The chart in all forms (there's more than one) shows each tweet as a node, and arrows showing which tweets are replies, and which tweets are "Quote-Tweets".
If A->B, then B is a reply to A.
In this particular version I've taken the longest thread and laid it out on the left, allowing the other descendants to flow to the right. Another layout is to have the initial tweet at the top and lay it out as a simple tree (technically DiGraph), but that often leaves the top left corner empty, leading people who initially open it to think it's empty and close it without scrolling. Yes, they do, that's happened before here on HN, including in this discussion.
Does that help? Are you still confused? It's just a chart showing tweets, quotes, and replies.
I have several tools that do this sort of thing, including a 'bot that can be invoked automatically on mastodon. I don't do that on Twitter because popular discussions get seriously out of hand ... there was one that I stopped tracing after if got to 3500 tweets. I have some heuristics in mind to help control that, but it's all still very experimental.
I also have a pig-ugly, pre-alpha, bug-ridden discussion system that works directly on a DiGraph, but when it was submitted to HN sometime ago reactions were ... (significant pause) ... mixed.
I think the main thread is on the left with the reply/qt sub-trees on the right. You can only read the first column. I quite like the layout, if there's only 1 main thread that i need to be aware of it's quite nice. This layout probably won't work if there's more than 2 people in a conversation.
The layout is actually not that much dissimilar from what twitter already has, just more info from non-main threads and better visibility for orphan leafs.
