I wonder what my blog would look like if I took my hot Twitter takes and wrote 500 words on each rather than 280 characters.
(Yes, I still have a blog, a couple of them actually.)
The instant publication of a tweet is very appealing, with a quick hit of dopamine possible if you happen to get really lucky and write something that triggers a quick response. That's great, in the same way that a rat pressing a lever thinks that getting fed is great.
In the olden days of web rings and RSS feeds and Google scooping up all of the blog content it could find, posting to a blog felt a lot more "live". If you wrote about something that people were searching for right at that moment, there was an opportunity to do serious numbers. Those days are mostly gone, with changes to the world leaving blogs behind as the source of hot news.
The biggest advantage of the blog format over the tweet (aside from its absurd length) is that you have a lot more room to ponder an idea and a lot more space to link out to other people's takes on the same subject. The writing has some space to breathe, there's a lot more chances to edit, and the shelf life of the words is a lot longer.
Not many people read blogs though any more so they fail for general audience seeking. We're in the Newsletter Era, so I suppose the reasonable option is to somehow cajole people into signing up for everything you publish. Direct email does increase the chance that any given thing will be read. The downside I guess is that readers expect to write back! Suddenly your hot take is an extended conversation and maybe you were just chasing a passing interest rather than a deep thought to ponder.
One thing is for sure: when you write blog instead of a tweet, there's a whole lot more time spent typing your own ideas, and a lot less time hitting the refresh button hoping someone else somewhere in the world has said something interesting. I can get into that.
