Because, as others have said, you go where the people are, otherwise you're just howling into the void, and what's the point of doing it? If I only wrote on Medium, or for niche magazines, or newspapers, then there's a whole lot of people who would never discover interesting stuff.
So I do both, depending on when the mood takes me, or if the subject can work in a Twitter format (not everything can) or needs the full longform treatment. If it's the latter, then I stick it up on Medium.
There is so much visual garbage on Twitter, please add links to a normal text if possible. Twitter is borderline unreadable and god forbid accidentally clicking anywhere on the page - everything just instantly closes and you get thrown somewhere randomly. Truly horrible UX/UI.
I do this mostly for fun. So tbh the alternative here was "not tell people something interesting at all" rather than "write a longform piece about the Hospitallers".
I DO have plans for the latter. Eventually. But it requires lots of research and time, and I don't have a lot of either to spare these days.
That's something I would suggest that is always worth remembering, I would gently suggest. Writing isn't a free action. It takes time and mental energy/effort. I'd love it if we lived in a world where people would magically give me money to do that, just as I suspect artists and musicians would say the same, but that doesn't happen unfortunately!
I didn't propose to you doing anything for free or additionally inconvenience yourself. But in case if you don't have any preference for media type and if you already have a text you want to publish for free/ads, then it would be nice to duplicate it to other more sane platform, whatever - medium, lj (dreamwidth) or anything else. It was just a suggestion. And if, hypothetically, the only concern is that normal text need more time to be prepared - you can just dump all these tweets as is as a single post and it will still be more readable than in Twitter.
There is a certain immediacy and satisfaction to having bite-sized segments of your work praised and re-posted that not even Medium can fulfill.
That, and atrophied attention spans can only handle bite-sized readings at a time. If this thread was in blog form it would get a fraction of the viewership.
Gah, it was too wordy for Twitter, I scrolled to the end and back up to see that "They got an air force to circumvent Italy's limit of planes set after Italy lost WW2, but the allies/US had to circumvent because of the cold war".
That's 1 tweet. I fucking hate Twitter longforms, because my eyes have to keep hunting for the next part of the content...
If `a certain immediacy and satisfaction` is an incentive so important to dictate the medium, then the content is pedestrian, lacking substance and posted just for personal gain.
This looks nice, but when you're combining a bunch of tweets it just helps you notice how choppy and disjointed the writing is— it still feels like a bunch of tweets stuck together.
So this is clickbait 2.0? Basically instead of incentivizing someone to click on a link to learn more, just shit out the 'more' in mediocre form right in your face.
It's the same reason that people write slide decks instead of documents. Because it works.
Small chunks of information that piece together into a larger whole along a narrative timeline is the go-to document method of pretty much all of tech.
Slides work when there's like 20 of them which highlight important information. Not 200 slides each with a paragraph of text that sometimes connects with the previous statement and sometimes not.
The latter makes more sense as an blog post or article.
It’s not a new trend at all, and it fills me with impotent nerdrage. Because sure, why wouldn’t you write a blog post in a form that encourages people to respond to individual paragraphs out of context? Makes total sense.
