Was thinking about this editable-threads-not-editable-tweets thing again today... And find myself thinking that if someone were building Twitter from scratch today, they might want to make Threads 🧵 be its own thing that's different from just a series of same-author replies.
Rethinking Twitter threads as editable, evolving units
13 tweets · April 2020 · 77 likes · 4 retweets · read on Twitter
Twitter has done this slightly in the UI: • when viewing, prioritizes all being shown in order, leaving replies til later • interface for composing a thread all at once • author gets "Add another tweet" btn at the bottom, which launches this thread composer not reply-composer
My thought today was inspired in part by playing around with @metamitya's app knovigator, which seems to sort of have this (it calls them quests, I think?)
This is part of a much deeper exploration I've had for some time which is like, what kind of relationship can two tweets have to each other? Currently it's basically: - reply - QT (quote-tweet) but there are many implicit things those official relationships can each mean!
Man. Okay, just thinking out loud here. What is the meaning of a reply? Moreso than anything else, whether thread or conversation, it represents the CONTEXT of a tweet. See something QT'd or RT'd? Click through to see its context. eg 👇 "which reason?"
My idea of individual tweets being non-editable but threads being editable would potentially kind of undermine this, unfortunately 🤔 But maybe it's something like, the old thread-structure isn't destroyed... just overlaid with a new by default? This is tough.
IDK. I feel like I'm onto something important here but I can't quite find it. Something like... okay, I created my roamblog so I could link to half-finished drafts, & what's great is that that same link will point at a finished draft once it's done. Can't do that with threads.
It seems to me like knovigator.com's Quest concept is kind of pointing at this, like, an ever-evolving exploration of a question. Where (as far as your exobrain is concerned) a given Quest represents your best answer to that question at a point in time.
Twitter could have this too. "Moments" wanted to be it but was were confused on a bunch of levels so it didn't work. @RoamResearch already has pages, but doesn't have the beauty of each utterance / thought-fragment being a static snapshot of the moment it was published.
(I mentioned this here talking about how Roam could evolve into a slack replacement.)
Also while we're on this topic, I need to make a plug for a "retract" button for a tweet. I can do a whole thread at some point about how I might design it, but for now check out this 💯 thread by @groundedSAGE on why we utterly need this 👇 twitter.com/groundedSAGE/s…
Aha, see right now I would love to pre-emptively link from here to a space where I would be designing the retract button for the tweet, but the only way to do that on twitter is to make an initial tweet that promises to become a full thread later, which is awkward.
I guess I'll make a page on my roamblog for it, where I can start collecting drafty thoughts. That's another amazing thing about Roam compared to Twitter... (Maybe my ideal version of Twitter would somehow have BOTH editable and non-editable tweets 🤯) roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo…