(original thread) Now that more of us are playing the threading game:
As we compete+collaborate effectively articulate things we all care about,
And weave each other’s thoughts into our respective webs,
The desire paths will assemble a mindcity paved with the best individual thoughts.
We used to each aggregate & share our favorite blogs and blogposts, each of which were themselves elaborate thought paths.
That was great, but twitter’s killer feature is that each specific thought is both self-contained and modular.
The rate of reference & rework is accelerating.
It’s easier than ever to play, and it’s cheaper than ever to make mistakes. You don’t even need to solve entire problems by yourself – partial contributions and partial coinages can be tremendously valuable, because each tweet can function as a setup or a punchline for your other tweets (and for other people’s tweets).
The system of routing is IMO fundamentally superior. And the cost of false starts and dead ends is decreasing, you can take more swings than ever before. A thousand tweets is a smaller commitment than a thousand blogposts, for both writer & reader.
One of my biggest frustrations with the old way – which is what drew me to threading in the first place – was that good ideas from the past get forgotten. Once enough people are combing through threads, the good stuff can continually be resurfaced, & the resurfacing is positive signal
I’m already seeing a substantial increase in people quote-tweeting each other’s old tweets in response to other people’s tweets. This is exhilarating. IMO the value of each individual tweet and the threads these tweets are in are increasing dramatically as a result
The race is on to assemble the best possible articulations of ideas in ways that are not just funny or clever, but deeply resonant in ways that make other people want to revisit and reuse them repeatedly
broke: viral tweet
woke: tweet that’s referenced & reused in many threads
The more people play the threading game, earnestly, directed by their own taste and curiosity and eagerness to share what’s good, the better chances individual tweets have of reaching a sort of semi-immortality. One person’s thoughts can become connective tissue serving thousands
The important distinction between this and FB’s On This Day is that thoughts have to be repurposed, reused, referenced, even contradicted. They have to be in play as currency, not frozen into plaques in museums where they languish in a sort of disuse-death
“That’s similar to how Google PageRank works” yup. ThoughtRank (or TweetRank) is the next iteration of PageRank IMO.