It’s Impossible to Follow a Conversation on Twitter

Without major fixes to the product, the platform will never be a place for complex discussions

Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Earlier this week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and the tech journalist Kara Swisher conducted a full 90-minute interview entirely on Twitter. The interview was meant to be an old-school “Twitter chat,” and users were instructed to follow along using the hashtag #KaraJack.

It was a disaster. Attempting to follow a public conversation happening on Twitter is “pretty much a mess right now,” Dorsey himself noted at a conference yesterday. The chat was so difficult to parse that Recode futilely attempted to collect Dorsey’s responses into a Twitter Moment. Meanwhile, other users begged the Thread Reader App bot to unroll the thread, to which it replied that it simply could not.

Part of the problem is that #KaraJack didn’t follow any of the standard norms for Twitter chats (essentially long, back-and-forth conversations that unfurl in @ replies on the network). When I worked as a social-media strategist eight years ago, at the height of Twitter chats’ popularity, I conducted more than 100 of them for brands. They were almost all bad, but they were made marginally better by a couple of important protocols. One is to number the questions and replies so that it’s…