Learn how to unroll a protracted Twitter thread for simpler studying

The nice thing about Twitter is that every message is limited to 280 characters or less. However, sometimes you simply cannot convey all of your thoughts in a single tweet. Or you are following a live message and need to follow the thread to read the messages as they evolve so that there is context for what happened earlier.

Whatever the reason, sometimes Twitter threads can get long, making it difficult to follow. Fortunately, there is a bot that allows you to merge these tweets into text without the additional responses of anyone other than the person who originally started the thread. This is called "unrolling" a thread and is created using a tool called "@threadreaderapp" that allows you to combine Tweetstorms with the keyword "unrolling" into a single post.

There are two ways to activate the bot.

If you've ever followed a Twitter thread just to find that there are simply too many tweets, just reply to every tweet of the original poster with "@threadreaderapp unroll". When the bot finishes compiling the tweets, you'll be tweeted back with a link to a post that put them all together in one place. This usually takes a few minutes.

You don't have to call the bot to a specific tweet in the thread – just reply to one and the bot will synchronize all tweets that are linked to the very first one in the thread. Here's an example with Dieter Bohn's thread about his nerdy, eventful Christmas with Verizon.

If you don't want to clog a thread's responses with a roll request, you can retweet them on your own timeline. Click on the retweet icon, select "Retweet with comment" and add the same command "@threadreaderapp unroll" to get the bot up and running.

The bot will answer you directly and only after the roll is complete. This way, you won't accidentally respond to the original tweeter in the middle of a thread that is running, or disturb the conversation that people may be having. This is also particularly useful if someone has already asked to unwind the thread, but you haven't seen it.

If you find that the thread is being updated after you have been asked to complete the tweet, go to the end of the thread post that was completed and click "Force Update". The bot recompiles the thread and introduces any new tweet that may have been published after the roll request was requested.

If, while scrolling, you decide that there is a specific tweet you are replying to, retweeting, or liking, simply hover over the text of that tweet and click on it. This will return you to the original tweet, where you can do whatever you want.

The bot is a free service, so there are of course limits to what it can and cannot do. If someone has blocked @threadreaderapp, is a private user, or suddenly their account is blocked, the bot may not be able to access tweets to get involved in a single post.

The bot can only access the last 3,200 tweets per user. So if the original tweeter is really in motion, you may not be able to compile all of the tweets.

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