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I still haven’t figured out how to read twitter conversations / threads and profiles. Everything always seems out of order. Referenced things are just generally

• unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  The fact that third-party "unroll" services are actually essential is what makes Twitter so laughable. It is, as it has always been, a banal protocol trying to dress up as an impressive product.
• coffeecat 5y ago
  I think this is a fundamental flaw in the platform. Shared context is the key to having productive conversations, and twitter is a massive decontextualization machine. Traditional forums allow messages to be disseminated widely to readers who potentially have no out-of-band context. But they have enough in-band context to enable productive conversations: (1) there's a thread title and an original post which everyone generally reads, (2) all messages in a thread are visible to everyone, and (3) longer messages are supported. Short messages of a sentence or two are insufficient to convey much information without context, but can be very useful with context: "Sure, 6 sounds good". SMS and messaging apps work fine because messages are displayed in the context of a conversation, and dissemination is limited to known recipients who generally have some out-of-band context. But twitter provides little or no in-band context, messages are too short to stand on their own without context, and messages are disseminated to a global user base which has no out-of-band context. You'd expect that to be a recipe for a dumpster fire.