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One of the things that has always confused me about twitter is that it seems to be offering a threaded conversation model, yet it tries to "flatten" the convers

One of the things that has always confused me about twitter is that it seems to be offering a threaded conversation model, yet it tries to "flatten" the conversation and render things in a linear timeline. I've always struggled to understand the full context of the tweet I'm reading (that is, where is this tweet in the full conversation?). Do others also struggle with this? Am I just Doing It Wrong?

thewebcount 5y ago
OMG, Yes! I can't understand anything about it's interface. Sometimes there's a moderately straightforward discussion, other times, random, completely unrelated things show up looking like replies, but obviously aren't. Still other times the thing being linked to is a reply to something I can't see. It makes zero sense and I avoid going to Twitter if at all possible.
mikestew 5y ago
I think it's a variation of Stockholm Syndrome at this point. I've used Twitter since early days, and the only reason I even keep an account is to keep the user name. But I quit regularly viewing Twitter going on probably close to ten years ago, and open it in some form maybe once a week to look at a specific post (not just browse). So, as one who doesn't use the interface very often: it's a fucking dumpster fire. If one were one of today's 10K, seeing Twitter for the first time, imagine explaining how to read a thread (no, you are not allowed to direct the n00b to a 3rd-party tool such as Nitter). It would appear to me, a not-regular user, that Twitter tries to do threaded conversations and fails miserably. As with parent comment, finding the context quickly turns into actual work. Someone must get value out of Twitter if they put up with all this, but that someone is not me. At the end of the day, I find Twitter to just not be worth the trouble anymore.
- playpause 5y ago
  I used to think exactly this - whatever Twitter has that makes it so popular, it can’t be its dumpster fire UI. But in the last year I finally got into it and it became a go-to place for me at certain times of day to get a kind of social/conversational fix that is just not provided by any other social networks. At some point I realised I no longer find the UI baffling, I seem to sail around it intuitively and enjoy it. Now I think it might be a smart decision not to ‘fix’ it. Yes you are constantly hunting around for the context of things, but I wonder if that’s a big part of what makes it work, makes it more enjoyable for your social brain. It’s that sense of “what’s going on? What’s this thing about?” and then being rewarded, over and over. It’s the closest thing online to a bustling marketplace where you bump into people you see often and overhear interesting things that draw you in.
aeturnum 5y ago
First: you are not alone, that's normal. Second: I think they are leaning into the surprising and sometimes pleasing juxtaposition of conversations that can be happening "close" to each other. Like, I'll click into a tweet, and generally the first "thread" is the one where the OP replies to themselves - but that's not always the case! Sometimes another reply is more popular and they will swap it. I think they are trying to give you a sense of how the conversation has gone - when they break the thread they are showing you that, based on activity, other people are ignoring the thread and paying attention to this other thread. It messes you up if all you want to do is see what the OP said, but if you are there to see "why people care about this tweet" (also common) it's important to understand where things fell apart.
pram 5y ago
There are so many things that make it an unpleasant ordeal. Having to hit 'see more replies' over and over. Having to click on individual tweets to see their replies. Pressing back and having your window reset to the top of the replies page, and now you have to click 'see more replies' all over again. Having your history completely broken somehow so pressing back doesn't even take you to the right place. etc etc
- twofornone 5y ago
  >Having to hit 'see more replies' over and over. I don't know if I'm just suffering from confirmation bias but it seems like this feature is used as a form of soft censorship, to discourage users from reading certain threads, as it appears to disproportionately pop up on "controversial" topics where right of center opinions are likely to be expressed.
  - StanislavPetrov 5y ago
    That's exactly the case, and its not at all limited to "right of center" positions. Accounts that are deemed undesirable by Twitter for whatever reason (usually involving posts that go counter to mainstream narratives) have all of their replies to every post listed after "see more replies" to reduce their visibility. And beneath "see more replies" you will often see another "show posts that may be offensive" that you have to click on to see even more replies from users Twitter finds less desirable still. Very frequently none of these posts will be offensive in any way. Those who have their posts under these extended tabs also don't give notifications to those they are replying to. It's censorship and information manipulation from top to bottom on Twitter.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      “See more board members” “Show board members that may be offensive”
  - wwweston 5y ago
    > soft censorship If it's soft, it's not censorship. (On top of "if it's private, it's not censorship.")
HellsMaddy 5y ago
I think it’s intentional on Twitter’s part. It’s FOMO: you see a hot take out of context and now your brain ~~wants~~ needs to know what the hell is going on, so you reward Twitter’s algorithm with lots of tasty engagement in your effort to figure out who pissed everyone off.
- xg15 5y ago
  Yeah, this seems to be the endgame of the whole engagement maximizer craze: If struggling with an app because you can't find the function you're looking for counts as "engagement", then the obvious strategy is to make apps as hard to use as possible.
  - snvzz 5y ago
    >the obvious strategy is to make apps as hard to use as possible. And this is exactly what they're doing. They as in facebook and twitter.
heavyset_go 5y ago
You'll see more ads and promoted content if you click through threads. Whenever you click a tweet to read through its threaded replies, sponsored content blocks refresh even if the page itself is an SPA that doesn't do a full browser refresh.
brimble 5y ago
No, it's very confusing. I also found Facebook too confusing to use back when I briefly tried it around 2009. A friend who'd been on it since it was still exclusive to some universities assured me it made a lot more sense a year or two before that, but by then, it was too confusing for me and I bounced off fast. Maybe it's on purpose?
dionidium 5y ago
It is a plainly idiotic user interface and threading model and the fact that it's lasted so long looks to me like evidence of extreme dysfunction within the company. Consider also their privacy model. Twitter is the only website I have ever been a user of that lets me see more information if I log out than I can see when I'm logged in (i.e. the tweets of anybody who has blocked me). Deep confusion is on display at every turn.
- krapp 5y ago
