The thing you're missing is that each of the tweets in a thread has its own set of replies & quote tweets, some of which may themselves be threads. [1] This is why I like to think of Twitter as a fractal annotation platform: it allows people to write commentary on specific portions of other people's commentary. Twitter's innovation is that it forces the writer to divide their text into annotatable segments before publishing it.
I think it's great that we're coming up with better tools to facilitate the process of writing modular text. Hopefully these tools will make it clearer to writers what Twitter threads are for and reduce the prevalence of behaviors like splitting sentences across tweets.
[1] Unfortunately Twitter's thread-composing UI isn't available when writing a reply to someone else's tweet. It would be nice if they fixed this. (Perhaps the reasoning is that a multi-tweet reply would work better as a quote tweet. I still think it would be nice to have the thread UI available for every tweet, regardless of the context.)
I think it's great that we're coming up with better tools to facilitate the process of writing modular text. Hopefully these tools will make it clearer to writers what Twitter threads are for and reduce the prevalence of behaviors like splitting sentences across tweets.
[1] Unfortunately Twitter's thread-composing UI isn't available when writing a reply to someone else's tweet. It would be nice if they fixed this. (Perhaps the reasoning is that a multi-tweet reply would work better as a quote tweet. I still think it would be nice to have the thread UI available for every tweet, regardless of the context.)