How to make long twitter threads easier to read and share
By Daniel Kim
Khamosh Pathak is a freelance technology writer who specializes in tutorials. His work has also been published on Lifehacker, iPhoneHacks, Zapier’s blog, MakeUseOf, and Guiding Tech. Khamosh has nearly a decade of experience writing how-tos, features and technology guides on the internet. Read more.
If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you’re bound to come across a long Twitter thread. Instead of reading it on Twitter, use the Thread Reader App website and bot to create a web page for easy reading.
Tweetstorms are the new blog posts. Instead of writing a short blog post on Medium or their own website, many bloggers or brands choose to publish long Twitter threads instead. Twitter now makes it really easy to publish multiple tweets together as a thread, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise.
But when you’re on the other side of the thread, the reading experience for a long Twitter thread isn’t as good. Not to mention, there’s no easy way to share a Twitter thread with a friend who doesn’t use Twitter (something that blogs figured out decades ago).
The Thread Reader App solves both problems. The website, combined with its Twitter bot, helps you unroll long Twitter threads and generates a unique web page for it. You can read the Twitter thread on the web page with ease and share that URL with a friend who doesn’t use Twitter.
Start by finding the last tweet in the thread that you want to unroll and reply to it. Here, tag “@threadreaderapp” and type “unroll.”
After sending the tweet reply, you’ll receive a notification from the Thread Reader App Twitter handle with a link to the unrolled Twitter thread. Open the link to read the thread in blog form.
If you don’t want to clutter the user’s notification, you can also quote retweet the thread. In the comment text box, add “@threadreaderapp unroll.” You’ll get a reply with the link to the unrolled thread.
Both of these methods involve your Twitter profile in some way. If you don’t want to clutter up your follower’s feeds, use the Thread Reader App website instead.
First, copy the link to the Twitter thread. If you’re using a desktop browser, you can do this easily from the URL bar. If you’re using an app, tap on the “Share” button from the tweet and select the “Copy Link To Tweet” option.
Next, open the Thread Reader App website in your browser of choice, paste in the URL in the text box, and click on the “Find Unroll” button.
The website will now show you the unrolled Twitter thread on its own unique page.
If you find that some tweets are missing, or if the thread has been updated, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “Force A Refresh” link to make the Thread Reader App reload the thread again.
As we mentioned above, the Thread Reader App provides a minimal and polished interface for reading the long threads. It automatically imports all photos and shows links with rich previews. It also numbers all of the tweets in the thread.
You can hover over a tweet and click it to open the particular tweet on the Twitter website.
Is your Twitter timeline getting too cluttered? Use lists to create different Twitter timelines based on topics and interests and then pin the lists to the Twitter Home screen for a better reading experience.
Khamosh Pathak is a freelance technology writer who specializes in tutorials. His work has also been published on Lifehacker, iPhoneHacks, Zapier’s blog, MakeUseOf, and Guiding Tech. Khamosh has nearly a decade of experience writing how-tos, features and technology guides on the internet. Read more.
If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you’re bound to come across a long Twitter thread. Instead of reading it on Twitter, use the Thread Reader App website and bot to create a web page for easy reading.
Tweetstorms are the new blog posts. Instead of writing a short blog post on Medium or their own website, many bloggers or brands choose to publish long Twitter threads instead. Twitter now makes it really easy to publish multiple tweets together as a thread, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise.
But when you’re on the other side of the thread, the reading experience for a long Twitter thread isn’t as good. Not to mention, there’s no easy way to share a Twitter thread with a friend who doesn’t use Twitter (something that blogs figured out decades ago).
The Thread Reader App solves both problems. The website, combined with its Twitter bot, helps you unroll long Twitter threads and generates a unique web page for it. You can read the Twitter thread on the web page with ease and share that URL with a friend who doesn’t use Twitter.
Start by finding the last tweet in the thread that you want to unroll and reply to it. Here, tag “@threadreaderapp” and type “unroll.”
After sending the tweet reply, you’ll receive a notification from the Thread Reader App Twitter handle with a link to the unrolled Twitter thread. Open the link to read the thread in blog form.
