I was just thinking a silly thought about an escape from Twitter client for Twitter addicts, that looks like Twitter, but it sends your pseudo-tweets out to numerous forums of your choosing, and it shows posts from those forums similar to how Twitter shows blogs posts, but has a reply box available. Not a real idea, really, just a way of griping about Twitter, really.
When I try to write a reply to a tweet on Twitter.com in a desktop browser, Twitter hides the tweet I'm trying to reply to. Let's suppose you ask to list these numbers in order of preference: 215, 875, 214, 2159, 152, 857, and 421. When I click reply, your tweet becomes unreadable, and I have to try to remember that list of numbers and maintain it along with my resorted version. This is not a design that anyone wanting people to chat with each other could possibly make thinking it's a good system for chatting. This can only be the result of a decision to make chatting extremely difficult. It's not possible to do such a perfect job of making a terrible conversation system by accident.
People talking to each other doesn't pay their bills. A system that makes chat easy also makes harassment and threats easy. So, making a good chat system costs Twitter money without increasing it's income. Users and users talking to each other are baggage, it's only user's wallets that matter, either directly by buying things from within Twitter or by sharing ads or sharing tweets from paying accounts who ultimately want you to buy something.
One gets used to their not or very little monetized free chat system, and then the makers get tired of paying for it, and the users won't pay anything so long as there's any free alternative left, so it becomes an ad server, with users and their chat seen by the providers as a necessary evil.
When I post here, I don't feel like I'm at at party listening to other people talking and occasionally tossing in a few words of my own. When I'm on Twitter, or any similar system that shows frequent incoming posts, where it feels like there's as many people seeing your stuff as there are people whose stuff your see, it gives you the illusion you are having a shared experience with people.
I'm on a desktop, and whether I'm tweeting, writing a post, on Facebook, sitting at a computer is usually all I'm doing, other than perhaps eating. I'm not watching TV or a movie and tweeting. I might have over a hundred tabs open, but I'm only actually concerned with a few of them while tweeting, like reading something linked to in a tweet.
So some people are watching a movie, talking with someone in real life, sitting back on a couch with a smartphone, looking at Twitter every half hour during commercials, while I'm sitting at a desk focused solely at twitter.com. The illusion of a shared experience is truly an illusion.
Twitter's made using it to talk with other people, to have a coherent conversation, so difficult, so miserable, that while using it, I am diverted from thinking about what's going on in the world, what's happening in my life I want to share, how are the people I follow who I feel some connection with doing, to "What a terrible system for communicating this is."
#RIPTwitter
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