I like the design. I suspect, as @KyleTibbits, @eddie, and others have mentioned, this is meant to make Twitter more accessible to a broader group of people. Or perhaps in addition: making Twitter more useful/enjoyable to the larger number of "lurkers" who just like to read. I suspect that the upper 10% of users who generate the majority of content don't even use the web browser anyway, so it's a non-issue to them.
@machinehuman I also discover (1) content then (2) people. If an interesting tweet shows up in my timeline from someone I don't recognize, I explore their profile to see if I want to follow. Tweets w/o replies and some other changes here really help with that.
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Terrible horrible no good very bad ideas