It’s really helpful that posts have titles and can be googled, and are written to be read without reading a whole reply chain first. Tweets are far less well-designed for reading, can’t be googled, don’t have titles, and often require reading long threads of lots quote tweets of lots of different subcultures that you don’t understand.
I also like that so much of the relevant information stays nested under the post on LessWrong, whereas on Twitter I find it much harder to systematically read various offshoot threads of a tweet
Take the lowest leaf of a thread, then systematically go up the tweets, and expand all the ones with multiple children, and keep going until they’re all expanded, and then start to read down.
Open the author’s twitter profile, view their replies, then click to open all their replies in new tabs so that I make sure to have all the subthreads
Nod, yeah I hadn’t thought through all the implications and maybe this is just crazy.
But, the sorts of thing I’m imagining:
comments have optional titles, you can basically upgrade anything into a post easily
i.e. the line between a top-level critical-comment, and EffortReply, and a Scott Alexander level “Contra So-and-So on Such and Such” was more about how much effort you put in?
many comments are heavily context dependent, but, if you choose to reply to something and want to put the effort into it being a standalone piece, you aren’t punished for not having broken out and written a top-level post.
I’d definitely want us to have way better UI for contextualizing things than twitter has (“how do?” is an open question)
I’m not sure about the UI of “what things are sans serif vs serif?” (and otherwise feeling “fancy” vs “off-the-cuff.”). One option is basically “fancy serifs or no?” is a setting.
I think it could be good to build post-level replies, where, when you get to the comment section, the post-item (i.e. just the height of like 3 lines of a comment) is sorted in the comment section by the karma of the post. So that you don’t have to choose between writing a response in a comment or in a post, but can instead do both in one motion.
agreed, the fundamental “self-recursive” model of twitter feels more complete. twitter’s UI of quickly understanding context is abysmal. fun fact, everything on Reddit is also a single data model “Post”. posts/comments are just rendered differently
I never understood how Twitter works, but now it seems to me like a tree that has only one (first? longest?) branch displayed by default… and most people are likely to reply to the leaf of the default branch, which makes most discussions linear.
It’s really helpful that posts have titles and can be googled, and are written to be read without reading a whole reply chain first. Tweets are far less well-designed for reading, can’t be googled, don’t have titles, and often require reading long threads of lots quote tweets of lots of different subcultures that you don’t understand.
I also like that so much of the relevant information stays nested under the post on LessWrong, whereas on Twitter I find it much harder to systematically read various offshoot threads of a tweet
Yeah. My typical twitter interactions are either:
Take the lowest leaf of a thread, then systematically go up the tweets, and expand all the ones with multiple children, and keep going until they’re all expanded, and then start to read down.
Open the author’s twitter profile, view their replies, then click to open all their replies in new tabs so that I make sure to have all the subthreads
agreed, but these problems are UI problems. not a critique of the concept of being “fully recursive” that LW is not
Nod, yeah I hadn’t thought through all the implications and maybe this is just crazy.
But, the sorts of thing I’m imagining:
comments have optional titles, you can basically upgrade anything into a post easily
i.e. the line between a top-level critical-comment, and EffortReply, and a Scott Alexander level “Contra So-and-So on Such and Such” was more about how much effort you put in?
many comments are heavily context dependent, but, if you choose to reply to something and want to put the effort into it being a standalone piece, you aren’t punished for not having broken out and written a top-level post.
I’d definitely want us to have way better UI for contextualizing things than twitter has (“how do?” is an open question)
I’m not sure about the UI of “what things are sans serif vs serif?” (and otherwise feeling “fancy” vs “off-the-cuff.”). One option is basically “fancy serifs or no?” is a setting.
I think it could be good to build post-level replies, where, when you get to the comment section, the post-item (i.e. just the height of like 3 lines of a comment) is sorted in the comment section by the karma of the post. So that you don’t have to choose between writing a response in a comment or in a post, but can instead do both in one motion.
agreed, the fundamental “self-recursive” model of twitter feels more complete. twitter’s UI of quickly understanding context is abysmal. fun fact, everything on Reddit is also a single data model “Post”. posts/comments are just rendered differently
I never understood how Twitter works, but now it seems to me like a tree that has only one (first? longest?) branch displayed by default… and most people are likely to reply to the leaf of the default branch, which makes most discussions linear.
Is this approximately correct?