It absolutely blows my mind that people try to use Twitter for long-form writing.
Honestly, it blows my mind that people use Twitter for anything at all, other than outrage and anxiety disorders. But if you do want to use an awful platform for long-form writing, then that's why we have Medium.
They probably feel like you when preparing these too. The reason it excels is that a few of the individual tweets go viral and it drives the complete thread.
Twitter could provide a long-form writing platform where you write the whole thing and then some tweets you want to package with it. I suspect they feel that this is a form of experimentation where any of the sets of sentences could go viral, but the author may be unlikely to select the correct ones most of the time.
It's probably seems less commitment for the reader as well. Instead of a block of text upfront, a few paragraphs with a punchline and a thread a tap away if you are really interested.
Certainly an interesting experiment, which can be improved on for sure.
I don't get it either, I miss when everyone had their own blog and we used RSS. Aside from the obvious decentralized and readability advantages, I miss that each had a different design, personality, style.
But I've long given up, since all the smart people chose Twitter to vent their minds.
It's the only social media I've caved in to.
Honestly, it blows my mind that people use Twitter for anything at all, other than outrage and anxiety disorders. But if you do want to use an awful platform for long-form writing, then that's why we have Medium.