cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/26108835
I’ll read long posts in either format, but the fragmented format of chained microblog posts, or threads, is mildly distracting at times.
For me personally, there are many times I don’t want to leave my app or site to visit something else. I want it right there.
It wouldn’t be so bad if so many articles and blogs didn’t have paywalls, pop ups that ask me for my information when I am reading mid-sentence, or will straight up block me because I have an ad blocker. If I don’t have the energy to deal with those roadblocks, I just won’t click the link. I’ll just move on to the next thing.
Makes sense, albeit the second part about the bad site experiences is sort of the flipside of what inspired this question.
If the initial content experience is awkwardly formatted, but there’s a better formatted version one could go to, would one still want to experience it in the same place forcing awkward formatting? That’s not poking at you specifically btw, moreso wondering aloud.
If the experience of visiting other sites wasn’t so bad, I would happily visit more links. I really like reading articles and long form content. If the contest was purely long form vs short form (or very fragmented long form), long form wins.
I might be the wrong audience though because Twitter and Mastodon never really appealed to me all that much.
It’s not awkwardly formatted though it’s just inefficient. But as a reader, it’s still top to bottom, left to right, and I don’t have to load up a new page/leave where I am. I can also respond to it right there.
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People are less likely to click through to another page compared to opening up a post.
Maybe it has to do with loading time? Same with Lemmy where I’m more likely to open a post and read the comments than I am to open the link and read the post
I’m guessing because most people don’t have blogs?
Most people who have blogs don’t even realize that’s what they are making with their stream-of-consciousness posts.
It’s just a whole different way of consuming content. I like my content organized and structured so that’s why I was on Reddit and now Lemmy.
Twitter/Mastodon is less structured. It’s just a stream of posts, not even necessarily in chronological order nor attached to the thread. You may read something interesting and get into the whole thread of posts. On Lemmy, that would be equivalent to browsing by new, and instead of showing posts it shows all the latest comments and posts the same way. Often you’ll get to a post by the discussions around it, not necessarily directly via the top level post. It’s like joining in the middle of a conversation.
As to why, well, people have been using the wrong tool for the job since forever, it just happens organically. There’s people on Instagram sharing stories as slideshows of pictures of just text. The same is happening on TikTok except you get some shitty overused song in the background with it. The average person tends to pick the platform by popularity and trends rather than what it does, and just do whatever is necessary to make the content fit in it.
If you have a lot to say, Xitter isn’t the right place for that. If this limitation results in chain posting, you’re using the wrong tool for the job. Many Mastodon instances have a higher limit, so maybe these people should be on Mastodon instead. If you have ever more to say, then maybe Lemmy could be the right place for that sort of text. Or maybe start a blog…
Anyway, some people have lots of followers on Xitter, and they’re kinda stuck there. If you want to write to your followers, that’s the place where have to do it. Since that place has ridiculous limitations, it naturally results in chain posting. It’s a symptom of the platform not being flexible enough for the need that people actually have.
I’m with ya, I prefer to just read a macroblog post, too. More accessible and easier for sharing.
I’ve done this a couple times. Some reasons off the top of my head:
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The content was specific to Mastodon and the people following me there, so there wasn’t much point posting it somewhere else.
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It started off as a normal toot well within my server’s character limit (1500, my server is awesome that way) but then I wanted to add more thoughts later without annoying everyone who already boosted the original.
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The individual toots in a thread are sometimes posted quite far apart, but make sense to be viewed together, e.g. standalone progress updates on the same project.
Of course there are plenty people doing it just because the microblogging is the only tool they have so they have to make the content fit. But there’s a few more potential reasons to add to the list.
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Because nobody will click on a link to some shitty blog.
With a twitter style format, you see one or two posts and know if you want to read the rest.
You click on a link and there’s no telling what kind of shitshow you’ll wind up in.
A few short chainposts can be screen-shot and make it onto other (granted, often even worse)platforms like so. Facebook and Twitter are both better at showing a collection of pictures, likely readable without even clicking, than they are at showing or previewing long-form content.
That’s even without accounting for pic-centric platforms like Instagram or Tumblr…
