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Before Twitter was Twitter, it was twttr. And this week, as a nod to the name of his original project and to the first tweet of founder Jack Dorsey, the company announced the creation of another space, the twttr, a space reserved for prototypes allowing selected users to test new features. (You can apply here to become a beta tester.) Presumably, some of these features will eventually be integrated into the platform, while others will never see the light of day.
The first batch of twttr testing features, launched this Wednesday, makes long conversations more user-friendly by incorporating a different color-coding system and nested responses. In addition, as has become commonplace on the Internet, design elements are more rounded and responses to tweets look like chat bubbles, unlike the straight line that is currently reducing a stream to direct users to the next tweet of the conversation. Twitter (uh, twttr?) Can also choose to hide some answer tweets to highlight only the relevant parts of the conversation.
The most notable update of this test alters the immediate visibility of Twitter engagement. In the prototype, faves, replies and retweets are hidden; users must click a tweet to access options to interact with it. Indeed, this new feature would prevent users from scrolling without thinking and touching Twitter. (Which may not be such a big loss.) But more importantly, it would mean that the "report" does not appear immediately when viewing a tweet in your feed. .
The ratio, as we know for a few years, is the way Twitterverse judges a tweet. Back in March 2017, a user reported a very ridiculous tweet Jason Chaffetz, who was then chairman of the House Monitoring and Reform Committee, had refused to investigate President Donald Trump's alleged conflicts of interest. Chaffetz's tweet collected 108 "likes", 23 retweets … and 701 responses. The disproportionate number of responses to preferences and retweets immediately signaled public opinion to the tweet. Or, like @ 85mf, the user who originally reported it, said, "This is the ratio of someone who got fooled.
Soon, There was Twitter accounts is dedicated to identifying and surfacing tweets with bad ratios – and "ratioed" itself has become recognized by many as a verb. (Merriam-Webster presented the word "proportionate" in the "Words we look at" column.) DeadspinDavid Roth discovered that he could align the ratio with baseball statistics, and the Data Science organization, which specializes in political data, created a ratio indicator for senators' tweets. Everyone has fun with the ratio, with the obvious exception of those who are compared.
This is because the report is delightfully simple, a quick and quantifiable way to visualize the victory – or, most often, to celebrate the absolute failure of someone. Much of Twitter's use is based on schadenfreude, and the discovery of the report was an extension. The twttr prototype will hide the ratio and may have the effect of minimizing the importance of tweets statistics. (Maybe the new direction of Twitter has something to do with a recent conversation between Dorsey and Kanye West, in which the rapper complained that these figures can have "an intense negative impact on our self-esteem ".)
Of course, these changes are not definitive; the beta test is simply a preview of what might happen – and even if the changes are made, the ratio is not eliminated, it is simply hidden. But it makes sense that Twitter wants to distract from statistics that primarily serve to identify people who have failed so spectacularly to use the platform that a glance at their tweet immediately shows how stupid they are, bad or cruel. The ratio looks forward to negativity, and that kind of rejoicing is what Twitter is desperately trying to limit.
But maybe they should first get rid of the Nazis.
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