Shortly after my previous post, my good friend David Reid not-so-subtly subtweeted me for apparently yelling at everyone using a twitter thread to be quiet and stop expressing themselves. He pointed out:

Threads are being used to say things which might not otherwise be said.

If you only see threads from blowhards stop following blowhards.

— dreid (@dreid) December 14, 2016

This is the truth. There are, indeed, important, substantial essays being written on Twitter, in the form of threads. If I could direct your attention to one that’s probably a better use of your time than what I have to say here, this is a great example:

Who radicalized Dylan Roof? And why aren't more people asking this question?

— Christiana A Mbakwe (@Christiana1987) December 13, 2016

Moreover, although the twitter character limit can inhibit the expression of nuance, just having a blog is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for clumsy, hot takes:

@glyph 🎶 isn't it ironic 🎶 that your blog post failed capture nuance 🎶

— dreid (@dreid) December 14, 2016

I screwed this one up. I’m sorry.

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The point I was trying to primarily focus on in that post is that a twitter thread demands a lot of attention, and that publishers exploiting that aspect of the medium in order to direct more attention to themselves¹ are leveraging a limited resource² and thereby externalizing their marketing costs³. Further, this idiom was invented by⁴, and has extensively been used by people who don’t really need any more attention than they already have.

If you’re an activist trying to draw attention to an important cause, or a writer trying to find your voice, and social media (or twitter threads specifically) has helped you do that, I am not trying to scold you for growing an audience on - and deriving creative energy from - your platform of choice. If you’re leveraging the focus-stealing power of twitter threads to draw attention to serious social issues, maybe you deserve that attention. Maybe in the face of such issues my convenience and comfort and focus are not paramount. And for people who really don’t want that distraction, the ‘unfollow’ button is, obviously, only a click away.

That’s not to say I think that relying on social media exclusively is a good idea for activists; far from it. I think recent political events have shown that a social media platform is often a knife that will turn in your hand. So I would encourage pretty much anyone trying to cultivate an audience to consider getting an independent web presence where you can host more durable and substantive collections of your thoughts, not because I don’t want you to annoy me, but because it gives you a measure of independence, and avoids a potentially destructive monoculture of social media. Given the mechanics of the technology, this is true even if you use a big hosted service for your long-form stuff, like Medium or Blogger; it’s not just about a big company having a hold on your stuff, but about how your work is presented based on the goals of the product presenting it.

However, the exact specifics of such a recommendation are an extremely complex set of topics, and not topics that I’m confident I’ve thought all the way through. There are dozens more problems with twitter threads for following long-form discussions and unintentionally misrepresenting complex points. Maybe they’re really serious, maybe not.

As far as where the long-form stuff should go, there are very good reasons to want to self-host things, and very good reasons why self-hosting is incredibly dangerous, especially for high-profile activists and intellectuals. There are really good reasons to engage with social media platforms and really good reasons to withdraw.

This is why I didn’t want to address this sort of usage of twitter threading; I didn’t want to dive into the sociopolitical implications of the social media ecosystem. At some point, you can expect a far longer post from me about the dynamics of social media, but it is going to take a serious effort to do it justice.

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A final thought before I hopefully stop social-media-ing about social media for a while:

One of the criticisms that I received during this conversation, from David as well as others who contacted me privately, is that I’m criticizing Twitter from a level of remove; implying that since I’m not fully engaged with the medium I don’t really have the right (or perhaps the expertise) to be critical of it. I object to that.

In addition to my previously stated reasons for my reduced engagement - which mostly have to do with personal productivity and creative energy - I also have serious reservations about the political structure of social media. There’s a lot that’s good about it, but I think the incentive structures around it may mean that it is, ultimately, a fundamentally corrosive and corrupting force in society. At the very least, a social media platform is a tool which can be corrosive and corrupting and therefore needs to be used thoughtfully and intentionally to minimize the harm that it can do while retaining as many of its benefits as possible.

I don’t have time to fully explore the problems that I’m alluding to now⁵ but at this point if I wrote something like “social media platforms are slowly destroying liberal democracy”, I’m not even sure if I’d be exaggerating.

When I explain that I have these concerns, I’m often asked the obvious follow-up: if social media is so bad why don’t I just stop using it entirely?

The problem is, social media companies effectively control access to an enormous audience, which is now difficult to reach without their intermediation. I have friends, as we all probably do, that are hard for me to contact via other channels. An individual cannot effectively boycott a communication tool, and I am not even sure yet that “stop using it” is the right way to combat its problems.

So, I’m not going to stop communicating with my friends because I have concerns about the medium they prefer, and I’m also not going to stop thinking or writing about how to articulate and address those concerns. I think I have as much a right as anyone to do that.

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.

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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.

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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.