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I basically can't understand a thread on Twitter

I don’t think Twitter understands threads on Twitter, and they never have. They built something over a decade ago, it took off for reasons they never fully could fathom, and they’ve been afraid ever since to futz with what for them has been a good thing.

Once upon a time, there was IRC for single-stream chats, and NNTP for threaded ones, and all was good. Twitter used to be one of the former, but then they noticed that users were using the "@name" convention to simulate replies, and started officially supporting it. Instead of a single conversation, or a tree of nested replies, they created some unholy thing partway between the two, that serves neither role well.

Twitter threads are a tree, but the representation in Twitter's web interface and mobile apps is linear and it's not obvious which tweets are in response to which. There are hints in the interface if you're aware of them, but it's easy to get lost.

They ought to figure this out or let people build alternative clients...

They used to let people build alternative clients, but those days of user customization are long gone.

I'm a similar age as you. I did create a Twitter account once, but never used it more than once or twice.

Unfortunately the Twitter username (handle?) I chose happened to be the same as the name of a somewhat well-known RnB/Hip Hop video producer (who I had no knowledge of before I created the account).

I signed in a year or two later and found that I had a couple of hundred follow requests from various aspiring and up-and-coming rap artists. At that point I realised in all honesty that I probably had no real use for Twitter.

I'm young, used twitter for about a year, and I don't understand twitter replies either.

Some people used to feel this way about IRC.

I'm afraid the reality is probably that you just don't have the motivation to figure it out, for whatever reason. No mass-market product like Twitter could succeed if it was as confusing as you say it is.

There's also the fact that a subset of computer programmer types have low tolerance for all sorts of "noisy" things that the average person doesn't have a problem with.

IRC is also terrible for conversations.

IRC is fine for conversations, though it's a different model of conversation than many mediums. All comments from different threads of conversation are intermixed, and you must separate them out mentally.

This is very different from threaded models, but it's something that can be adapted to easily enough, same as how most people can talk within a group in a noisy bar, where there are multiple surrounding intelligible conversations. Like in a bar, it's easy to jump into another adjacent conversation spontaneously.

More important IRC don’t enable to browse history as far as I known.

Meanwhile tweet can persist enabling asynchronous conversation, so it’s more like a very lightweight forum than IRC.

Edit: But the tree structure for reply is actually more similar to a HN thread with a less visible structure.

It isn't but solely because IRC channels are of a reasonable size, and have some form of moderation.

If you wanted to chat in a channel with 1000s of people (like twitter), the IRC model would be untenable.

I'd separate use cases. If you want to talk to/about yourself or if you just want to rant at somebody, post memes, etc then Twitter is easy and natural to use. If you want to have meaningful nuanced conversation, Twitter is useless. So you end up with a dichotomy where for some people Twitter is a fine fit and for others it's completely unusable. Both are correct.

I'm actually a Twitter user, and I think this is a very jaundiced opinion. I have a lot of different interests and following people on Twitter is a very good grapevine system. Math twitter is a good place, for example. A lot of people are very enthusiastic about how it has enriched their mathematical diet. There are many good people on Twitter who use it for serious sharing of ideas in other fields as well.

In general, it's a good way for people to share thoughts and links to a diverse audience. Liking Twitter isn't a sign of foolishness. Among the social networks, it's not as gross and corporate as FB, or as superficial as Instagram.

Your dismissal of the reasons why people might like Twitter, the implicit claim that it's useless for sophisticated people like yourself, and the apparent desire to impose black and white dichotomies on the world risks making you into a candidate for the category of "just wanting to rant at somebody".

We know that HN has its own serious cultural problems, after all.

> I basically can't understand a thread on Twitter

I built a Twitter client just for that, because I find Twitter threads hard to read (https://threader.app).

It turns threads into a single page so it’s easier to read, like an article. We are also working on a way to compile conversations with multiple users: https://threader.app/conversation/1123033196642201600/vpw88S...

Twitter, reddit, slack and others are meant for constant asynchronous engagement, mostly by schoolkids, and not random access or long-lived discussion. Coming from the message board world, the difference in the attention spans involved is pretty frustrating.

And 9gag. Strong market for short attention spans.

This is why I use https://threadreaderapp.com on tweetstorms. Kinda silly, but it's the only way to properly read threads, as even Twitter itself seems to mess up the ordering.

I've never understood the appeal of Twitter. Today I read Spacex and Musk talking about Starlink on twitter and I could not fathom who was talking to who, it seems like abunch of random statements with tons of animated gifs and stupid jokes. How does anyone navigate that mess? People say such stupid things. And spend so much time writing it out and finding a gif and ... for what? It's just noise. What motivates them? When do they find the time? What are they hoping to achieve? That Elon Musk replies with a lol. Couldn't Twitter just look at your last 40 posts and if no one has interacted with you then it just deletes your account. Sorry buddy, no one cares.

I had the same problem with Twitter too. The posts and replies seemed random and without any structure and I didn't really get it. But after I spent a few weeks using it, it started making sense and I would browse posts and replies without too much effort.

I think it just takes a while for new people to get Twitter. Probably most people don't even know why Twitter is confusing initially because they are so used to it.

> I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all.

Chaos is a Ladder [0]

[0] https://www.thenarcissisticpersonality.com/narcissistic-chao...