a reply is a way of saying "now that you've read THAT, read THIS" a QT is a way of saying "now that you've read THIS, read THAT" (From my current musings on the kinds of relationships tweets can have. Importantly, in both cases, the "that" tweet is the older one.)
Replies vs quote tweets as directional links between tweets
8 tweets · July 2019 · 20 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter
Note that this works the way it does due to the current main limitation of QTs, which is that you can't tell by looking at a tweet that it has been quoted somewhere. Otherwise QT would also have the reply property.
This is bringing up a metaphor of linked lists & pointers from CS data structures. Replies are technically a doubly-linked list, but QTs are currently basically singly linked (Have to perform a search operation to go backwards)
Context: starting to work on this question I tweeted about yesterday on the relationships between tweets.
Where I got started was reading this 2011 @kevin2kelly article on What Books Will Become that @procrastiwork linked me over here, which prompted musing about the question "What is prose?" twitter.com/procrastiwork/…
I'm noticing I get very different answers to "what is a tweet/reply/QT/blog/book?" when I think as a writer vs a reader vs a commenter.
Tagging @visakanv, @conaw, @posobin, @prigoose, @aaronzlewis, @myk, @gmws82. Noticing that—relevantly—I am tagging you way down here, but you will want to go back up to the first tweet in this thread. Which I would love to embed here as I compose, but ofc it doesn't exist yet!
And of course the big-picture context for this thread is my continuing exploration of my #TwitterReplacement concept: