This is not a new problem specific to twitter btw. All flow publishing lives in an intimately entangled conversational context. The only reason my blogs and newsletters have even been ebook friendly that I never wrote in “catalyze huge comment threads” ways.
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For comment heavy blogs, losing the comments context is similar to losing the reply/quote context of twitter. Even if you manage to navigate shaky copyright issues (rights to publish comments or twitter replies) how do you actually “dress up” that content in suits and ties?
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We kinda solved this problem in an anthology we published off webzine content in 2001, pre-blog: include a selection of comments after articles. A painful editorial task. I produced this book (I was an editor at what was then a webzine… sulekha).
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But the solution was a weak one. Fundamentally, turning flows into stocks is a highly lossy process. The faster the flow, and the tighter the REPLs underlying it, the more lossy it is. Printing twitter threads is like 70% lossy. Printing blogs is like 50% lossy. Newsletters, ~20%
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Of course old media books and papers are flow-to-stock too. A paper is the end result of a bunch of collaborating academics working together with whiteboards, meetings, and emails. But that doesn’t feel lossy because it was ephemeral to begin with.
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Unlike twitter or blogs, most oral conversations/video conferences aren’t recorded. Most whiteboard states aren’t photographed for posterity. Most email and text messages isn’t preserved. You can’t “lose” what had little to no archival potential to begin with.
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Revealingly, I photograph most of my whiteboard scrawls, most recently directly into Roam 😆
I use digital notes where possible, though paper notebooks are still a big part of working notes (because I like to draw/diagram/math in ways that are still not easy even on iPad/pencil)
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