Better as a Tweet
A great number of journalists, including most who cover Twitter, have made the service a major part of their jobs. It functions less as a resource than a context; a feed-and-follower-based framework that matches a reporter’s self-conception better than most of the other things they do at work, where their stories are filed and piled into publications with diminishing sense of direction or purpose. It’s a place where they feel listened-to, at least by their peers; it’s a place where their news can get just the right amount of traction, becoming visible to thousands of people without totally losing context. It’s a service that allows the writer’s ego to remain, if diminished, at least intact. It is a place where reporters perform their jobs in every sense of the word.
And so of course we’re mad! This time about [CHECKS TWITTER] the long tweets. Jack Dorsey, writing in the voice of the first-ever man to discover that sentences can be linked together into groups larger than two but fewer than infinity, responded to leaked news reports about “10,000-character tweets” with this announcement:
— Jack (@jack) January 5, 2016
“We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it,” Dorsey writes. “Instead,” he asks, “what if that text… was actually text?” Not-quite answering his not-quite rhetorical question, he says: “That’s more utility and power.”
Screenshotting text is a common recent behavior: celebrities posting screenshots of notes; publications posting preview quotes; most commonly, probably, readers screenshotting and highlighting the parts of links they most want their followers to read. Twitter has been gradually and deliberately adding new types of media to Twitter posts for half a decade: with clickable hashtags; with shortened links; with images, then grids of images; with “Cards,” which preview text — many characters of text! — and pictures; with videos, then auto-playing videos; with quotes of tweets inside tweets. 140 characters, once an all-encompassing limit, became just one limit of many: you can have this many photos, this many links, and these many letters tying them all together. As Matt Buchanan wrote in 2012, after the introduction of one of an endless line of “new Twitters”:
So, this is the Twitter we have today, and the one we’ll essentially have for the foreseeable future, particularly since Twitter has pushed out third-party developers and clients that would give us an alternative way to look at and use Twitter. It’s rich and graphical and dense and will only become richer, denser and more media-heavy still. It’s ultimately a different service now, no longer simply about the best you can do with 140 characters.
Then, a conclusion that could have been written at the end of basically any Twitter article published since: “Twitter may well be just as important today as it was yesterday, if not more so, but the things we’re saying with it now just don’t feel quite so essential anymore.”
Anyway, people were posting images of text on Twitter for lots of reasons. They posted images of text because there was no other way to write long. They posted images of text because they wanted to highlight a quote. They posted images of text because… they wanted to post images of text! For all its reported struggles with growth, Twitter still has the rare privilege of being a destination — a platform that people check frequently and repeatedly, from which they find other things. People are linking to images on Twitter? Let’s incorporate images! People are watching YouTube videos from Facebook? Let’s host videos of our own. People are reading articles from the feed? Let’s… put articles in the feed! Platforms are markets; they research themselves. It’s a great setup for the platforms! And one that Twitter has embraced enthusiastically, gradually assembling a service out of features conceived and tested by users and (mostly now defunct) third parties. (Down to its logo. Down to its verbs!)
So the capability to post longer text posts that expand inside the feed seems especially notable because posts can be counted in characters, and Twitter is known for its character count. But a feed in which you can already tap “play” or open a grid of photos into a slideshow or open a link into an internal browser is a feed in which tapping a text preview to see more text will feel natural. It won’t take long, I imagine, for links to start to feel almost out of place — for Twitter to feel a bit more like Instagram, where users frequently write blog-length captions, and where the links and the web effectively don’t exist.
Like each change before it, longer text posts will alter the character of Twitter — they will make certain behaviors more attractive and common and will marginalize others. Alternative link-shortening services still exist for a very narrow set of uses — analytics, mostly — and plenty of people still post links to images or gifs hosted elsewhere. But the dominant link and image behaviors on Twitter became, as soon as was possible, native.
What’s unusual about text, and which helps explain why journalists’ reactions to this change are so confident and visceral — as opposed to the resigned and uncertain responses they have to changes in Facebook, which, to them, is much more powerful in ways they can control much less — is that, unlike, say, native Twitter images, which marginalized a small number of Twitter-specific companies, longer posts change a professional calculus for anyone who uses Twitter to promote writing online. An old boss used to say, half-joking and then eventually not joking at all, “maybe that story would be better as a tweet.” What was initially almost pejorative — said to mean “short” or “slight” or “unworthy of a longer post” — became a complex judgement. Could this piece of news be conveyed well in a sentence or two with an image or video? Could we just screenshot that statement, or release, rather than asking people to follow a link to a post where it’s quoted? If the answer is yes, then the corresponding reader question — would I rather see this on Twitter, or click on some site — is answered as well.
The ability to post 10,000 characters will make the answer to that question “yes” in a majority of situations. Possibly a large majority! This post, for example, would fit in a 10,000 word text card. I doubt anyone reading it expanded in their Twitter feed would think, “damn, I wish I was reading this on a website instead of right here! I wish I had clicked a link, for some reason!” This is somewhat worrying if you’re in the business of making posts against which ads are sold.
In the past, the tweeting media professional could attempt to justify the enormous amount of labor invested in the daily use of Twitter with a number of arguments: it sends traffic, which makes money with ads; it develops loyalty not just to me, your employee, but to you, my employer; it keeps us in “the conversation,” or “a conversation,” or “the most readily visible conversation.” The first argument, which was always questionable — Twitter never sent THAT much traffic, and the arguments that it was somehow especially valuable traffic were conveniently unquantifiable — barely applies. The jokes about journalists all “working for Twitter” suddenly become true in every way except one.
Longer text will, in this way, ruin Twitter for the people who are most vocal about its ruin: it will make the work they do better for Twitter, better for Twitter users, but worse for them (or at least their employers). If Twitter could absorb what’s left of blogging, great news for Twitter! Moments seems like it might be a better, or at least more complete, product if a “collection of tweets” could include a little more text, right?
Now commence some now-familiar conversations:
— If readers never leave Twitter, what does a publication matter to them?
— If readers never leave Twitter, how do posters get paid?
— If posters get paid, why only those posters? Because they work for publishers? Didn’t we just lose track of what a publisher is?
— How would revenue sharing work? Twitter doesn’t really monetize posts or videos or images so much as it monetizes the entire feed, so… ???? (I think this explains, somewhat, some publishers’ early experiences with Facebook Instant articles, which are returning significantly lower ad rates per-reader than heavily monetized webpages. Facebook’s like “nope, that’s the right amount of ads,” because they also monetize outside of individual posts, in the feed itself; publishers are like, “hey, uhhhh, we need to be making a LOT MORE on these posts to keep doing what we’re doing??” And then everyone backs out of the room shrugging. Allegedly.)
And some newer ones:
— Why would your interview subject, who is on Twitter, talk to you for a post that you’ll be putting in a text box on Twitter?
— Inline Twitter writing would be… different, right? You wouldn’t just write a straight new article to be read inline — it would have to feel sort of natural in the flow? It’s maybe not a place for stories so much as… announcements? Announcement-like things? Stories told like announcements?
— Twitter is currently testing non-chronological feeds, and already shows you tweets you “missed,” etc. A stronger emphasis on engagement will naturally favor native posts. This isn’t a question I guess.
— Will this make arguing on Twitter easier? (Or just more tempting, oh god)
— Do tweets become… headlines for themselves?
— What’s the end-game? Where does that gradual trajectory of follower growth end up? At a sad plateau corresponding with the death of Twitter? Somewhere else entirely? Just… here, forever? Hm.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. The only question in Jack’s post was “What if that text was… actually text?” More utility, more power. For Twitter.