People want to prompt a sub discussion based on their response to your original post, and provide the original context of their remark.

Without an algorithm to do it well, seeing replies requires actually going back and revisiting a post to see comments, or seeing a flood of out-of-context comments. (At least on Damus)

Nostur does show comments alongside the OP, but sometimes the comments in the middle get lost… this is the sort of thing the big tech companies honed over the last decade that we don’t have when we start to rebuild

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But people do it when they are simply just replying to the OP. Like if I quoted your note with this same exact response instead of simply replying to you. I see that a lot, and it feels like they want attention, not a conversation.

Michael Malice does it all the time on Twitter, it’s annoying, I agree

Sounds like we agree it has a legit purpose but you’re saying it gets misused all the time, that makes sense

Yes 🤝 I once saw a back and forth on Twitter where the entire “thread” was a series of the two people quoting each other instead of replying directly. It was an interesting discussion, but that approach made it incredibly hard to follow along with. And it felt more like they were each more interested in “one upping” each other in front of their own followers than simply engaging in a good debate.