Twitter thread ownership as a metaphor for who steers a conversation

As I continue musing on how I'd design a #TwitterReplacement, I noticed that something really messy happened with a thread of mine from a month ago. It started with this reply to @cosimia_

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Feb 27, 2019

@cosimia_ > difference between negative and positive motivation? Have thought lots about this. Seems there is, both inherently to any feedback system and specifics to human psychology implementation. It's adaptive for fear to overpower desire: those who don't flee don't survive.

Mar 23, 2019

I was on a roll—lots to say. Ask a question I've thought about a lot but not talked about and that's what you'll get! But it's really hard to follow my train of thought in this thread. Even for me, trying to track down my tweets in it is hard.

The reason is that Twitter's thread view prioritizes replies from the person who tweeted the very first tweet in a thread. This makes sense! It's why, even if many people reply to the first tweet in a tweetstorm—even before storm finished—the storm shows up as one block.

But in this case, because @cosimia_ was engaging a bunch with my tweets and *she* was the owner of this particular thread, there's no way at all to follow the train of thought that *I* was originally having.

It occurs to me that this is an interesting metaphor for what sometimes happens when someone in a conversation is given (or claims) a certain kind of high-status role. Even if someone else is talking, the attention always returns to what this person thinks or wants to know.

I've noticed myself take this role sometimes. My "mmm" & "ahh" & "oh?" that make a 2-person convo very engaged can make a group convo just about me and the speaker. I'm kinda steering their train, making it about my understanding & interest rather than about what's on their mind.

This isn't *bad*! Status & power aren't bad. Twitter's design is a simple prioritization system that works great for most use-cases. *And* you want to be aware of the impacts and be able to shift them when necessary.

And so that's a thing I'd add to my #TwitterReplacement: the ability to organize tweets more directly after the fact. To say "check out this thread but particularly this chain of it", for instance. (Also it would collect all notifications from a given thread and organize them)