(2019-05-31) Lewis The Spreading Of Threading

Aaron Z Lewis: The spreading of threading. My Twitter feels like a local library. Each one of my Twitter friends is tending to their own little corner of the internet, sharing their best material, and responding to my random research questions. There are a lot of knowledgable folks out there, but Visakan Veerasamy is the ultimate librarian. See also (2018-11-15) Books Vs Tweets.

He’s constructing a digital version of his brain, and his curation style feels like an early iteration of something that might one day go mainstream. It’s a knowledge creation and exploration ethos that feels more true to the original “web” and more fit for how we think.

When Marc Andreessen started tweeting in 2014, he didn’t let the 140-character limit stop him from posting his thoughts at length. Instead of shortening his tweets, he started stringing them together by replying to himself. Thus was born the tweetstorm.

Whereas Marc Andreessen’s twitter threads were mostly self-contained, Visa’s are linked together. They form a giant web of interconnected thoughts.

At each node, there’s usually a full-on discussion taking place between his followers

Visa’s threads are doing to Twitter what hyperlinks did to dead-tree text.

These threads bear a family resemblance to the vision of an early 20th-century computer pioneer named Vannevar Bush.

a knowledge device he called the Memex.

Bush’s vision of associative trails has been realized in some corners of the web, like Wikipedia.

We don’t really “surf” the web anymore. Unless we’re Wiki-racing, we’re not hopping from hyperlink to hyperlink on a surprising journey across human knowledge.

I see Visa’s Twitter threads as a response to this boring linearity — an attempt to make things hang together. We’re associative beings. We make sense of things by relating them to other things.

I’ve noticed that the threading impulse is beginning to expand beyond Twitter. It’s popping up in more and more corners of the web. At Ribbonfarm, Venkatesh Rao is experimenting with a new genre called “blogchains,” in which a bunch of blog posts are linked together around a single theme.

At Epsilon Theory, Ben Hunt created what he calls a Discovery Map. It’s an interactive graph visualization that displays all 300 of his blog posts as a network graph.

The most interesting non-linear threading product I’ve discovered is called Are.na. It’s like Pinterest, but for nerds.

Other people can easily add blocks to your channels, and you can include their channels inside your own. Channels can be rearranged, renamed, connected in novel ways.

I’ve started searching for things on Are.na (instead of Google) because every block lives inside a channel that’s connected to a lot of related content