Thread by @shrikanth_krish

Nov 7 2017 is an important day in the history of literature in my view. Or atleast will be recognized as an imp day many decades later.

It was the day Twitter decided to increase its character count from 140 to 280.

While Twitter was mostly a news / group messaging service for much of its history, this move gave a great fillip to the "Twitter thread" - a literary genre of its own, which is still in its incipience, and whose importance is still not being adequately recognized.

While it is not possible to do much in 140 characters beyond 1-2 sentences, 280 gives you room to compose a nice paragraph that contains 2-3 ideas. Sometimes 4.

A huge difference.

Why do I regard the "Twitter thread" as a literary genre? Why is it a big deal?

Very often I get asked - why don't you write a long piece on your blog and link it on twitter?

Such questions betray a total ignorance of the potentialities of the "twitter thread"

So let's examine what makes "threads" special.

a) Disintermediation - Threads let you reach out to your audience directly. You don't have to be chummy with editors, nor be "mainstream" enough to be considered for "publication".

But the counter to a) is still "Why threads"? Why can't we blog and provide a link on twitter?

That brings us to b)

b) Twitter threads let you think of an "article" as a chain of ideas as opposed to a monolithic structure

There is a tendency to "rate" articles as good or bad, which is misplaced. There is no piece of writing that is wholly good or wholly bad

Twitter threads exploit this truth

With a "twitter thread" you get feedback on every little thought you have. And not on the article as a whole.

So you know exactly which line worked. And which line did not.

That's just not possible with a long blog. Most people don't finish reading the blogpost. And you get zero feedback. Except perhaps a few comments on the blogpost (judged as a whole)

In a twitter thread, you are not asking your readers to read the whole damn thing. Let them read what catches their fancy. And give feedback

You may write a very inane thread, with one brilliant idea (which may catch the attention of a 1000 people). The same idea would get lost in a long article.

Magazines and Journals by their very design reward what I call "dull competence" where there is a strong aversion to "downside risk" and no appetite for "upside rsk"

So an editor would rather publish a solid, unspectacular piece with no bad parts. Rather than a brilliant article, with 3-4 terrible, stupid lines.

This naturally creates a bias in the "established" literary / journalistic scene against "inconsistent brilliance"

While the "Weblog" (blog) does enable disintermediation, it has very little capacity for "reach" (unless you have a reputation that precedes you).

Sure, you can ask some famous people to read your "blogpost" on twitter. But they wont waste their valuable time reading your post

Instead in a "twitter thread", they may still be kind enough to read 2-3 interesting tweets in a long thread, and may choose to retweet or endorse it

So twitter threads hold people's attention, where one elicits feedback on specific ideas as opposed to the whole article

The other novel thing about the "thread" that for the first time in the long history of prose literature, the "basic" unit of a piece of writing, is no longer a "paragraph", but an "idea".

Paragraphs are too long. Without a natural basis for their boundaries.

Sometimes a paragraph contains 3-4 different , unrelated ideas. Sometimes they just contain a lot of "filler" sentences.

The Twitter thread disciplines the prose writer of our times, by forcing him to cut out the "filler sentences", and instead think of his "article" not so much as a collection of paragraphs, but as a sequence of "ideas".

The last but arguably the most important thing about this new genre is that the feedback is instantaneous.

You know whether your "thread" is working or not, within a few minutes of writing it. Sometimes even during the composition of the thread.

It's akin to a stockmarket where the price discovery is near-instantaneous upon the arrival of new information.

Twitter threads reward / punish you quickly, as opposed to a blogpost / magazine piece, where you never quite get genuine feedback. Atleast not on specific ideas

It's only been some 8 months since the relaxation of the character limit on twitter.

The coming months will give us a sense of how this new literary genre will shape the world of ideas.

It is as momentous an occasion as the emergence of the novel in the early 1700s