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Comment by raquo | Hacker News Reader

What I don't like in twitter is how non-obvious and inconvenient it is.

E.g. the only way to communicate with someone without polluting your timeline (because who really cares what you @replied to someone) is DMing them, and even that is less convenient than even facebook messages. But no one uses DMs for most conversations so I have to go without following some awesome people just because they @reply massively and I have scroll fatigue already.

Another example – twitter's website has no new @mention notifications, and my SO accidentally discovered this feature when she downloaded Tweetie months after she started tweeting.

No wonder twitter's user retention rate sucks.

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But @replies don’t show up in your timeline unless you are following both sides of the exchange, right?

Does not seem right. See http://twitter.com/#!/shauninman for example

I see a lot of Shaun's tweets starting with @someuser, e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/shauninman/status/59266889741905920 http://twitter.com/#!/shauninman/status/59254473125666816 http://twitter.com/#!/shauninman/status/59237467353657344 http://twitter.com/#!/shauninman/status/58999188649807872 and I don't follow him or any of these guys

Yes, because it's his public timeline. But you will not see @replies from people you are not following in your timeline.

Um, thanks, I'll check that! Still, I think it's unintuitive. There's no way I could figure this out from twitter's UI, if only somehow by accident.

Where are you reading your tweets? @replies don't show up for me when using the official clients or when reading on the website.

Correct. And I've never found those exchanges disruptive. I also limit the number of people I follow. Possibly related. :)

If you send a mention to someone, no one will see it in the timeline except for the person who you addressed it to, and people who follow both you and that person (If that makes sense.) You're generally not going to annoy your followers by sending out @mentions.

There is a mentions section that lists all of your replies. And you can have any mentions text messaged to your phone.

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