Twitter is such a horrible way to convey information with all these small snippets of text and no sensible way to get more context.
All I understood is that he "refuse[s] to do it with her and also without her" which is just confusing.
All I understood is that he "refuse[s] to do it with her and also without her" which is just confusing.
I wouldn't say horrible, just different. It's a list of small texts, but they're consecutive so you only need to scroll down.
When you open a tweet, it shows its direct replies below, prioritizing the author's own replies so it forms a coherent string.
Each reply can have its own replies, but you don't have to read those subthreads. Think of it as HN with all first-level comments collapsed by default.
Instead, you're shown more tweets Twitter chooses for you, except this time unrelated ones, such that I recently followed a link to a Brendan Eich tweet about JavaScript and ended up being shepherded to the latest and greatest anti-vax thought leaders, in keeping with his current political leanings: https://imgur.com/a/755aOwI
I'm not going to make any grand claims about it being 'toxic' or 'destroying democracy', or how it ought to be banned, or about tHe AlGOrIthMs, or any of that. I'm just going to say that it's an extraordinarily, exasperatingly stilted way of structuring a conversation. And I'm mystified by that, given the size and success of Twitter, and the relative ease of just showing you the straight conversation like HN does. Hell, if they did that, I wouldn't even care about the character limit.</rant>
Imagine if HN had hundreds/thousands of first-level comments. Upvoting/downvoting alone wouldn't be enough to weed them or showcase the best of them.