Does anyone actually read “atomic essays”? Ship30 etc? Ever found a useful insight in one? It might be a useful process for the people doing it, but my timeline is full of them and for me they add zero value.
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Certainly haven't read any stuffing the timeline. The idea of writing atomic essays to clarify your own ideas obviously valuable, but twitter is the wrong medium for it.
Folks should quietly publish them to a blog/garden that others can voluntarily browse. Less invasive.
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Interesting perspective.
Is your issue with how the content is organized? Because if one were to organize the content into a thread instead of an atomic essay, the end result is the same thing.
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1/ Threading the content instead of posting an (a11y inaccessible) screenshot of an essay would at least make it native web-searchable text.
But it wouldn't solve the original frustration; the current cultural conventions around "atomic essays" are that they help the writer...
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2/ ...clarify thoughts, develop writing skills, etc.
Twitter isn't the ideal medium for practicing long-form, interconnecting writing over time. Blogs / gardens are designed for it.
Writing on a static website gives you space to write without it becoming a notification stream
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I am in it currently and find aspects useful.
I like the time-boxed, data-driven approach. It informs on what resonates with audience and self.
Two unrelated topics I wrote about converged as I write my newsletter this week.
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I've no doubt the programming is valuable and gets people to write far more than they would on their own.
My beef is the medium – specifically, images of essays posted to twitter. A non-hypertext format that can't include links, or be read by screen-readers and search engines.
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Fair points. I agree Twitter isn't the ideal medium for long-form text-based content.
However, the reason Essayists are using Twitter is for the data, analytics, and instant feedback it provides.
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Appreciate those are much harder to get/non-existent outside a platform like Twitter.
Some happy medium would be the intro/lead paragraph posted to twitter + link out to hypertext post. Still gives you a read on interest, data, and a space to engage in conversation