Thread by @EpistemicHope

For at least the month of March, I'm going to maintain the TAP of "feel and urge to write a twitter thread -> start writing a blog post instead."

So if you want to follow my content, I guess you should follow my blog.

musingsandroughdrafts.wordpress.com

Broadly, I'm not sure how much value my writing twitter threads provides, relative to the costs.

Ostensibly, more people see my twitter threads than my blog posts (I think), but I suspect the QUALITY of the engagement is much lower for twitter.

For twitter, I think most people are casually scrolling through their feeds, giving momentary attention to things that seem interesting.

And I guess that that kind of engagement is 10 to 1000 times less likely to cause any kind of permanent shift in anyone's understanding of anything, or in their behavior, compared to the way that people typically read blog posts.

(I would be quite curious to hear corroborating or conflicting personal experience, on that point.

Do any of you have specific twitter thread that left a lasting effect on your thought or action?)

Plus, twitter content is typically ephemeral. It gets most of the engagement it is ever going to get in the first few days, and then fades into the fog of the internet.

I do feel that the twitter thread is somehow a different format than the micro-blog post. Since I've been posting here, I've been finding myself having different more twitter-shaped thoughts.

Part of this is that twitter threads are linear and un-plotted, in the way that a blog post is usually more of a structured tree, which makes it easier to write without necessarily knowing where I'm going. It's just one chunk at a time.

I don't have to have a thesis.

But most of my threads them take about as much time to write as a blog post.

So I want to try to convert my twitter-posting thoughts into blog-post format instead, and see what happens.

If here's something you think I should see, or respond to on twitter, feel free to ping me about it. I might not see it otherwise.

Also, I add virtually all my twitter threads to threadreader. In case you, like me, want to read threads more slowly and careful, and not in the mix of twitter, you can find mine here.

threadreaderapp.com/user/Epistemic…

(Unfortunately, @threadreaderapp does have random-seeming constraints on what shows up on an author's page (must be a top level thread, longer than 4 tweets).

It will unroll other sorts of threads, but they won't show up on an other's page, for some reason.)

@threadreaderapp unroll