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Comment by la_oveja | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if the author uses Twitter as much as I do, but I love RTs and Quotes, and serve a central point on what Twitter is, a sharing network of short messages.

Making people copy & paste is an 90's mindset. If you think too much noise is being published, ask the author or stop following him. Or make add him/her to a list so you can watch his/she's messages without RTs.

I want to know news, and I want them FAST. Twitter does an amazing job on this field, because when something is really important a lot of people are gonna share it. RTs are also is very important for Trending Topics!

imho not wanting RTs on Twitter is not fully understanding Twitter.

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I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting copy+pasting as an alternative to retweeting.

Funny enough, the word "retweet" used to refer doing exactly that. Twitter only added retweet functionality in 2009, before then the convention was to write "RT" followed by the handle and then paste the tweet.

As a trivia point, one of the tweets that got Quinn Norton fired from her NYT editorial gig was a manual retweet she did of a John Perry Barlow tweet that contained the n-word:

Her explanation: https://twitter.com/quinnnorton/status/963594118747361281

The original tweet: https://twitter.com/JPBarlow/status/3760544030

There was plenty else that Norton tweeted that was problematic (including another time that she used the n-word in a debate to rhetorically quip that "terrorist" was an equally stupid word), but I was struck at how easy it was to misread those pre-official-RT tweets as actual original tweets from the retweeter. And many of the people dragging Norton over that tweet may not have been around back in 2009.

This is in the third paragraph of the article.

I'd really like to see his proposal as something you can toggle when you navigate to someone's twitter profile, since when I do that I'm usually only interested in things they wrote themselves, not things they retweeted.

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