It's the only popular publishing platform that permits true hypertext features such as nonlinear text, and comments on and transclusion of individual paragraphs of a post.
3. It is ... remarkably like posting a public Zettelkasten. In particular, there are often responses to specific items on a thread and those themselves can prove revealing.
A huge issue with traditional "single entity" documents (books, essays, even longish HN comments as I'm wont to produce...) is that responses tend to be either to the thing-as-a-whole or some irrelevant point. One of the hardest things to get as an author is specific feedback to a given passage of writing, and for all its many, many faults, the tootstream format cracks open that shell.
That feedback may highlight well-written bits, poorly-written ones (where readers repeatedly misinterpret authors' intent), salient or poorly-supported facts and logic, etc.
My usual platform for this is Mastodon, and I've posted a number of longer tootstorms (using the Mastodon nomenclature rather than "tweets"), searchable via hashtag from my present and previous instance homes at
I think because Twitter is where their audience is. As annoying as it is to read on Twitter, posting it as multiple tweets also allows people to like/retweet individual and multiple parts of the essay which probably increases the essay’s overall reach/engagement.
Yep, people who are interested can immediately and directly engage with the author of the thread on any single point.
Medium had the right idea allowing people to highlight specific items in a post and comment on them, but I think people prefer a forum over long form articles.
