The obstacle is not the format but the ease of sharing. Yes, I've had a blog since ~2000, I know there are some ways to share others' content on your own blog, but it never became as easy or readily consumable as a retweet.
Ironically, I think the reason is recognizable from epidemiology. The network of twitter followers is just denser than the network of bloggers ever was or likely ever will be. Even the very best blog posts still tended not to spread even an order of magnitude as well as a good tweet thread. As much as I hate the format, I don't think blogs can or will displace it.
The network allows things to go viral, but I don't think a retweet or tweets are very consumable. Twitter has an atrocious UI. I think when people do these threads tweet storm things, it's way way less readable than essays people were writing a thousand of years ago. I close the page when I encounter those and shake my head at how redundant all the extra stuff is between each sentence. Who naturally writes like that? It's almost like we are going backwards.
The only reason Twitter is big and the network has the power it does it because by a chance of history it got celebs on it in the middle of the last decade. I think content creators, especially devs, should be aware that there are a lot of us (dozens of us!) that won't touch Twitter with a ten foot pole. I don't go out of my way to read Tweets and I never ever check out someone's Twitter feed because I can't stand the site and the narcissism it fuels.
It's like America Online keywords. Someday it will be a dead piece of history. Twitter, what's that, grandpa?
We're funneling our content through platforms that amplify those who talk the most and/or have the patience to comb through that. How many voices are excluded because people don't want that?
Couldn't agree more. Some good info gets distributed that way, but so does even more crap. It does tax people's ability to filter.
> Twitter has an atrocious UI.
Sure, twitter.com has a terrible UI, but there are many other UIs available that are better
> there are a lot of us (dozens of us!) that won't touch Twitter with a ten foot pole.
There are a lot of us who do use Twitter too. I'm connected to probably over a hundred fellow developers, sysadmins, computer scientists, etc. One step away through them are thousands, and we do learn from each other every day. (More so than here, that's for damn sure.) Avoiding Twitter means missing out on that, just like using only Twitter would mean missing out on blog content. It's a high price to pay for fashion, and people who avoid or dump on Twitter for that reason seem to outnumber those who do so out of genuine principle by a large margin.
Ironically, I think the reason is recognizable from epidemiology. The network of twitter followers is just denser than the network of bloggers ever was or likely ever will be. Even the very best blog posts still tended not to spread even an order of magnitude as well as a good tweet thread. As much as I hate the format, I don't think blogs can or will displace it.