/
2016-01-29-twitter-as-ad-blocker
24 lines (16 loc) · 2.24 KB
/
2016-01-29-twitter-as-ad-blocker
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
---
layout: post
title: "Twitter As Ad Blocker"
date: 2016-01-28 22:09
comments: true
categories: blogs twitter ads
---
[Manton Reese is onto something here](http://www.manton.org/2016/01/twitter-and-the-cost-of-links.html), where he writes about the biggest trouble with Twitter going to 10,000 characters is that it won't send any traffic out to other sites. I barely blog these days, but I still do follow a lot of links from Twitter to larger sites to read longer articles. I'm fine with that, except -- a lot of sites take incredbily long to read, especially on my iPhone, and I give up on them. Or, I'll click the "Load in Safari" button and use that as my "Read Later" option. Eventually, I figure, I'll open up Safari and read the articles that have stockpiled there. Usually, I don't. I just move on.
We are once again back to the problem of the web being all the ads and javascript crap that pollute it. Pages take way too long to long and that's why people install ad blockers.
Twitter, then, is the ultimate ad blocker. Yes, Twitter has its own ads, but it doesn't slow me down when I want to read something.
I don't click on links to TheVerge.com anymore, for example. It's not worth the pain of that over-designed eyesore. Technically, it has impressive website construction. Realistically, it gets in its own way and creates a horrible user experience.
But if that content or that newsbit was included in a longer tweet, I would be more likely to read it.
Manton concludes:
> Anyone with a blog should be concerned about what could happen with Twitter’s 10,000-character push. We won’t feel the effects right away, but years from now it will matter. We should do more not just to promote blogs and writing on the open web, but to also make it easier for Twitter alternatives to exist through independent microblogging.
I agree, but it's also important for those independent bloggers to create usable experiences that let the writing be the hero of the page and not all the crap that usually surrounds it on websites these days.
(Manton's blog post is also the first I've heard of [The AMP Project](http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/12/14/does-amp-counter-an-existential-threat-to-google.html), which sounds promising. Fingers crossed on that one.)