  The fact that it's lasted this long is evidence that it doesn't matter enough to the end user to be worth changing. If it were Hacker News people would be saying "if it isn't broken, don't fix it." And people using Twitter despite its user interface - even putting in the effort to work around it, implies that it isn't really broken.
  - dionidium 5y ago
    I think it's evidence that network effect are powerful, more than anything. I'm on twitter because that's where everybody else is.
    - city41 5y ago
      People also just suffer silently. Buggy, confusing, incorrect, whatever it may be, in my experience a lot of people just put up with all of it and never think to complain or look for alternatives. I find this especially true of less technical people who often think bugs are due to something they did wrong.
      - autoexec 5y ago
        I think people have been trained to feel helpless about what companies do to them, especially when it comes to tech companies. It's very much not just a problem with tech, but tech gives companies new and easy ways to force things on their users long after the sale is completed. Everyone's been conditioned to accept things like sudden and unexpected changes. The websites they visit do it, so does the software on their computers, their consoles, and their cell phones. There was some grumbling from uppity Windows users when forced updates/upgrades and reboots were pushed onto them, and I thought things might start to change but those things are still around (although the reboot thing was walked back a little) and now people are slowly being made to get used to hosting all their data on 3rd party servers and never being sure if/when it will be suddenly and unexpectedly be removed and inaccessible. Today there are stories of people who had their YT video or their repository removed, or lost access to books/music/games/movies they paid to be able to download/stream/play etc. Car companies are now disabling or pay-walling off features people already had when they purchased the vehicle.
supertofu 5y ago
Wow, I thought it was just me. I've tried to "get into" twitter for the past decade, but I could never figure out how to read threads. I just gave up after a while because I was too proud to hunt for an explainer article somewhere. And I have too much noise in my life anyway...
jsemrau 5y ago
Twitter is terrible as a social platform. It's a great platform to get quick news about something. Obviously platforms like these thrive during eventful times. Just look at who is posting about the Ukraine/Russia war. But it's not about dialogue or threads. It's only consumption.
- Gollapalli 5y ago
  Imagine a world where social media companies drove controversial events just to drive engagement metrics. Replace the word "drove" with the word "stoked" and you have the current world.
AgentME 5y ago
I spend a lot of time hiding whole comment subtrees when browsing Reddit threads, especially on mobile. I'd do that on HN too except HN's UI is completely mobile-hostile with how tiny its buttons are. I don't fault Twitter for picking the opposite default. In small discussions where most people are interested in every detail being followed up on, HN and Reddit's style is nicer. In popular discussions where every individual message has too many replies to care about and most people don't care to see every single subthread to completion, Twitter's style is much nicer because you can just scroll without repeatedly hitting buttons to avoid getting caught in way too deep subthreads every single message.
- boardwaalk 5y ago
  Some reddit clients have a "next top-level comment" floating button. Apollo does at least, and I thought the official client did too.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    Hacker News has these as parent/prev/next buttons.
jollybean 5y ago
Yes, this is the most absurd thing about Twitter and makes me wonder how it can exist. I have no clue who is responding to who or when or what the 'thread' is. YouTube content is also very unstructured - in 2022 there will be a 5 part series and it's nary impossible to find the 'next part' it's utterly inane. I don't know if this is 'just me' but it triggers something deep within, like an OCD, like something 'very out of place'. Twitter and Youtube almost rely on you to just go from one random thought to the next with nary and consideration in between. They offer obviously triggering content. TikTok I've noticed does not try to dose you up with political BS.
spullara 5y ago
I think if you tried you could understand why it looks the way it does. There replies are rendered under what they are replying to. Do you have any example of what you think is being displayed incorrectly?
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  This is almost never the case for me. The replies to this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/SamTLevin/status/1512109658432888840 https://mobile.twitter.com/SamTLevin/status/1512109658432888... are way, way off screen (except for the self replies). And when you scroll down to them it's not clear if they're replies to the first tweet, the last, or the middle.
  - spullara 5y ago
    Every tweet under the tweet are a reply if they don't have a line connecting them to a previous tweet. The ones that have lines up are replies to the tweet the line connects to.
    - notreallyserio 5y ago
      Thanks, looks like you're right. That's some counterintuitive UX right there, requiring the user to scroll several pages just to see a mid-thread comment. Wonder why they don't just put the replies immediately below the tweet they're replying to.
      - spullara 5y ago
        What you are seeing in that thread is the OP replying to themselves to create a thread of related tweets. They believe that seeing the whole thread of the OP is more important than what could be 1000s of replies to the original tweet.
bromuro 5y ago
Same here! Eg I sent a “threaded” tweet, now my timeline is full of out-of-context tweets. WTF.
slightwinder 5y ago
> One of the things that has always confused me about twitter is that it seems to be offering a threaded conversation model, yet it tries to "flatten" the conversation and render things in a linear timeline. They do not flatten it to a linear timeline, they "optimize" it by mixing in the important sub-threads. Generally they show only the first level of replies. and then they optimize it by also showing some replies to those replies, which can go down pretty deep. So basically they give the thread, but selectively hide the unimportant parts. I understand the reasoning here, as there popular tweets can gain many replies of which most are just noise. But the actual result is a clusterfuck of experience which only makes it worse. And lately they even made it worse, because now they also show irrelevant tweets under the normal tweet-view, and it's hard to see where the original tweet ended.
ColinWright 5y ago
I have a tool to "Chart" Twitter conversations. For example: https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1511425005443174402.svg https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1511425005443174402.svg https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1510898215448678400.svg https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1510898215448678400.svg I find it invaluable, others find it unusable.

