Update: I've written a brief follow-up to this post to clarify my feelings about other uses of the tweetstorm, or twitter thread, publishing idiom. This post is intended to be specifically critical of its usage as a self-promotional or commercial tool.
I don’t like Tweetstorms™1, or, to turn to a neologism, “manthreading”. They actively annoy me. Stop it. People who do this are almost always blowhards.
Blogs are free. Put your ideas on your blog.
As Eevee rightfully points out, however, if you’re a massive blowhard in your Tweetstorms, you’re likely a massive blowhard on your blog, too. So why care about the usage of Twitter threads vs. Medium posts vs. anything else for expressions of mediocre ideas?
Here’s the difference, and here’s why my problem with them does have something to do with the medium: if you put your dull, obvious thoughts in a blog2, it’s a single entity. I can skim the introduction and then skip it if it’s tedious, plodding, derivative nonsense.3
Tweetstorms™, as with all social media innovations, however, increase engagement. Affordances to read little bits of the storm abound. Ding. Ding. Ding. Little bits of an essay dribble in, interrupting me at suspiciously precisely calibrated 90-second intervals, reminding me that an Important Thought Leader has Something New To Say.
The conceit of a Tweetstorm™ is that they’re in this format because they’re spontaneous. The hottest of hot takes. The supposed reason that it’s valid to interrupt me at 30-second intervals to keep me up to date on tweet 84 of 216 of some irrelevant commentator’s opinion on the recent trend in chamfer widths on aluminum bezels is that they’re thinking those thoughts in real time! It’s an opportunity to engage with the conversation!
But of course, this is a pretense; transparently so, unless you imagine someone could divine the number after the slash without typing it out first.
The “storm” is scripted in advance, edited, and rehearsed like any other media release. It’s interrupting people repeatedly merely to increase their chances of clicking on it, or reading it. And no Tweetstorm author is meaningfully going to “engage” with their readers; they just want to maximize their view metrics.
Even if I cared a tremendous amount about the geopolitics of aluminum chamfer calibration, this is a terrible format to consume those thoughts in. Twitter’s UI is just atrocious for meaningful consideration of ideas. It’s great for pointers to things (like a link to this post!) but actively interferes with trying to follow a thought to its conclusion.
There’s a whole separate blog in there about just how gross pretty much all social-media UI is, and how much it goes out of its way to show you “what you might have missed”, or things that are “relevant to you” or “people you should follow”, instead of just giving you the actual content you requested from their platform. It’s dark patterns all the way down, betraying the user’s intent for those of the advertisers.
My tone here probably implies that I think everyone doing this is being cynically manipulative. That’s possibly the worst part - I don’t think they are. I think everyone involved is just being slightly thoughtless, trying to do the best that they can in their perceived role. Blowhards are blowing, social media is making you be more social and consume more media. All optimizing for our little niche in society. So unfortunately it’s up to us, as readers, to refuse to consume this disrespectful trash, and pipe up about the destructive aspects of communicating that way.
Personally I’m not much affected by this, because I follow hardly anyone4, I don’t have push enabled, and I would definitely unfollow (or possibly block) someone who managed to get retweeted at such great length into my feed. But a lot of people who are a lot worse than I am about managing the demands on their attention get sucked into the vortex that Tweetstorms™ (and related social-media communication habits) generate.
Attention is a precious resource; in many ways it is the only resource that matters for producing creative work.
But of course, there’s a delicate balance - we must use up that same resource to consume those same works. I don’t think anyone should stop talking. But they should mindfully speak in places and ways that are not abusive of their audience.
This post itself might be a waste of your time. Not everything I write is worth reading. Because I respect my readers, I want to give them the opportunity to ignore it.
And that’s why I don’t use Tweetstorms™5.