If you don’t want to clutter the user’s notification, you can also quote retweet the thread. In the comment text box, add “@threadreaderapp unroll.” You’ll get a reply with the link to the unrolled thread.
Both of these methods involve your Twitter profile in some way. If you don’t want to clutter up your follower’s feeds, use the Thread Reader App website instead.
First, copy the link to the Twitter thread. If you’re using a desktop browser, you can do this easily from the URL bar. If you’re using an app, tap on the “Share” button from the tweet and select the “Copy Link To Tweet” option.
Next, open the Thread Reader App website in your browser of choice, paste in the URL in the text box, and click on the “Find Unroll” button.
The website will now show you the unrolled Twitter thread on its own unique page.
If you find that some tweets are missing, or if the thread has been updated, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “Force A Refresh” link to make the Thread Reader App reload the thread again.
As we mentioned above, the Thread Reader App provides a minimal and polished interface for reading the long threads. It automatically imports all photos and shows links with rich previews. It also numbers all of the tweets in the thread.
You can hover over a tweet and click it to open the particular tweet on the Twitter website.
Is your Twitter timeline getting too cluttered? Use lists to create different Twitter timelines based on topics and interests and then pin the lists to the Twitter Home screen for a better reading experience.
Because sometimes the thread is too damn long
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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The beauty of Twitter is that every message is constrained to 280 characters and under, but sometimes you simply can’t get all your thoughts across in just a single tweet. Or perhaps you’re following a live news story and you need to follow the thread to read the news as it develops so there’s context for what happened earlier.
Whatever the reason, sometimes Twitter threads can get long, which can make them difficult to follow. Thankfully, there’s a bot that can help piece those tweets together into one piece of text without all the extra replies from anyone other than the person who originally started the thread. This is called “unrolling” a thread, and it’s created by a tool called @threadreaderapp, which lets you combine tweetstorms into one single post simply by using the keyword “unroll.”
There are two ways to activate the bot.
If you’ve ever started following a Twitter thread only to realize there are just way too many tweets, simply reply “@threadreaderapp unroll” to any tweet by the original poster. When the bot is done compiling the tweets, it will tweet you back with a link to a post that has pieced them all together in one place. This usually takes a few minutes.
You don’t have to summon the bot on any particular tweet in the thread — just simply reply to one and the bot will sync up all the tweets that are linked to the very first one in the thread. Here’s a sample with Dieter Bohn’s thread about his nerdtastically eventful Christmas with Verizon.
If you don’t want to clog up a thread’s replies with an unroll request, you can also retweet it onto your own timeline. Click the retweet icon, choose “Retweet with comment,” and add the same “@threadreaderapp unroll” command to get the bot going.
The bot will reply directly to you and only you after the unrolling is complete. This way you won’t accidentally respond to the original tweeter in the middle of an ongoing thread or disrupt any conversation people might be having. This is also particularly helpful if someone has already asked to unroll the thread but you didn’t see it.
If you find that the thread gets updated after you’ve already asked to unroll the tweet, head to the bottom of the unrolled thread post and click “Force a refresh.” The bot will recompile the thread and bring in any new tweet that may have been posted after the unroll was requested.
If during your unrolled reading you decide there’s a particular tweet you’d like to respond to, retweet, or like, simply hover over the text of that tweet and click it. This will take you back to the original tweet where you can engage with it however you’d like.
The bot is a free service, so naturally there are some limits as to what it can and cannot do. If a person has blocked @threadreaderapp, is a private user, or suddenly gets their account locked, the bot may not be able to access tweets to unroll into a single post.
The bot can also only access the last 3,200 tweets per user, so if the original tweeter is really on a roll, you might not be able to get all of their tweets compiled.
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Justin Pot has been writing about technology for over a decade, with work appearing in Digital Trends, The Next Web, Lifehacker, MakeUseOf, and the Zapier Blog. He also runs the Hillsboro Signal, a volunteer-driven local news outlet he founded. Read more.
Twitter threads are the worst. Don’t make them.
…is advice I myself don’t listen to. Neither do you. There’s nothing you can say in a Twitter thread that can’t be said better in a blog post, but something about getting feedback for individual sentences is intoxicating, and just too compelling for us to not do it.
