Also consider when there's say four people tagged in a conversation, and then someone needs the extra characters to make their point and they remove one of the names, then that person loses the context too.

Also, conversations look different when you're looking at them from one of your lists, or if the people you are following are different than the people I follow.

So many clunky issues that you need to be on top of for it to make sense, and this is what's lost on the general person.