Malcolm Ocean's roamblog

Quote Tweet

created 2021-10-31 · edited 2021-10-31 · open in Roam

No content on this page itself — see linked references below.

1 linked reference

Open Letter to Twitter re Conversational Design

Game-changers on the tweet level
  • Multi Quote Tweets
    • First, I want to express profound appreciation for:
      • the existence of QTs as a feature at all
      • the creation of the QT button
      • the ability to view QTs of a given tweet—one of the top requests I had a couple years ago!
    • Visakan Veerasamy, one of the people at the very forefront of what's possible with this platform, expressed in 2019 that quote tweets are a killer feature and needed more prominance—which, impressively, Twitter recognized!
    • > Quote-tweeting is the ultimate value proposition of the internet.

      To be able to mark up every concept, every saying, every image—with endless levels of commentary and meta-commentary...

      Is the great Talmudic dream.
    • As a person whose constant conversational refrain is "oh, that reminds me of..." I find it so cool to use a medium where I can share a quote, while offering someone the ability to go explore the original context.
      • this doesn't seem like the best way to point at this
    • Currently there are 2 modes of QT:
      • 1. When you push the QT button you get a full 280-characters and the tweet you're quoting is previewed.
      • 2. When you paste a tweet into the body of a tweet, it just shows as a renders as a QT but it takes up characters in the meantime.
    • (Links to other websites are currently somewhere in between, where the link previews when you paste them but they still take up characters)
    • The obvious direction to go is for QT functionality to become more like the first kind, even when you're adding them mid-thread. This continues Twitter's long-time pattern of making leading-edge behaviors easy for everyone to do. When writing a long thread with a lot of QTs, it's easy to forget exactly which tweets you're quoting in each tweet.
    • On one level, the preview feature is more important than getting the full 280 characters, but removing QTs from the tweet length makes space for the possibility of something much more powerful: multiquote tweet
    • Each tweet is an atomic unit of thought—a digital utterance. That's not to say each tweet contains only one idea, but that each tweet is sort of self-contained. Context is important, but when someone likes or retweets or quotes a tweet, the whole tweet is what they are interacting with.
    • When someone makes a quote-tweet, they're essentially saying "I have some thoughts I'd like to share, that relate to the tweet here". This might be a critique of the quoted tweet/thread, or it might be using the quoted material as a sort of footnote of supportive evidence or further reading or ironic contrast. This meta-commentary is very powerful, whether it's used by someone reflected "I think what I really meant to say here was" or someone framing a thread they just read as an answer to a particular question they and their followers might care about.
    • Currently, however, it's impossible to QT two or more tweets at once. This means that in the natural ontology of Twitter, there is no way to properly compare or contrast or relate different thoughts. This contributes, I think, to the divergent quality of thinking on Twitter: the structure of the app prohibits expressing convergent thoughts. You can have a meta-thread that pulls a bunch of things together, but each tweet in that thread is still only referencing one other tweet. You can use screenshots, but then all context & interlinking & copy-pastability is destroyed.
    • The amount of utterances that need to connect two other utterances is huge. Thoughts shaped like:
      • X & Y are similar takes on the same thing by different people
      • X is a better articulation of Y
      • X is an earlier articulation of Y
      • X & Y contradict (especially noteworthy if they were tweeted by the same person 😅)
      • X & Y are aesthetically related
      • X implies Y
      • which is better, X or Y?
    • It's not 100% clear to me what the ideal composer for this would look like, but we can get some inspiration from how pasting in images produces first one image, then two side-by side, then 1 & 2, then a 2×2 grid. From my vantage point, double-QT, side by side, is an obvious win. It seems likely to me that up to 4 would be good, aside from the added challenge of designing an intuitive interface for it.
    • But here's an interface I think would be workable-enough, which I thought of in an hour. So it's surely doable.
      • you enter tweet urls in the composer
      • they aren't counted against the 280 characters
        • (this should be easy to do since urls already count as exactly 23 no matter how long, due to the t.co swap)
      • the tweets show up arranged in the same way the urls are arranged in the text
      • if you put 3 urls each on separate lines, you get
      • Or if you put 2 urls with no line breaks between them, they'd show up side-by-side in 2 columns
          • source
            • in which @visakanv points out @Twitter's killer features (idk if Twitter saw it but the left one has since half-happened! QTs now separated from RTs & show backlinks but still hard to find in notifications)
      • (the only issue with this is that usually the urls are so long that they wrap around to the next line even if they're technically only separated by a space. I'm not sure how to solve that but I'm sure there's a way, or a similar syntax that would be about as good like putting a | between tweets you want side-by-side)
      • if you put 1 url then on the next line 2 urls, you get something like this:
      • I think there's a good case to be made for allowing quote tweets at the start of a tweet too. Sometimes your tweet is commentary on the other tweet but you want people to have a fresh experience of the other tweet before reading your commentary. And it's slightly awkward to write "read this quoted tweet below. okay, now that you've read it... does it also seem to you to be ABC?"
        • This UI described above could be naturally extensible for that purpose: just put the tweet url at the top of the tweet, and voila!
        • or if you just QT'd it directly:
      • And of course no reason you then couldn't have both:
        • make an example, maybe something like "if you like X, you'll love Y"
      • Other ideas:
        • 1 (2 / 3) would give tweet 1 on the left, then on the right tweet 2 over tweet 3 (similar to the display for 3 attached images). This is weird and arcane but it would be fairly easy to add to the above.
        • The ability to embed tweets in the middle of freeform text. Doing this in a preview-enabled way would be substantially harder beyond what I've proposed above, though doing it once the tweet is published could be pretty straightforward.
    • MultiQT
    • QT-search
      • Similar to the GIF-searcher, what if you could query tweets to reference, while composing. This isn't as necessary on a computer where it's easy enough to search in another tab, but it would still lower the friction on creating meta-threads or replying with a QT of a pre-existing tweet, which makes a difference to the power of the QT function.
      • It would be nice to have some quick buttons to filter searches to self, or people-you-follow, or liked tweets, or recent(ly-seen) tweets
      • Similar to how slack search has an autocomplete of potential people when you type from:, or there could even be a quick button to say "tweets from me" or to quickly select the top 2 people you quote from.
      • Examples in the wild: