Twitter was conceived as a 'micro-blogging' platform. Each Tweet being an independent semantic entity on itself with a 140 - expanded to 280 - character limit.

Twitter was conceived as a 'micro-blogging' platform. Each Tweet being an independent semantic entity on itself with a 140 - expanded to 280 - character limit. The entire point was to post succinct status updates. Naturally, people tend to use tools in ways that go beyond the original intended design purpose. Creating entire threads using @ mentions is one of those behaviors. Proper UX, readability and findability are opportunity costs happily paid in return for tapping directly into a large audience in real time. Since Twitter is an ad company, it won't fix this because there's zero incentive to do so. On the contrary. If more people are willing to use Twitter and stay on Twitter, the better. Arguably, Twitter offers the least number of affordances to accommodate long form writing and reading. But here we are. Medium valiantly tried to offer an answer - proper UX combined with the directness of Twitter - but failed since they were fighting an uphill battle from the get go because their business model consisted of competing with an incumbent using the same tactic: building another content silo as a private venture.