thewebcount 5y ago

OMG, Yes! I can't understand anything about it's interface. Sometimes there's a moderately straightforward discussion, other times, random, completely unrelated things show up looking like replies, but obviously aren't. Still other times the thing being linked to is a reply to something I can't see. It makes zero sense and I avoid going to Twitter if at all possible.

mikestew 5y ago

I think it's a variation of Stockholm Syndrome at this point. I've used Twitter since early days, and the only reason I even keep an account is to keep the user name. But I quit regularly viewing Twitter going on probably close to ten years ago, and open it in some form maybe once a week to look at a specific post (not just browse). So, as one who doesn't use the interface very often: it's a fucking dumpster fire. If one were one of today's 10K, seeing Twitter for the first time, imagine explaining how to read a thread (no, you are not allowed to direct the n00b to a 3rd-party tool such as Nitter). It would appear to me, a not-regular user, that Twitter tries to do threaded conversations and fails miserably. As with parent comment, finding the context quickly turns into actual work. Someone must get value out of Twitter if they put up with all this, but that someone is not me. At the end of the day, I find Twitter to just not be worth the trouble anymore.

playpause 5y ago
I used to think exactly this - whatever Twitter has that makes it so popular, it can’t be its dumpster fire UI. But in the last year I finally got into it and it became a go-to place for me at certain times of day to get a kind of social/conversational fix that is just not provided by any other social networks. At some point I realised I no longer find the UI baffling, I seem to sail around it intuitively and enjoy it. Now I think it might be a smart decision not to ‘fix’ it. Yes you are constantly hunting around for the context of things, but I wonder if that’s a big part of what makes it work, makes it more enjoyable for your social brain. It’s that sense of “what’s going on? What’s this thing about?” and then being rewarded, over and over. It’s the closest thing online to a bustling marketplace where you bump into people you see often and overhear interesting things that draw you in.

