[BuildTheRobots]

The obvious difference is that it's impossible to explain any complex or in depth information using 280 characters or less. Trying to follow a thread of tweets (without using a 3rd party site) is painful. Heck, this throwaway response barely fits.

[ipaddr]

Many times there are a series of tweets. It's as easy to view it is as easy as scrolling down no third party tools required

[btown]

Yea, Twitter has vastly improved its UX here over the years. Thread unrolling isn't really necessary any more.

Twitter is actually an incredible feed if you meticulously scope your feed or lists to industry folks, people doing advocacy for various marginalized groups, and individual journalists (not their news outlets, whose editors add the clickbait). If you do this, Twitter becomes a place where people proudly try to summarize their own intensive research and journalism into 280 characters, and thus present varied insights at extremely high density. Every tweet tends to link the long-form work itself, as well as a thread, by them, that is essentially an abstract for their long-form work. And professionals who want to post off-brand content will often times open up a second account for trivialities, which you can choose not to follow.

To put it another way: If you wanted to capture the zeitgeist of, say, a machine learning conference, and made a user interface to let people summarize their work, speak excitedly about it, be able to present multiple levels of depth (single-sentence, abstract, images, full paper), and throw in the occasional meme whose comment section is actually an insightful take on challenges people are facing... odds are your interface would look very similar to Twitter as it currently exists. The difference, as always, is the content.

[ufo]

If only it were that easy. Twitter displays a complex mix of follow up tweets and replies from other people, so the follow up can be burried and hard to find. It also may require clicking to load more tweets and there is little indication when there is important information in the replies. There is no way to know if scrolling through the replies will be a worthwhile use of time, or just have useless twitter noise.

This very comment thread is evidence of this. Look at all the people who didn't know that there were infringing binaries, because that is only mentioned in a reply by an obs dev in another tweet.