Read on Twitter
Why do some tweets begin with a period? After some research, the answer is actually pretty similar to using “.filename” to hide items in a computer directory. Fellow twitter noobs, prepare for a semi-in-depth explanation as to why you’ll see tweets that begin with a period.
In short (from my understanding), placing a period before a username at the beginning of a tweet is just a legacy habit for some users, that originated in the days past of Twitter, when we did not have the luxury of a dedicated “reply” mechanic.
Thus, in order to reply to someone in a thread, you would begin your tweet by typing their username, then typing out whatever. To save space taken up by otherwise irrelevant information, Twitter would hide all tweets beginning with a handle, unless they were addressed to you.
Users could circumvent this feature by just beginning the tweet with a period, which would then allow anyone to see their tweet in the thread. Now, let’s compare this phenomenon to directory listings in computer operating systems.
My history is not precise, but here goes. In the days of computing when hierarchical filesystems we’re becoming popular (i.e., not all the files were in one big collective directory/folder), there existed two items in every single (sub)directory.
These two items were called “.” and “..”, and referred to the current and the parent directories respectively. Anyone who knows how to use a command line interface surely knows that typing “cd ..” into any command interpreter will take you to the parent directory.
However, since these items were in every single directory and weren’t very interesting (i.e., took up screen space), developers needed a way to filter out these items from directory listings such as those obtained by running “ls” or “dir” on the command line.
The solution? Simple. Check whether the filename begins with a period. If it does, then don’t display it in the directory listing. However, this also meant that ANY file beginning with a period would be hidden from normal view.
This led to developers and users taking advantage of hidden directories and hidden files to store things like configuration files in a user’s home directory, since ls or dir wouldn’t display them by default.
The conclusion: beginning a tweet with a period, and beginning a filename with a period, are very similar concepts, even though they technically accomplish opposite tasks. However, one could argue that the “.” in filenames is equivalent to the “@“ in tweets.
Thank you for reading my informational blurb.
