The longer a live twitter thread, the more likely it is to be crackpottery (not counting listicle threads).
I haven’t done live ones longer than ~30 I think. Newsletters have gone to ~100 but that’s just numbered essay paragraphs, with lots of editing/rearranging/resequencing.
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The irreversibility of live tweet threading means the person is improvising the argument. This is rarely robust >30 points unless it is an argument they’ve made a LOT in the past.
The one exception is conspiratorial thinking. Unlike logic, red string is sequence agnostic.
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While some people do pre-compose threads and fake live-tweet them, you can usually tell: it lacks the freshness of raw improv.
True live tweetstorming >30 reveals either total mastery of the topic or total crackpottery
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Exploratory threads might be an exception. You can easily mine rich insight veins for more than 30 tweets if you don't need a coherent structure.
If only Twitter had a better UI for viewing branching threads. Then you could use subthreads to separate lines of attack... 🤔
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Some smart friends who have worked on this stuff have convinced me that branching UIs are almost never the answer. If you think you need branching, you typically need something else.
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I can't quite imagine what other formal structure would satisfy "I'm exploring an idea in chunks and following many little paths as I explore different facets", but I'm open to ideas!
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Serializing into essays with organic callbacks, foreshadows etc. Basically, we think in branches, but we consume in serial sequences.
I built a whole failed branching-map web product, so learned this the hard way.
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