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Comment by no_gravity | Hacker News Reader

The main problem I have with Twitter is that when you reply to your own tweets, the reply will appear as a new tweet on your timeline.

This way your timeline becomes total chaos. Unless you only tweet a single 280 chars text and never add anything to it.

Otherwise, I would use it to post topics I am interested in. Reply to those topics to add more text or when new information becomes available. And have a discussion with people interested in those topics. I wish there was such a platform. It would be like everybody can run their own mini HN.

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How about Wordpress? What you're describing sounds to me like the standard structure of a blog with comments.

Twitter is a weird sort of blog platform.

It is chaotic by design: the chaos is consequence of its distinguishing features. Everyone does get their own 'mini HN', i.e. a forum. But they lack the tools to rule over that forum. It's idealistically anarchic. Everyone's expected to get along peacefully, totally in public. There's no ownership over threads.

Wordpress is a tool to make websites. Yes, you can put your content on a website and then link to that from Twitter.

But that puts a big barrier in front of your content and the Twitter users. Visiting a website is usually a horrible experience. So people are very hesitant to do so. Click through rates from social media to websites are abysmal.

Good point. Users are willing to browse around Twitter (and Facebook) where the experience is consistent, tolerable. And functional enough for many kinds of content creators. They've achieved a sort of balance.

User hesitation to follow links out to the open web is lamentable, but wholly understandable.

Perhaps some 3rd party service with a recognisable URL could establish itself as a non-horrible, useful supplement to add extra structure to one's posts.

(Although I was suggesting something to use instead of Twitter, not something to use with it.)

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