How to unroll a Twitter thread
26Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/25/21152579/twitter-thread-easier-full-text-reading-unroll-how-to
Reported today in The Verge.
How to unroll a Twitter thread
The beauty of Twitter is that every message is constrained to 280 characters and under, but sometimes you simply can't get all your thoughts across in just a single tweet. Or perhaps you're following a live news story and you need to follow the thread to read the news as it develops so there's context for what happened earlier.
Whatever the reason, sometimes Twitter threads can get long, which can make them difficult to follow. Thankfully, there's a bot that can help piece those tweets together into one piece of text without all the extra replies from anyone other than the person who originally started the thread. This is called "unrolling" a thread, and it's created by a tool called @threadreaderapp, which lets you combine tweetstorms into one single post simply by using the keyword "unroll."
There are two ways to activate the bot.
Respond directly to the tweet
If you've ever started following a Twitter thread only to realize there are just way too many tweets, simply reply "@threadreaderapp unroll" to any tweet by the original poster. When the bot is done compiling the tweets, it will tweet you back with a link to a post that has pieced them all together in one place. This usually takes a few minutes.
You don't have to summon the bot on any particular tweet in the thread - just simply reply to one and the bot will sync up all the tweets that are linked to the very first one in the thread. Here's a sample with Dieter Bohn's thread about his nerdtastically eventful Christmas with Verizon.
Retweeting the thread
If you don't want to clog up a thread's replies with an unroll request, you can also retweet it onto your own timeline. Click the retweet icon, choose "Retweet with comment," and add the same "@threadrea