Yeah, I don't get this at all. I think it's even deeper than designing for controversy. I'm "older" (40s), though I work on products used by younger people, so I don't think this is just me being old, but I can't follow a conversation on twitter at all. When there's a link from HackerNews to Twitter, I click on it and sometimes see the thing mentioned in the HN title, and sometimes don't. Then there's a bunch of stuff below it, some of which is definitely replies to the original post, and some of which appears to be part of a completely different conversation. Some threads of conversations get cut off for no apparent reason and you have to click something to see more of them. Nothing is indented, so it's really hard to tell who's replying to whom.
I basically can't understand a thread on Twitter, so I've never signed up because who the hell wants to be part of that? I usually also don't go to Twitter to read stuff other people link to because I'm not going to be able to follow it. Forget boosting controversial stuff, I bet a lot of users post the way they do because they also don't understand what they're looking at.
I don’t think Twitter understands threads on Twitter, and they never have. They built something over a decade ago, it took off for reasons they never fully could fathom, and they’ve been afraid ever since to futz with what for them has been a good thing.
Once upon a time, there was IRC for single-stream chats, and NNTP for threaded ones, and all was good. Twitter used to be one of the former, but then they noticed that users were using the "@name" convention to simulate replies, and started officially supporting it. Instead of a single conversation, or a tree of nested replies, they created some unholy thing partway between the two, that serves neither role well.
Twitter threads are a tree, but the representation in Twitter's web interface and mobile apps is linear and it's not obvious which tweets are in response to which. There are hints in the interface if you're aware of them, but it's easy to get lost.
I'm a similar age as you. I did create a Twitter account once, but never used it more than once or twice.
Unfortunately the Twitter username (handle?) I chose happened to be the same as the name of a somewhat well-known RnB/Hip Hop video producer (who I had no knowledge of before I created the account).
I signed in a year or two later and found that I had a couple of hundred follow requests from various aspiring and up-and-coming rap artists. At that point I realised in all honesty that I probably had no real use for Twitter.
I'm afraid the reality is probably that you just don't have the motivation to figure it out, for whatever reason. No mass-market product like Twitter could succeed if it was as confusing as you say it is.
There's also the fact that a subset of computer programmer types have low tolerance for all sorts of "noisy" things that the average person doesn't have a problem with.
I'd separate use cases. If you want to talk to/about yourself or if you just want to rant at somebody, post memes, etc then Twitter is easy and natural to use. If you want to have meaningful nuanced conversation, Twitter is useless. So you end up with a dichotomy where for some people Twitter is a fine fit and for others it's completely unusable. Both are correct.
I'm actually a Twitter user, and I think this is a very jaundiced opinion. I have a lot of different interests and following people on Twitter is a very good grapevine system. Math twitter is a good place, for example. A lot of people are very enthusiastic about how it has enriched their mathematical diet. There are many good people on Twitter who use it for serious sharing of ideas in other fields as well.
In general, it's a good way for people to share thoughts and links to a diverse audience. Liking Twitter isn't a sign of foolishness. Among the social networks, it's not as gross and corporate as FB, or as superficial as Instagram.
Your dismissal of the reasons why people might like Twitter, the implicit claim that it's useless for sophisticated people like yourself, and the apparent desire to impose black and white dichotomies on the world risks making you into a candidate for the category of "just wanting to rant at somebody".
We know that HN has its own serious cultural problems, after all.
IRC is fine for conversations, though it's a different model of conversation than many mediums. All comments from different threads of conversation are intermixed, and you must separate them out mentally.
This is very different from threaded models, but it's something that can be adapted to easily enough, same as how most people can talk within a group in a noisy bar, where there are multiple surrounding intelligible conversations. Like in a bar, it's easy to jump into another adjacent conversation spontaneously.
Twitter, reddit, slack and others are meant for constant asynchronous engagement, mostly by schoolkids, and not random access or long-lived discussion. Coming from the message board world, the difference in the attention spans involved is pretty frustrating.
This is why I use https://threadreaderapp.com on tweetstorms. Kinda silly, but it's the only way to properly read threads, as even Twitter itself seems to mess up the ordering.
I've never understood the appeal of Twitter. Today I read Spacex and Musk talking about Starlink on twitter and I could not fathom who was talking to who, it seems like abunch of random statements with tons of animated gifs and stupid jokes. How does anyone navigate that mess?
People say such stupid things. And spend so much time writing it out and finding a gif and ... for what? It's just noise. What motivates them? When do they find the time? What are they hoping to achieve? That Elon Musk replies with a lol.
Couldn't Twitter just look at your last 40 posts and if no one has interacted with you then it just deletes your account. Sorry buddy, no one cares.
I had the same problem with Twitter too. The posts and replies seemed random and without any structure and I didn't really get it. But after I spent a few weeks using it, it started making sense and I would browse posts and replies without too much effort.
I think it just takes a while for new people to get Twitter. Probably most people don't even know why Twitter is confusing initially because they are so used to it.
It's at the carrier level. I believe that at least some part of it is noticing that the calling number is a number that doesn't exist. For example AT&T might be given phone numbers 555-0000 through 555-1000, and they know they've only actually given out 555-0000 through 555-0782, but the caller ID claims the number is 555-0999. They can tell it's not a legitimate call because that number couldn't be making an outgoing call because it's not assigned.
I don't think that's all of it by any means, but there are a number of ways that the carriers can tell that some percentage of the calls are bogus without having to ask the receiver if they want to receive it.
I basically can't understand a thread on Twitter, so I've never signed up because who the hell wants to be part of that? I usually also don't go to Twitter to read stuff other people link to because I'm not going to be able to follow it. Forget boosting controversial stuff, I bet a lot of users post the way they do because they also don't understand what they're looking at.