articles, books).

but the reach of the platform prevents them from publishing elsewhere.

No it doesn't.

Twitter's limitations are it's main advantage and value prop. Many people enjoy using it for what it is, if you don't - you can always write a medium article. You can automatically share it on twitter, which looks great and gives you the same advantages of exposure as a longer tweet would.

mmanfrin• 9 years ago

  Trust me, nobody who uses threading wants to be using 
  threading. They want to be able to write a paragraph. (3/8)

Did you not see the backlash that came from them upping the limit to 280 chars?

SquidLord• 9 years ago

The backlash that involved the requisite "three days of hate because something changed on the Internet" and then moved on to "everyone is using it and pretending that it was always that way"?

Yeah, I saw that.

nhangen• 9 years ago

They should have just called it a Tweet Storm and let the crowd win. Instead, they tried to pioneer a new term and act as if it was in their heads all along.

As for the topic itself, I do find "threads" interesting, but on the whole, would much rather read longer format text.

I love the 240 character limit. I do not love having to sort through a thread, or seeing a single thread item retweeted.

There's a reason athletes and entertainers are using notepad to author longer form content, and there's a reason "threads" are interesting, and it's not because of the format. It's the content.

There are so many times that I read a tweet, and because of its length, have zero context to use in understanding its meaning. This is one of the reasons I've stopped using Twitter, and why my businesses are planning to do the same.

It's a pool of nonsense.

Angostura• 9 years ago

I can think of one valid use of the Tweetstorm, which you haven't identified, and that's to associate Tweets on a single subject spread across time.

So, when live Tweeting from a conference or other event, using the plus button to add another tweet and group them together seems rather useful, and not necessarily driven by length limitations.

bluthru3• 9 years ago

No one wants to see text interrupted. Just allow a long character limit text "attachment" that starts out collapsed, like a photo. Eliminating the need for people to screenshot text and post it is long overdue. The bandwidth savings alone would be worth it.

jonknee2• 9 years ago

It depends on the author and topic I suppose, but I like having chunks. It's interesting to see what resonates with people, each chunk has its own like/retweet count.

minikites3• 9 years ago

But that's not how (good) writing works. You need transitions to connect, compare, or contrast ideas and that doesn't mesh well with a tweetstorm.

minikites3• 9 years ago

It would also help for accessibility reasons, photos of text are impossible for a screen reader to read.

bluthru3• 9 years ago

Great point, along with dynamic text sizing and bandwidth for low-bandwidth parts of the world. It's weird how twitter considers this inclusion a very low priority while almost being self-parody with judging employees based on their identity: https://careers.twitter.com/en/diversity.html

joelrunyon2• 9 years ago

Lots of hate in this thread.

I think tweetstorms are 1) actually useful, 2) obviously something people are using twitter for and 3) better improvement than the character expansion.

The character limit combined with the threading, made people really think when writing, rather than blathering on - in other words, it forced people to edit themselves.

It's strange they made this change AFTER they made the character limit change (and it seems maybe less useful now), but it's still long-overdue.

username223• 9 years ago

Yeesh! Does anyone remember Usenet? It was an efficient way to have a public conversation online, it had "threads," and people could use any of a number of clients to read it. I don't do Twitter, but its main value seemed to be limiting participants to 140 characters, i.e. a single sentence. It would be far easier and cheaper to do this by hosting a free NNTP server with analytics and ads.

Whitespace• 9 years ago

Could have named this post: Pat yourself on the backpedal

rgrove• 9 years ago

Will third-party clients be able to use this feature via the Twitter API?

Splendor• 9 years ago

I'm guessing the answer is no. Even though they just made an announcement about their new "premium" api[0].

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/i...

jandrese• 9 years ago

Seems like the kind of thing third party clients could have already provided pretty easily. It's just breaking the message up into small chunks and adding a counter to the post. Posting them all at the same time in the right order should be trivial for an API user.

sAbakumoff• 9 years ago

To me twitter was always a nice way to read a short concise joke /idea/thought or just click on an interesting link. The max number of characters was too short for BS. Now they have decided to remove all the BS filters all together instead of doing the single simple thing that users have been asked for years. WTF.

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