🧵🧵Meta-thread For over a year I've been thinking & modelling about "what would twitter be like if it were actually optimized for conversation?" Mostly I've been tagging my thoughts #TwitterReplacement but haven't been collecting them anywhere. (A lot is still in workflowy too)
Design notes for a conversation-optimized Twitter replacement
17 tweets · July 2019 · 79 likes · 9 retweets · read on Twitter
Here were some early #TwitterReplacement/#ConversationalTwitter thoughts about being able to interact with tweet-tree-structure, nonlinearly, including replying. I realized I'd put money towards something that solved this, and said as much.
This thread is me thinking out loud about densely networked twitter threads, and the emotional experience of being *lost* on twitter being analogous to chaotic malls optimized for impulse buys.
What does twitter need? One thing is something that right now they're in the process of rolling out, which is better support for Quote Tweets (QTs) No idea if this was influenced by me & @visakanv & @micahtredding & others tweeting loudly about it. 🧵👇
QTs are such a powerful feature. They need: - their own notifications tab - visibility: so you can see when someone has QT'd the tweet you're viewing - better systems for composing QTs (more like "RT with comment" UI, where it previews link) - &+ Context.
Twitter is currently very divergent: you can't bring 2 tweets together by replying to both or by QTing both at once. That's a HUGE limitation to what kinds of thoughts we can represent here. Ends up as screenshots—cumbersome & loses context.
@garybasin asked me about how to get network effects on a twitter replacement, and I figured it'd be best to start with a plugin. Various folks (@metamitya, @nosilverv, &+) are working on this. Reply to this tweet with links to others!
We've got an emoji-picker and gif-search for tweeting. Why not also a tweet-to-quote-search? This would be especially valuable for mobile.
Oh! And way more conversational notifications. Smoosh together all notifications from a given thread. Don't want ability to mark unread because then it's an inbox aka a todo list aka work aka 😒 But better overviews of what convos are happening, 🔥💯🤩
Negative feedback loops. @robinsloan illustrates this beautifully with platforms.fyi—there's no inherent reason why something going viral needs to get huge fast. Could be a mix of automatic dampening plus a button to disable RTs on your tweet.
Some sort of retract/reconsider button. This is tough, but clearly something like this needs to exist. Somewhat concerned that outrage mobs would start demanding retraction, but that's not really worse than now, and prevents spreading outdated stuff. twitter.com/groundedSAGE/s…
What else does Twitter need? Last idea for tonight: maybe editable threads? (Though NOT editable tweets) This is also tough, for related reasons, but here's a case for it:
Ok 1 more: two types of tweets... By default they aren't editable, but you could specify certain tweets that can be updated later, which would look different so it's clear. Synergizes with QTs: can update event details, a forecast, top answer to Q, etc.
Thread about censorship, free speech, and challenges of creating moderation that is symmetric wrt partisanship but assymetric wrt favoring generative discourse over destructive engagement.
Thread that talks about how quote-tweets are like asexual reproduction and *multi*-quote-tweets would be like sexual reproduction (in the sense of mating two memes together)
(oh wait actually no, single QTs are like horizontal gene transfer and multiQTs start getting sexy. or maybe that'd be multiReply, which is kind of a bonkers idea)
Great thread on a ton of ways to improve block management on Twitter: twitter.com/AnaMardoll/sta…