A small defense of the Twitter thread

It’s easy to hate on the Twitter thread, that weird form where somebody tweets, then replies to their own tweet, and so on ad infinitum until it finally ends.

The Twitter thread is a mainstay of mansplaining (or, as Gizmodo cleverly called it, Manthreading). It fills your timeline with half-contextualized tweets, sometimes poorly connected so you can’t figure out where they start and where they stop. Most of all, you will say, it’s ridiculously easy to find a blogging platform and just write out your “longform” there instead of inflicting your thoughts on your followers in 140 character chunks.

I do not want to argue that any of those points are wrong — nor could I, honestly, because I agree with all of them. But I would also be sad if...

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