There are excellent conversations carried out by Twitter. They can also act as comments to the linked content. Sometimes you get more from a 20 word comment than from a full article.

That's true, but I feel Twitter isn't really structured to handle the flow of conversations well. I've seen good conversations on Youtube, as well, but like Twitter that seems to happen in spite of the restrictions of the platform, not because of it.

Also, the quality of Twitter comments doesn't seem to translate to HN, so much as the quality of the posts. Which, when those posts are emotive and lack sufficient context, tends to lead to poor threads here. And most of the rest of what's posted from Twitter seems to be HR and press releases, which are kind of uninteresting.

I hear this complaint often and still don't understand it. Twitter has had threaded conversations for a while now and they flow just as easily as HN comments.

Counterpoint: I can easily understand the treading on HN. Whenever I see a threaded conversation on twitter, I cannot tell what is a response to what. I'm not sure if threaded is even the right word, but you used it first.

For instance: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/49800848655150694...

There are a ton of replies to things, but I can't tell where anything fits logically.

Basically you're looking at a flattened tree. Anytime you see the lines, those are part of the same conversation sequentially. Once the lines stop, that's a new conversation.

http://i.imgur.com/02mm3YW.png

And an ASCII version:

    Tweet
    -----
    1.0 Reply to tweet
    |
    1.1 Reply to 1.0
    |
    1.2 Reply to 1.1
    ----
    2.0 Reply to tweet
    |
    2.1 Reply to 2.0
    |
    2.2 Reply to 2.1
    ---
    3.0 Reply to tweet

So where does a reply to 1.1 go?

Right where 1.2 is. If you wanted to see the direct responses to that, you'd click on that tweet, and then be looking at a new subthread. It's all predicated on whose message the reply-er clicked the reply button on.

    First Tweet
      Reply 1
      Reply 2 <-- click


    Reply 1
      Reply 1.1
      Reply 1.2

You only see the first two levels of the main tweet you're looking at. The first tweet, its replies, and the immediate children of those replies. Some indenting would make this a lot more intuitive.

That is basically my complaint then. I have 1920 horizontal pixels available, but for some reason twitter is intent on only using a small fraction of that.

For an outsider Twitter looks like a UI hell. I can't figure it out in any 5 minute long attempt when I happen to open a twit. And I don't see a real incentive to spend more time digging through that messy UI, when there is a FB, RSS aggregators, HN, etc. Tons of distraction feeds in use already and forums too. Frankly it is a mystery for me how Twitter is still popular.

> I also think Twitter posts should be banned from HN for the same reasons (anything of value will be linked in a tweet, the tweet itself is bound to be void of quality.)

Much like how 140 characters usually isn't enough to capture ideas properly, I think there are a lot of exceptions to this that you haven't considered:

- discussion topics, a la #DevDiscuss

- real-time news, e.g. when AWS goes down

- off-hand thoughts/responses, e.g. when @antirez asks for Redis dev ideas

- announcements that don't get press releases, e.g. when Chris Lattner left Tesla

Fair enough. I feel like we don't need a new thread whenever AWS, Github or whatever goes down, though.