Tweets are the new abstract: how to actually get people to read your paper

willcb · x · 2026-09-21

In a discussion with @yuntiandeng about promoting the PAW paper (an open-source compiler-interpreter system distinct from Jev — it outputs no confidence scores and can't guarantee predefined categories), willcb argues the best way to get people to open papers today is great tweets and blogs.
His framing: the tweet is the "abstract", the blog is the expanded-thread/workshop version; people read the full paper once convinced and want details.
Context from yuntiandeng: use cases like email triage, log filtering, and fuzzy search don't need confidence scores and can be solved in 3 lines of PAW code.
Also touched on: define who you're marketing to (researchers care about methods like training recipes and scaling laws; builders care about API simplicity), and stop reply-spamming.

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