This is so hard to follow on twitter; I might recommend a blog post for this sort of thing.
When I click on the link, I get taken to a page on twitter.com that shows me a post, in normal linear order. It reads to me like ordinary English text, in the order you ordinarily read or write it in. The text is not interrupted, except by the little "replies / retweets / likes / share" bar that appears after every tweet.
Not to mention that on the desktop, the text is literally only quarter of the screen. Add that to the very frequent interrption bars, you are in for a very long scroll while reading
A quarter of the width? Well, naturally! The optimal line length for readability is somewhere in the 50-100 character range. This is one of those things that is actually backed by empirical research (lots of research... experiments in readability are cheap and easy to conduct, and people have been doing these experiments for a long time). The width of lines of text in tweets is on the shorter end of that range.
Hacker News, for example, is an example of a site with poor readability. The text is as wide as the window. To address this deficiency, I open Hacker News in a narrower window. It's still harder to read.
Not with CSS, their markup is impenetrable. You have to have another site scrape and reformat the content. Shameful.
Because it's highly that even if it's correct in aggregate, there will be outliers that the opposite is true, and they'll benefit from different formatting.
That is, even if it's right, it might still be wrong for them. So the question being asked is, why is it made so hard to change?
Like, you're talking about "what's right for them" as if that's supposed to pull my heartstrings, but the grandparent even literally said "I am going to re-phrase your question negatively", it's not like they're going to magically be convinced or actually argue about any readability metrics in any kind good faith, it's literally just a reflex. I wouldn't waste my time defending it on some egalitarian principles or whatever.
Only on a small screen. An HN `div.comment` has a `max-width: 1215px;` rule.
Also, replies to tweets within one of these multiple-tweet posts are hard to even get to, and I genuinely cannot figure out why Twitter used that design. It can’t help engagement.
Short of interspaced adverts or popovers, what could be done to make it worse?
It could have super-wide text, like Hacker News. That would make it worse. The line length is a fairly comfortable length, unlike Hacker News’s dizzying long lines.
It could have unusual scrolling behavior, like those Apple product announcements. That would make it worse.
You’ve mentioned the biggest thing that makes websites worse—interspaced adverts and popups, which are downright ubiquitous now. Nearly every site I visit has those.
Honestly, it seems very easy to read for me.