@manton I'm going to post this on GitHub as well but just wanted to put it here in the context of the conversation. A couple of technical suggestions:

• An excerpt field (it could be called "summary" or whatever else) for longer posts. This could make such posts more attractive for replies when they appear in the timeline, and support for this field from externally hosted sites would also be needed.
• Conversation limits and/or threading. Long walls of text in conversaitons are just bad, at least for me. I find it difficult to see how people are encouraged to talk when; replies to other replies aren't obvious; some posts are the length of full blog posts and you cannot hide or shorten them; off-topic conversations also cannot be hidden or shortened or moved.

My assumption is that the mechanics are complicated for both of these things but I think a decent design can help conversation; for example, discovery on Twitter means absolutely nothing to me because the design of the whole thing, especially threading is just awful and only causes me to become confused and overwhelmed.