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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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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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