The Persistent “Why Not a Blog?” Complaint

There's a particular genre of comment that shows up whenever a popular thread appears on platforms like Twitter, Mastodon, or Threads: “Why is this a Twitter thread? It should be a blog post.” The same sentiment appears on videos, with people asking why the creator didn't just write an article instead. These complaints are often expressed with considerable frustration:

I can't read those tweets that span pages because the users puts 5 words in each reply. I find common internet completely stupid: Twitter, tiktok, Instagram, etc. What a huge waste of energy.

Or, more bluntly:

When someone chooses to blog on twitter you know it's facile at best, and more likely simply stupid (as in this case)

These remarks are remarkably common. Looking at a sample of ten popular Twitter threads by one prolific poster that scored 200 points or more on Hacker News, nine out of ten drew at least one complaint about the use of Twitter instead of a traditional blog format. Commenters express genuine bafflement that anyone might have a reason for using what they consider an inferior medium, asking things like “how many tweets are there just to make his point? 200? nobody thinks 'maybe this will be more coherent on a single page'? I don't get social media.” Others frame it in terms of pure effort: “typing a short description and uploading a picture 100 times is easier than typing everything in one block and adding a few connectors here and there? ... objectively speaking it is more work.”

Personally, I generally prefer text. For a large majority of videos I encounter, I would rather have the information as an article. And for a reader focused purely on getting information efficiently, a well-structured long-form post is essentially always better than a sprawling thread. But that framing misses something important: much of the content that appears on these platforms simply wouldn't exist if the creator had been forced to write it up as a polished blog post.

Looking past the frustration, there are four main reasons people choose short-form platforms or video over long-form text: engagement, community, friction, and money.

Engagement and Audience

Engagement is the most straightforward factor. The numbers are stark: short-form platforms like Twitter and Instagram completely dominate longer-form writing platforms. Substack, perhaps the most prominent long-form platform, was last valued at around $600M—a trivial figure next to the valuations of major social networks. People spend their time where the engagement is, and money follows people. Even creators who primarily produce long-form content often find their readers and growth come from short-form platforms like Twitter; optimizing for reach therefore pushes them to keep producing short-form material alongside their longer work[1].

Moreover, creators are influenced by this feedback loop, even if they aren't consciously optimizing for it. When people start using a new platform, they often post a mix of content. Those who continue tend to drift toward the types of posts that generate more response. If someone posting a Twitter thread gets engagement, and posting an article link gets silence, the calculus tends to resolve itself—not necessarily through deliberate analysis, but through accumulated experience.

Where Your People Are

A second significant driver is simple social gravity: people use what their friends and peers use. There's a generational texture to this. A younger person starting to share ideas online today would likely try streaming or video before blogging—not because those are objectively better, but because they're what the people around them are already doing.

For someone active on a microblogging platform, the community itself can be the primary reason for posting there. When you're part of a community on Twitter or Mastodon, it often makes more sense to keep content where your community is, rather than fragmenting your output to an external blog and hoping people follow links. The platform is the community, and the content is an extension of that social context.

The Real Meaning of Friction

When challenged, people often point out—reasonably enough—that posting 50 tweets involves more literal actions than writing a single article. If it’s “objectively” more work to produce a thread, why would anyone do it?

That argument misidentifies what friction actually means in this context. For most people, the barrier isn't the number of clicks at the end of the writing process. The cost is emotional, and often neuropsychological. Many people find the prospect of writing a long, coherent, self-contained piece deeply intimidating. They can draft something short and rambling, but the prospect of shaping a substantial piece of prose that flows as one continuous document becomes a hurdle they simply cannot clear.

This isn't unusual. Some bloggers report difficulty writing anything but one-sitting posts; if they don't have the momentum to finish in one session, the project doesn't happen. For others, even a full-sitting post is too much. One well-known creator, Foone, has been explicitly public about this exact problem:

Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of getting posted on hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE TIME there's one highly-ranked reply that's "jesus man, this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets when you can make one blog post?"

CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT. I have ADHD. I have bad ADHD that is being treated, and the treatment is NOT WORKING TERRIBLY WELL. I cannot focus on writing blog posts. it will not happen

if I try to make a blog post, it'll end up being abandoned and unfinished, as I am unable to edit it into something readable and postable. so if I went 100% to blogs: You would get: no content I would get: lots of unfinished drafts and a feeling of being a useless waste

but I can do rambly tweet threads. they don't require a lot of attention for a long time, they don't have the endless editing I get into with blog posts, I can do them.

Some commenters respond to this by suggesting that a blog inherently works the same way—you can append to a post incrementally over time, revising as you go. But the dynamic is different in practice. The same few paragraphs that are impossible to stretch into full prose somehow work fine as threads for plenty of people, and arguing that one “should” be easier doesn't change which one actually feels easier.

Money Changes the Calculus

Whatever the individual motivation, letting creators use a format that works for them means we get more content—and much of that content only exists because the economics of the medium work out favorably. Video in particular monetizes dramatically better than text. This allows specific types of information that text couldn't sustain to exist at all.

Automotive reviews are a good example. Alex Dykes runs Alex on Autos, producing detailed practical reviews and comparisons of various cars and contemplated alternatives. Nothing in the heyday of car magazines—even publications like Car and Driver or Road and Track from 1997—approaches his depth; no one was producing content remotely this thorough outside of YouTube. Before Jonathan Benson's Tyre Reviews, nobody had put breadth and depth into consumer-facing tire testing documentation; this data existed mainly inside tire companies, obtainable only by speaking with engineers directly[2]. Video monetization enabled creators to turn such detailed information into a living in a way text was never able to do before.

Tech YouTubers show similar patterns, sometimes surprisingly early. Lucy Wang's channel, Tech With Lucy, was making more money at 50k subscribers than she had earned working at AWS, largely through sponsorships. By comparison, blog content is far harder to monetize directly. A blog that gets well over a million hits might cover its creator's rent at best. It's possible to monetize text with paywalls, as Gergely Orosz demonstrates with his Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, but those walls constrain access. Video that is freely available beats out almost any comparable open text model.

Learning to Live With the Format

It would be more convenient if the content I would prefer reading as text were actually written as text. But the reality is most of that content is created in short chunks or as video because it’s accessible to its authors and it holds their attention long enough to be completed, or because it funds itself. The material typically wouldn't exist at all in an alternate form. Tools that can summarize video content are not yet reliable enough to trust with core details; until that changes, the practical choice is to accept the formats creators naturally use or to do without—and those who'd rather complain will presumably keep complaining.

[1] Most people aren't deliberately optimizing revenue, which doesn't really apply to most content producers. But the pull of the platforms works by subtle mechanisms: experiment that replaced a month of blog posting with Twitter postings grew followers by ~50%; for anyone prioritizing total eyeballs or income, short-form posting is statistically the rational play.

[2] For German-language text, a semi-decent exception once existed in magazines, but no one translated this into English. Jonathan Benson’s tire testing still went beyond anything done before, and he also voluntarily translated related German research into English to fill that gap.