aeturnum 5y ago

First: you are not alone, that's normal. Second: I think they are leaning into the surprising and sometimes pleasing juxtaposition of conversations that can be happening "close" to each other. Like, I'll click into a tweet, and generally the first "thread" is the one where the OP replies to themselves - but that's not always the case! Sometimes another reply is more popular and they will swap it. I think they are trying to give you a sense of how the conversation has gone - when they break the thread they are showing you that, based on activity, other people are ignoring the thread and paying attention to this other thread. It messes you up if all you want to do is see what the OP said, but if you are there to see "why people care about this tweet" (also common) it's important to understand where things fell apart.

pram 5y ago

There are so many things that make it an unpleasant ordeal. Having to hit 'see more replies' over and over. Having to click on individual tweets to see their replies. Pressing back and having your window reset to the top of the replies page, and now you have to click 'see more replies' all over again. Having your history completely broken somehow so pressing back doesn't even take you to the right place. etc etc

twofornone 5y ago
>Having to hit 'see more replies' over and over. I don't know if I'm just suffering from confirmation bias but it seems like this feature is used as a form of soft censorship, to discourage users from reading certain threads, as it appears to disproportionately pop up on "controversial" topics where right of center opinions are likely to be expressed.
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  That's exactly the case, and its not at all limited to "right of center" positions. Accounts that are deemed undesirable by Twitter for whatever reason (usually involving posts that go counter to mainstream narratives) have all of their replies to every post listed after "see more replies" to reduce their visibility. And beneath "see more replies" you will often see another "show posts that may be offensive" that you have to click on to see even more replies from users Twitter finds less desirable still. Very frequently none of these posts will be offensive in any way. Those who have their posts under these extended tabs also don't give notifications to those they are replying to. It's censorship and information manipulation from top to bottom on Twitter.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    “See more board members” “Show board members that may be offensive”
- wwweston 5y ago
  > soft censorship If it's soft, it's not censorship. (On top of "if it's private, it's not censorship.")

HellsMaddy 5y ago

I think it’s intentional on Twitter’s part. It’s FOMO: you see a hot take out of context and now your brain ~~wants~~ needs to know what the hell is going on, so you reward Twitter’s algorithm with lots of tasty engagement in your effort to figure out who pissed everyone off.

xg15 5y ago
Yeah, this seems to be the endgame of the whole engagement maximizer craze: If struggling with an app because you can't find the function you're looking for counts as "engagement", then the obvious strategy is to make apps as hard to use as possible.
- snvzz 5y ago
  >the obvious strategy is to make apps as hard to use as possible. And this is exactly what they're doing. They as in facebook and twitter.

heavyset_go 5y ago

You'll see more ads and promoted content if you click through threads. Whenever you click a tweet to read through its threaded replies, sponsored content blocks refresh even if the page itself is an SPA that doesn't do a full browser refresh.

brimble 5y ago

No, it's very confusing. I also found Facebook too confusing to use back when I briefly tried it around 2009. A friend who'd been on it since it was still exclusive to some universities assured me it made a lot more sense a year or two before that, but by then, it was too confusing for me and I bounced off fast. Maybe it's on purpose?

dionidium 5y ago

It is a plainly idiotic user interface and threading model and the fact that it's lasted so long looks to me like evidence of extreme dysfunction within the company. Consider also their privacy model. Twitter is the only website I have ever been a user of that lets me see more information if I log out than I can see when I'm logged in (i.e. the tweets of anybody who has blocked me). Deep confusion is on display at every turn.

krapp 5y ago
The fact that it's lasted this long is evidence that it doesn't matter enough to the end user to be worth changing. If it were Hacker News people would be saying "if it isn't broken, don't fix it." And people using Twitter despite its user interface - even putting in the effort to work around it, implies that it isn't really broken.
- dionidium 5y ago
  I think it's evidence that network effect are powerful, more than anything. I'm on twitter because that's where everybody else is.
  - city41 5y ago
    People also just suffer silently. Buggy, confusing, incorrect, whatever it may be, in my experience a lot of people just put up with all of it and never think to complain or look for alternatives. I find this especially true of less technical people who often think bugs are due to something they did wrong.
    - autoexec 5y ago
      I think people have been trained to feel helpless about what companies do to them, especially when it comes to tech companies. It's very much not just a problem with tech, but tech gives companies new and easy ways to force things on their users long after the sale is completed. Everyone's been conditioned to accept things like sudden and unexpected changes. The websites they visit do it, so does the software on their computers, their consoles, and their cell phones. There was some grumbling from uppity Windows users when forced updates/upgrades and reboots were pushed onto them, and I thought things might start to change but those things are still around (although the reboot thing was walked back a little) and now people are slowly being made to get used to hosting all their data on 3rd party servers and never being sure if/when it will be suddenly and unexpectedly be removed and inaccessible. Today there are stories of people who had their YT video or their repository removed, or lost access to books/music/games/movies they paid to be able to download/stream/play etc. Car companies are now disabling or pay-walling off features people already had when they purchased the vehicle.

