I do Twitter threads once in awhile and for the creator, it's a very nice yet informal interface (e.g. compared to blogging) for posting a stream of connected thoughts, especially ones regularly punctuated with multimedia, such as images and video. There's the obvious benefit of the immediate network effect – a tweet thread has potentially far more reach, faster, than any RSS feed. There's also the benefit that, unlike a typical blog post, it's very easy for people to engage directly with a single thought (roughly equivalent to a paragraph in blog prose) – either to retweet your most cogent point, or to reply to it. And it's easy as the author to engage specifically on that point.

On a deeper level, content follows form. The limits of Twitter inherently force me to cut my wordiness and elaboration to a concise point. Of course whether this makes the overall thread better than a blog post is up to debate, but it most certainly makes composition easier on the creator.

Once in awhile I'll read the ThreaderApp's rollup of a thread, and almost always find it less of an optimal experience than just scrolling through the thread on mobile, though that may be attributable to differences in visual design. I can think of a number of Twitter threads that I simply cannot imagine working well in a blog or article format.

For example, here's a Twitter thread that was posted by a newspaper reporter, as she followed a mailman on his last day after 35 years:

https://twitter.com/Jennifer__Brett/status/11312980440104837...

(HN Thread is here: [0])

AFAIK, she never posted this as an article on her newspaper's site – which to me, as a former newspaper reporter, is very surprising given publishers' demand to feed the content/pageview beast. I don't know if she ever explained this decision, or if the thread eventually did make its way into native article format. But I think the thread format worked beautifully here. By necessity, it minimized whatever tendency the reporter had to insert superfluous prose. And the Twitter visual design places heavy emphasis on the photos and videos, which each exemplified the aphorism of "a picture is worth a 1,000 words"

edit: the WaPo did do a recap of her thread [1]. Being a recap, of course, means it's inherently different than an original article about the mailman, but you still get a taste of the extra verbiage needed to connect scenes in traditional prose, which is not needed (maybe because people don't necessarily expect it) in a typical Twitter thread.

And again, the visual design aspect is critical imho. Twitter's format integrates images and video much more seamlessly than a standard website design, partly because tweets have a strict container max-width of ~500px, which is far narrower than most modern sites. And I suspect knowing that you're recording media for a Twitter thread fundamentally affects how you do it – e.g. you may feel less restrained about context and quality.

For example, one of the best tweets in the mailman thread imho is this one:

https://twitter.com/Jennifer__Brett/status/11319201271575920...

The text is very informal: It took forever to #MrFloyd to even get to his own party - people kept stopping him for photos and hugs!

But the attached video tells the story better and more immediately than any prose could. I can't imagine that 49-second raw footage clip being inserted into a standard story without being a massive distraction from the reading.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20001559

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/05/24/mail-car...