[aeternum]

Twitter is a great idea ruined by terrible UI. It's clear that people do want to listen to what famous people have to say, and they want to hear it directly from the person, not a PR team.

If only the UI let you do things like follow a thread, set up proper notifications, and made at least some attempt at filtering out the spammer/scam replies.

[wpietri]

Those all strike me as very much advanced-user features, so as much as I'd enjoy using some of them, I doubt they'd make much difference to general-audience growth.

And I think you're being unfair about the spam/scam replies. Twitter has made great improvement there in terms of downranking/hiding junk replies. It'll never be perfect, but it's at the very least much better than it was. I have to go a long way down in most threads I look at to see that stuff if it appears at all.