waxwing on Nostr: This is apropos of nothing really, but: do you remember that phrase "reply guy" that ...

This is apropos of nothing really, but: do you remember that phrase "reply guy" that was popular on twitter a while ago? The idea of that phrase as an insult is so revealing about the dynamic of that type of social media.

Going back 20 years, discussion on the internet was on fora like IRC (not much even then), usenet (already mostly died out by then), mailing lists, and especially, web forums (like bitcointalk). Everything had the commonality that there was just a linear flow of messages (chatrooms) or a linear flow of threads, with threads existing so you could keep track of a particular conversation; but in that conversation, time ordering was still preserved (except for the batshit insane people who came up with the idea of time-reversed conversations in fora, but they were not common thankfully).

The whole idea of *quote*-tweeting (or quote-noting here) is kind of dodgy from the point of view of polite social interaction. Even so, it's very tempting, for very reasonable reasons: conversations here on amethyst and perhaps on other clients, are quite, quite hard to read properly, and replies are somehow "lower status" - I think? - in terms of discoverability. On Twitter as far as I know (I stopped using it many years ago, but continued reading often), it became a big habit for people with more clout to "overwrite" a message from the less cloutful by quote-tweeting them to give their own version of the story. Using replies is I guess an indicator of lower social status ("reply guy").

If this ramble has a point, it's this: can our nostr clients make replies (a) readable in nested threads better and (b) have the same "status" somehow as quotes so that people don't gravitate to this mode of conversation?.