Twitter stinks, why do smart people use it?
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It would be horrible, right? A poor way to get a message of any complexity across. Nonetheless, if you are trying to learn about crypto, then sooner or later you will find yourself following some of the smartest people in the space on the worst system there is — at least, if you want to do much more than share GIFs.
Don’t get me wrong; Twitter has its place: Real-time updates on news and sports are often fastest through Twitter. But scintillating insights like “Trump is still President,” or “Giants fumble” are not the same as nuanced dissections of on-chain governance or problems with sharding.
In fact, very few ideas in crypto can be summed up in 279 characters and an emoji (fine “When Moon?” is an exception) .
Which leads me to the “tweetstorm.” Seriously? If you are writing something broken into 26 parts, then it had better be an encyclopedia. If it’s not, then you are using the wrong medium. Let’s put it another way: Would you drink a beer from a thimble? No. Twitter is the wrong format for thoughtful discussion, and it’s obvious.
To make things even more confusing, readers (me!) always seem to back our way into the middle of a multi-tweet-thread-storm by way of a retweet or comment from someone else we’re following. It’s dizzying to work your way out of the maze to find the initial post, let alone discern its context at the time it was posted.
Just last week, someone — let’s call him Andy Awesome — one of the smartest speakers in the crypto space, a man I would happily read or listen to for hours, retweeted a tweet that was a retweet of a tweet that finally linked to an article outside of Twitter. There has to be a better way than that!
Systems like Medium, Hacker Noon, and private blogs are completely available; even Reddit allows for long-form content and responses. Read Nic Carter’s Bitcoin’s Existential Crisis or Vlad Zamfir’s Blockchain Governance 101, and then, seriously tell me that you care about their tweets.
Another problem with Twitter is that content creators mix their subject matter expertise with their personal crap and other mubo-jumbo. It is of little interest to me that Bobby Poem is only eating bananas. I have no problem with bananas, I support his right to only eat bananas, but that information is just noise drowning out his otherwise extremely-high-def signal. I even had to stop following an O.G. because I couldn’t take the political BS he posted every 15 minutes. It was like reading my great-aunt’s Facebook feed.
For the love of god, as you all try and figure out how fee-less inflationary-based tokenonomics will unlock micro-payments helping to bank the unbanked, or identify how governance fits into your project’s broader philosophical stance, or reconcile the true distribution outcomes of ICOs between people who want to invest in your token versus the people who want to use your token, could you just add, “Let’s stop trying to squeeze complex and nuanced ideas into a tiny, shitty tweeter?” That would be great! Thank you.
