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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

At some point they made it so that in the web UI (you could do this in some other clients before, but since they started shutting those out it doesn't really count) if you replied to your own tweet and removed your name you could connect tweets together. People have been making excellent use of this to link thoughts together in a way that's readable but still encourages you to pare down your thoughts into bite size chunks (though some people do abuse it to write uninterrupted essays, this was no less true before).

All they really need to do is make this feature a little more accessible, imo.

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I have a love-hate relationship with that feature.

On the one hand, some of the most insightful things that I've seen on Twitter have been written in such way.

On the other, it's just so effin ugly. You can't reply/share/like the whole thing at once, so you end up with splintered conversation trees with different people replying to different parts of the mega-tweet.

I think it's a poor design choice, really.

Well, I think it's only worth comparing it to how it was before when someone had a train of thought in tweets. Linking to a single tweet then and telling people to follow it through meant that they had to go to the user's page, to the time it was posted, and then possibly go back and turn on tweets&replies, and then follow it backwards up the page.

I do not think there is any really perfect solution, but sometimes tweets should be connected to each other and much like many other twitter features (lists being the other really notable one) this one is only half complete and wanting of some extra love to make it not suck as much. But, like many of those features, does fill a real need.

I can see what you mean, but as a still-current user I only compare it to my user experience at the present.

Certainly I understand that it used to be much worse, but if it's not satisfying me now, well, I'm keeping an eye out for what will.

It's interesting you note lists as I agree that there's a really good underlying idea there that has never blossomed. Any ideas by how they could be improved?

Really I think they should be more like google+ circles (I don't like much about g+, but I do think that particular idea is well suited to twitter). They should be part of the home page presentation, allowing you to filter your main view down by list.

Personally, almost all the time I look on twitter I'm looking at a list. Either the one that's basically "these are the people I want to see all the tweets of" or topical ones (politics, infosec, etc). I spend very little time on the 'firehose' main feed.

Yeah, I actually like that a lot. I was thinking of something along the same lines.

Do you think it would be cool if there was a way for people to choose which lists to post their tweets to? Like, I follow some people who do research on type theory and I love their insights, but I really don't care what they've had for lunch, or if they find some cat picture funny. So maybe if there was a way for them to tag things in such a way that when I filter by "type theory" I only see their posts related to type theory and nothing else.

I like the idea in general, but my fear that it might be a bit too complicated for a lot of people? I think it's important to have a really simple and intuitive user interface, and something like that could just overcomplicate things.

I don't know, what do you think?

I have a sneaking suspicion that the ability to connect tweets to get something resembling a longer tweet is probably considered to be a bit of a cop out.

The reasoning behind retaining the 140 character limit seems to be that if it's longer than 140 characters - post it elsewhere, then link to it if you want it on your feed. Trying to cater to the market where you can create messages to your social network that are somewhat untargeted seems like it would make twitter less able to offer the 'of the moment brevity' they want, and really would result in them being a partially implemented feature that already exists on other social media platforms.

I disagree, and I personally rarely click through to such "I expand on my thoughts over there" posts. I don't read twitter for that.

But I think there is value to the concept of forcing brevity, and I think it's essential to twitter. As I said, some people abuse it and those people should do just as you said, because that's what they really want.

Connected tweets are basically like a semicolon in normal writing. They imply a loose connectedness between independent thoughts. When used that way I think they're incredibly valuable for certain kinds of expression, and they still force brevity upon you in ways that "oh just go look at my 10,000 word essay on Medium" does not.

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