Visualising Twitter Conversations in 3D Space

The Twitter 'unnested-nested style' conversation continuously baffled me. It is confusing and harder to follow where the conversation go. Normally the headline or original poster should be on the top. But in retweeting, the person who is retweeting will be on the top and put the original below it which is strange and confusing.

The thing that gets me is that you (as someone writing your own client) can't reliably get all the replies to a tweet from Twitter's api. Twitter gives you a conversation_id property[1] on tweets that you can search for, but you can only search for it in recent (in the last week) tweets. Searching for older tweets in a conversation requires registering as an Academic Research Project[2]. I'm just some schmuck that wants to throw a script together to get a tree view of a thread that's big enough to be a pain to read in the web client (the main thread is long enough that replies to individual posts in the thread don't ever get loaded in).

Really curious to see how this tool does it.

[1] https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/conversati... [2] https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/tweets/cou...