supertofu 5y ago

Wow, I thought it was just me. I've tried to "get into" twitter for the past decade, but I could never figure out how to read threads. I just gave up after a while because I was too proud to hunt for an explainer article somewhere. And I have too much noise in my life anyway...

jsemrau 5y ago

Twitter is terrible as a social platform. It's a great platform to get quick news about something. Obviously platforms like these thrive during eventful times. Just look at who is posting about the Ukraine/Russia war. But it's not about dialogue or threads. It's only consumption.

Gollapalli 5y ago
Imagine a world where social media companies drove controversial events just to drive engagement metrics. Replace the word "drove" with the word "stoked" and you have the current world.

AgentME 5y ago

I spend a lot of time hiding whole comment subtrees when browsing Reddit threads, especially on mobile. I'd do that on HN too except HN's UI is completely mobile-hostile with how tiny its buttons are. I don't fault Twitter for picking the opposite default. In small discussions where most people are interested in every detail being followed up on, HN and Reddit's style is nicer. In popular discussions where every individual message has too many replies to care about and most people don't care to see every single subthread to completion, Twitter's style is much nicer because you can just scroll without repeatedly hitting buttons to avoid getting caught in way too deep subthreads every single message.

boardwaalk 5y ago
Some reddit clients have a "next top-level comment" floating button. Apollo does at least, and I thought the official client did too.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Hacker News has these as parent/prev/next buttons.

jollybean 5y ago

Yes, this is the most absurd thing about Twitter and makes me wonder how it can exist. I have no clue who is responding to who or when or what the 'thread' is. YouTube content is also very unstructured - in 2022 there will be a 5 part series and it's nary impossible to find the 'next part' it's utterly inane. I don't know if this is 'just me' but it triggers something deep within, like an OCD, like something 'very out of place'. Twitter and Youtube almost rely on you to just go from one random thought to the next with nary and consideration in between. They offer obviously triggering content. TikTok I've noticed does not try to dose you up with political BS.

spullara 5y ago

I think if you tried you could understand why it looks the way it does. There replies are rendered under what they are replying to. Do you have any example of what you think is being displayed incorrectly?

notreallyserio 5y ago
This is almost never the case for me. The replies to this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/SamTLevin/status/1512109658432888840 https://mobile.twitter.com/SamTLevin/status/1512109658432888... are way, way off screen (except for the self replies). And when you scroll down to them it's not clear if they're replies to the first tweet, the last, or the middle.
- spullara 5y ago
  Every tweet under the tweet are a reply if they don't have a line connecting them to a previous tweet. The ones that have lines up are replies to the tweet the line connects to.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    Thanks, looks like you're right. That's some counterintuitive UX right there, requiring the user to scroll several pages just to see a mid-thread comment. Wonder why they don't just put the replies immediately below the tweet they're replying to.
    - spullara 5y ago
      What you are seeing in that thread is the OP replying to themselves to create a thread of related tweets. They believe that seeing the whole thread of the OP is more important than what could be 1000s of replies to the original tweet.

bromuro 5y ago

Same here! Eg I sent a “threaded” tweet, now my timeline is full of out-of-context tweets. WTF.

slightwinder 5y ago

> One of the things that has always confused me about twitter is that it seems to be offering a threaded conversation model, yet it tries to "flatten" the conversation and render things in a linear timeline. They do not flatten it to a linear timeline, they "optimize" it by mixing in the important sub-threads. Generally they show only the first level of replies. and then they optimize it by also showing some replies to those replies, which can go down pretty deep. So basically they give the thread, but selectively hide the unimportant parts. I understand the reasoning here, as there popular tweets can gain many replies of which most are just noise. But the actual result is a clusterfuck of experience which only makes it worse. And lately they even made it worse, because now they also show irrelevant tweets under the normal tweet-view, and it's hard to see where the original tweet ended.

ColinWright 5y ago

I have a tool to "Chart" Twitter conversations. For example: https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1511425005443174402.svg https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1511425005443174402.svg https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1510898215448678400.svg https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartter/1510898215448678400.svg I find it invaluable, others find it unusable.