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Comment by ASalazarMX | Hacker News Reader

> Twitter is such a horrible way to convey information with all these small snippets of text and no sensible way to get more context

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.

View on HN

Then imagine if HN comments could only be 280 characters. And instead of seeing all the branches of the conversation tree, ordered by the vote count of the parent node, you instead saw a random subset of them, chosen on the basis of what Twitter thinks will optimise engagement for your specific account. Once you finish your assigned selection of replies, you're not able to see – hell, you're not even able to elect to be shown – the rest of the thread.

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>

Ah, to be fair, I only read the author's replies, and those are already shown first. The rest only if something catches my eye. Fortunately the bulk of replies are inane, and Twitter does a good job at weeding them.

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.

Ah, sorry I missed this. This is true in general, but I'd like to be able to control whether, and in what way, I 'load shed' comments. I also don't trust the design priorities of Twitter's logic which selects for me.

If you think criticizing covid vaccines makes someone "anti-vax" as a binary all-or-none, Pharma-all-good-versus-all-bad binary, then you're the one politicizing the issue. I know one of the three people in your Imgur screencap, and we're not on the same page politically. Good luck with that false binary!

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