Stop writing Twitter threads!

Over the last few weeks, I came upon a few interesting bits of information:

(yes, I have a very broad spectrum of interests)

If you've clicked on the links, you've probably noticed a pattern: they are all Twitter threads. And Twitter threads are an absolute abomination.

First of all, it is really, really hard to read. The people who posted these had to hash their writings into ~~farts~~ ~~twats~~ tweets of 280 characters or less. Each tweet is displayed independently, and the reader has to make a cognitive effort to follow the flow. Adding GIF memes every 2 tweets doesn't help with this, but I guess this is a generational issue (I'm old, get off my lawn!).

Then, it's never clear where the thread ends. Comments are piling up at the bottom, but in the case of the “How to make your house more heat-proof” thread, there is also a link to... part 3 of the thread!

There is the aberration of the amount of data transferred, too. Just unfolding the thread about the cold-proof housing downloads 7.20 MB of data according to Firefox devtools (including 5.30 MB of Javascript alone)… and it's not even the whole thread, since there is a part 2 and a part 3! All in all, I had to download 22.26 MB of data. I actually heard about this thread thanks to Tristan Nitot's article about it, where he stitched all the tweets together into an actual article. By comparison, his blog page downloads 28.94 KB of data (the full text is actually 16,093 bytes). I downloaded almost 800 times more data from Twitter to get the exact same information. Eight hundred times more data, people!

So please, please, if you plan on writing something longer than a bad joke or a snarky comment, do not use Twitter. Your ideas, your findings, your knowledge deserve better. Put your thoughts on your own website or blog, and share it with the World using whatever social network you see fit.

“But Pierre, I hear you say, you can use X/Y/Z service to render a Twitter thread as a single page, so where is the problem?” The problem is these solutions are just hacks on top of a crappy design, not to mention readers would have to know them to begin with. Please don't ask your readers to workaround Twitter's crappy design!

I highly recommend you follow this principle: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere!