[slightwinder]

> One of the things that has always confused me about twitter is that it seems to be offering a threaded conversation model, yet it tries to "flatten" the conversation and render things in a linear timeline.

They do not flatten it to a linear timeline, they "optimize" it by mixing in the important sub-threads. Generally they show only the first level of replies. and then they optimize it by also showing some replies to those replies, which can go down pretty deep. So basically they give the thread, but selectively hide the unimportant parts. I understand the reasoning here, as there popular tweets can gain many replies of which most are just noise. But the actual result is a clusterfuck of experience which only makes it worse.

And lately they even made it worse, because now they also show irrelevant tweets under the normal tweet-view, and it's hard to see where the original tweet ended.