I had to laugh, as an old guy with a sense of social media history, at this report from LinkedIn on how Twitter wants to change its usage model:
Jack Dorsey wants to shift Twitter from its model of following specific people to one where users would follow topics, in order to improve the quality of conversations on the platform. “That is a huge fundamental shift to bias the entire network away from an accounts bias to a topic and interest bias,” he told the audience at TED 2019 in Vancouver.
The Twitter CEO admitted the platform incentivizes the wrong kind of behavior, consequences he had not imagined when building the platform thirteen years ago. “In the past, it’s incentivized outrage. It’s incentivized a lot of mob behavior. It’s incentivized a lot of group harassment,” he acknowledged. “If I designed the service again, I wouldn’t emphasize the follow count as much. I wouldn’t emphasize the like count as much. I don’t think I would even create likes.”
Sheesh. Just like the old Internet forums, pre-Web, the name of which I sadly cannot remember. Or, off the Internet completely, a number of different species of BBS software, such as the Citadel software I was involved in[1].
An optimist would say Twitter is evolving from a backward form of communications to a proven form; a pessimist would ask, Why should I use the Twitter I love after it mutates into something else? My exposure to Twitter has been limited to following links and, sometimes, providing a link to a Tweet. My experience is that the thoughts of Twitter authors, even in “Tweet storms”, are fragmentary and more useful for pointing at more developed sources, than for themselves.
But the popularity of Twitter marks me as simply someone unsuited for the experience; many people no doubt love it. And so, for them, will this change to what I hazard to be the very heart of Twitter be such a turnoff that Twitter will become another failed social media experiment? If they change, will they become an object lesson to everyone else about changing the primary hook of your social media offering?
Could this be the death of Twitter as it loses its uniqueness?
