This is why Twitter fails as a discussion platform, in comparison to something like HN or Reddit: A sub-thread is in effect a social contract that somewhat lim

This is why Twitter fails as a discussion platform, in comparison to something like HN or Reddit: A sub-thread is in effect a social contract that somewhat limits scope to the shared understanding created by the parent comment(s). This constrains the speech a bit, but also offers the speaker a different persona to speak from... more of a small group persona than the public persona who issues each tweet. Virality on Twitter relies upon a tweets lingering in the space where the social contract of a constrained discussion is highly unstable. Coda is pointing out the phenomenon by which that unstable contract results in a laser of scrutiny from a horde of people who lack any kind of thoughtful context but who are now able to comment on equal footing with those who have context. The simple phenomenon of ranking comments vertically by vote count (used by HN, Reddit) solves this problem when the goal is focused discussion. But when the goal is to create a fray in which self-promoters can flourish in that space of deliberate misunderstanding, the normal dynamic of respect and meritorious vote-ranked commenting goes away, and the next self-promoter has an incentive to misunderstand and offer an embellished take that furthers his/her agenda (self-promotion). So while Twitter fails as a discussion medium, it succeeds brilliantly as a broadcast medium, and Twitter's product team has created something quite clever with the semantics of mentions, stars, retweets, etc. The "what's been going on on Twitter" feature is a pure algorithmic feed which is likely a nod to the effectiveness of Facebook's algorithmic feed approach for user engagement and targeted ad placement. I can't wait to see how all this evolves in terms of Twitter's product decisions.