Jack Dorsey’s interview on Twitter showed how confusing threading is

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It was supposed to be fun. 

It was supposed to be an “experiment.” 

Instead, it was a stinking mess.

Last week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey proposed that ReCode’s Kara Swisher interview him entirely over Twitter. The unlikely pair carried out the plan Tuesday.

Dorsey positioned the idea as a novel test of Twitter’s conversational features, which was odd to anyone who has ever held any sort of Q&A over Twitter. That’s, well, a lot of people. Why would the CEO need to test this out in so public a fashion?

But it turned out that Dorsey was right. The Q&A was an experiment, in that it proved a point: following a one-on-one conversation on Twitter is damn near impossible.

While the live tweet Q&A didn’t shed much new light on Twitter’s operations as a company, it did show that Twitter’s threading feature is in dire need of repair. 

There were problems from the very beginning. Swisher failed to thread her first tweets, which left people wondering where Jack’s response was.

Then, sub-threads kept getting created for some reason, where some replies would show up in a master thread, and others wouldn’t.

Another problem was that Swisher kept accidentally tagging people in her tweets, therefore adding them to the thread. Most notably, she added Mark Zuckerberg. And then, in an attempt to remedy things, she added her friend — who texted her to tell her the thread was a “chaotic hellpit.” 

Jack, tech maven that he is, took the experience as a ~learning opportunity~. This was proof for him that he needed Twitter to be… better at threading!

The conversation between Swisher and Dorsey continued, but all the talk about the incomprehensibility of the conversation dominated.

At CES in January, Twitter announced that it was testing features like status updates to promote conversation. The initiative is part of Twitter’s larger campaign to both define and promote “conversational health” on the platform. But the Twitter Q&A made Jack’s followers doubt whether this was possible at all.

Then again, perhaps the chaos of Twitter is what makes it, well, Twitter.

Swisher wrapped up the interview with the conclusion that “analog talking seems to be a better way of asking questions and giving answers.” Jack agreed — but he’s still up for a challenge. 

Experiment with that, Jack!