This is great for the person creating the tweet storm, but Twitter is a terrible user interface for actually reading long strings of text. Which is where Spooler comes in.
This tool parses any Twitter thread and puts it together into something resembling a blog post. No RT and Like buttons, no replies from randos, no dateline; just the text you want to read, along with any images or videos included in the thread.
Using the tool is simple. First, find a thread you want to turn into a post.
Find the last post in the thread, then copy the URL by right-clicking the date, then clicking “Copy Link” (or whatever specific wording your browser of choice uses.)
Next, head to Spooler. If it’s your first time using the site, you’ll have to log in using your Twitter account. Once that’s done you can paste your URL.
The tool will take a while to parse things, particularly for very long threads. This has to do with Twitter’s API limits, but eventually you will see the Tweets turned into a collection of text.
This is a lot easier to read, and can be a godsend for long threads. It’s particularly useful if you want to quote a long thread in something you’re writing, because it saves you from having to copy-paste from a bunch of different tweets.
Even better: if a given thread includes images, or links to YouTube videos, all of that will be embedded.
You can even link to the threads you’ve blog-ified, though users need to log into the service in order to see the result. And there are a few downsides, like needing to scroll to the bottom of a thread in order to convert it. You can read the reasons for these and other decision in this blog post about Spooler’s creation, if you’re interested.
If there’s a thread people keep telling you to read, but you can’t be bothered to sort through all the tweets, this is a pretty good tool for the job. It be nice if people would start posting their extended thoughts to blogs again, instead of tweeting them out en masse, this is a decent stopgap solution until that happens (it won’t.)
Now you can keep tweetstorms going forever
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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Twitter has tweaked its UI to make it easier to add new tweets to old threads. (No, it’s not an “edit tweet” feature.) As you’re composing a new tweet, you’ll be able to pull down a view of your past tweets and threads into the composition window. Previously, you’d have to go back and find the thread, then add the new tweet at the end.
It looks like the “continue thread” feature is now available to some users on Twitter’s iOS app, according to TechCrunch.
Now you can add a Tweet to one you already Tweeted, faster!
Here’s how it will work: while composing the new tweet, choose which older tweet you want to connect the new tweet to. Then click on the three dots menu in the older tweet and choose the “continue thread” option. The new tweet will now become part of the original thread.
It’s the latest tweak to the threading feature that Twitter introduced in 2017, which allows compositions of tweetstorms all at once, rather than forcing users to reply, reply, reply to tweets in chronological order so that they would be connected. Last month, it updated its iOS app so that users could better see replies from people they follow.
The Verge has reached out to Twitter to clarify if and when the new “continue thread” feature will be made available to all users, and we will update when we hear back.
The new blog post-esque feature lets writers share longer pieces of content, and include photos, videos, GIFs or tweets within their work.
Twitter revealed Wednesday that it is testing Notes, a blog post-adjacent feature that allows longer pieces of writing to be published on the social network.
The feature makes it easier for people to publish long-form writing without having to resort to the Twitter thread and segment out their thoughts across multiple tweets. Notes writers can also include photos, videos, tweets or GIFs within their content.
“As the platform for writers, it’s clear that Twitter is essential — from the proximity to an engaged audience, to the conversation around a writer’s work, to the community of readers (and, often, cheerleaders) that Twitter provides, to the critical role it plays in the livelihoods and careers of writers, on and off Twitter,” Twitter’s editorial director, Rembert Browne, said in a Note on the platform.
People can read Notes on and off Twitter, and you can find all of a persons’ Notes in the new tab on that person’s profile. A small group of writers in the US, Canada, UK and Ghana are part of the Notes test, Twitter said. The company didn’t indicate when Notes might be available more widely.
In April, Twitter revealed that it’s finally testing an edit button, a long-awaited request from anyone who has ever made a typo in a tweet. The platform has also kickstarted Twitter Blue, a paid subscription feature that allows subscribers to make changes to tweets, upload longer videos and read ad-free news.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is in the middle of a proposed $44 billion acquisition of the platform. Musk has said he wants to quash bots on the platform and get 1 billion users on Twitter.
