Twitter is also stuck with itself

Twitter, on the other hand, when it doesn’t recognize and sanction new habits – not all of which are good for the community – is more often in a position to simply brake or play with a spinning button between “Less Twitter “and” More Twitter, “with” Twitter “defined not by Twitter itself, but by hundreds of millions of people who simply won’t log out for fear they lose their chance to see or see. be seen in the One True Feed.

Part of it depends on how Twitter works, at a basic level. “Twitter has preserved an architecture that allows the public to emerge around any issue, including how Twitter works,” said Prof Burgess, who works at the University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Center. from Queensland. “It’s hard for the company to institute major changes because there is this really active, mobilized user community,” especially, she said, “when practices or standards don’t seem to emerge. of users, and seem to just mimic the functionality of other platforms three years later.

In their book, Professors Burgess and Baym suggest that for nearly a decade now, Twitter has moved away from its “open innovation” paradigm – one where Twitter, impressed by its users, turns the button to “More Twitter ”- and in an advertising-driven environment, where“ user metrics need to be contained and monitored. ”If an openly top-down Twitter can’t work, in other words, the business can at least make sure that it is monetized.

Twitter, of course, can do whatever it wants. He is often humiliated by his collective users, but he often disappoints them too. (In some contexts, “more Twitter” equates to harassment.) It’s also a profitable business that makes billions of dollars out of this process; What Twitter users collectively insist on doing isn’t exactly an impressive mystery, it’s just surprisingly specific and, it turns out, extremely tacky.