Some part of my mind feels that blog posts have to be long. Most of the time, though, I don’t have enough content and ideas to fill up a full blog post, which is why I like Twitter—its low character limit encourages that ideas stay brief.
Still, 250-something characters and the lack of formatting gets unwieldy, and I find myself often spreading my thoughts across multiple tweets. That’s why I made this blog and named it “Longer Tweets,” for the ideas that are too big for a tweet but too small for a blog post.
Despite that, I ended up treating this site like a normal blog, and I’ve found myself writing long blog posts that I never end up finishing.
New goal: write more, write less
Quantity over quality has always been the overarching theme of my website, and I think it could apply here too. If I write more short longer tweets, the more likely one of them will actually be good. If I write few, long longer tweets, I simply won’t publish many of them.
But also, I’ve found myself at best skimming through other people’s blog posts. I don’t really care about every thought the author has, but I also don’t want to just see an AI summary at the top. I believe I’d do a service to my readers (if they exist) by being concise.
Besides, with LLMs proliferating everywhere, I’m starting to mentally associate some long blog posts with LLMs. Nicely organized and formatted blogs, with separate sections and bolded bulleted lists, give strong LLM vibes. I tire of reading LLM slop every day, at work and online, and LLMs are very good at writing a lot with little substance, while brevity takes skill.
And to this effect, I’ll start by ditching conclusions.