> Over several days this spring, BuzzFeed News met with Twitter’s leadership and watched as twttr’s team worked on its first big push: helping people better understand what’s being said in often chaotic conversations. The team thinks that if people took more time to read entire conversations, that would help improve their comprehension of them.

I had assumed that Twitter was aware of the implications of its design for conversation and had decided that the controversy boost to engagement numbers was worth creating a toxic environment. For real, consider these two basic elements of Twitter's design. First, any given post has a low maximum length, so any time you want to say more than a sentence or two it needs to be spread over multiple posts (a "tweetstorm"). Second, Twitter has two separate features that let anyone pull any part of a series of posts out of its original context: retweeting and quote-tweeting.