Before the rise of Twitter's own official client, it really was an elegant way to handle the problem of having a minimal interface (i.e. no reply button). But yes, it was basically something you wouldn't "get" unless someone told you, or you used twitter enough to eventually notice that someone's direct-tweet did not make it into your overall timeline.

And the many screwups with direct-messages is pretty well known...

If that riles you up, look at how SMS legacy commands still cause issues: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/one-thing-you-definitely-c...

Aha, until I read about the SMS issue, I'd forgetten how incompetent Twitter was in the past. The whole 'scaling' debacle, etc.

I'm not certain that's fair. They grew by an order of magnitude every half year or so. That's very difficult to keep up with, especially when you have no idea how to turn all those signups into money.

I followed the entire thing and was trying to use the site, too... my impression is that there was an equal mixture of legitimate challenge met well, and incompetence/bad decisions.

Hey, Quora got slightly less obnoxious about blocking their content. Finally. Just a week or two ago, I followed a link to Quora and they were still doing the scummy old Experts Exchange trick of blurring out most of the answers.

I tried them two days ago and they were doing the same. Seems like a very recent change.

I just tried them now and got the blurred answers. Maybe you have a Quora account you're signed into?

haven't used quora enough to discern but it seems to be selective. sometime i get the roadblock, other times not

This is the exact reason Twitter needs to change or accept it will never have true long-term mass market appeal. It's UX is targeted at geeks and not for the average user. This was great for getting off the ground, but the fact that these things still exist is pretty sad. I'm not at all surprised their new CEO didn't get this. In fact it underlies the need for the to pivot even more.

I'm still confused. If I'm on someone's profile, the tweet box already includes @user. So if I go ahead and tweet in that box, it will not show up in my follower's feeds? It was not a "reply".

I would agree that's totally broken but live feeds aren't even usable past 10 or 20 followees anyway so maybe it doesn't matter that much?

Tweets preceded by "@user" appear only in the timelines of the sender, the user in question and people following that user.

Reyner's response is the correct answer.