Twitter is a platform for amplifying messages to be sure. We can see this fairly plainly when considering that both the @ symbol and hashtag were created by th

Twitter is a platform for amplifying messages to be sure. We can see this fairly plainly when considering that both the @ symbol and hashtag were created by the community as hacks for features that didn't exist natively. I once met one of the original employees of Twitter (back when it was Odeo) at a conference and he explained some of the early uses of the platform when it was built around SMS. There were instances of protestors who would message "police spotted 23rd street" and presumably other users would receive that message on their timelines. To be clear, I'm not saying Twitter was designed for protests but it seems a lot of the things that make it look more "conversational" were definitely after thoughts and so it's no wonder that it's so broken as a medium. Even more plainly, getting anything across with nuance in 280 characters (it was 140!) is swimming against the stream no matter how many pseudo-features like threading are added.