The thing you're missing is that each of the tweets in a thread has its own set of replies & quote tweets, some of which may themselves be threads. [1] This is why I like to think of Twitter as a fractal annotation platform: it allows people to write commentary on specific portions of other people's commentary. Twitter's innovation is that it forces the writer to divide their text into annotatable segments before publishing it.
I think it's great that we're coming up with better tools to facilitate the process of writing modular text. Hopefully these tools will make it clearer to writers what Twitter threads are for and reduce the prevalence of behaviors like splitting sentences across tweets.
[1] Unfortunately Twitter's thread-composing UI isn't available when writing a reply to someone else's tweet. It would be nice if they fixed this. (Perhaps the reasoning is that a multi-tweet reply would work better as a quote tweet. I still think it would be nice to have the thread UI available for every tweet, regardless of the context.)
It's neat being able to link to an individual tweet in a tweetstorm, and to be able to favorite and retweet individual ones and have the counts vary, indicating which tweets are the most interesting.
I think this tool is not very useful, because writing tweets in the character limited box is what forces you to get to the essence of the idea that you are trying to communicate. Your tweet thread will be very unreadable if you use this tool.
Consuming using "unrolling" is fine, because it only gets rid of the interface that some people don't like.
> Your tweet thread will be very unreadable if you use this tool.
Isn't that only the case if you don't work with their built in tool on the right to see what the thread will look like? I personally have no problem reading through a thread in this way, especially when the thread is crafted with the individual tweets in mind.
Think on it. We've created a wonderful packet-switched network, on top of which we:
* first built an app that made its users break a message into packets by hand;
* then built apps on top of that app that do the packet disassembly/reassembly for the first app automatically.
There is theoretically no end to the heights this tower of madness can reach! A driven young Hackernews could theoretically be occupied for decades adding to it, all to chase that VC money or Show HN whuffie!
What's wrong with the web where sharing content requires the use of tools for both authors (a text editor) and readers (a web browser)?
We're so used to social networks being all-in-one, but that doesn't mean it's the only way. A network that doesn't come with all of its own tools isn't necessarily worse -- it might even be healthier that people can solve their own use cases with their own apps.
What's wrong with this network where sharing content requires to use such tools both for authors and readers? ;-)