Twitter should kill the Retweet



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In addition, retweets, not tastes, is Twitter's most powerful reward method.

The quest to accumulate retweets regularly leads users to tweet wacky comments, extremist opinions, false news or worse. Many users have deliberately tweeted false and damaging information and opinions in order to become viral via retweets. Entire Twitter accounts have been built on this strategy. If Twitter really wants to control the uncontrollable reward mechanisms that it has created, the retweet button should be the first to disappear.

Retweets feed on the worst instincts of users. They mislead Twitter users into believing that they contribute to a thoughtful speech by continually amplifying the arguments of others – the numerical equivalent of shouting "yeah, what they said" to middle of a discussion. And since Twitter does not allow editing of tweets, information that becomes viral via retweets is also more likely to be false or exaggerated. According to an MIT study published in the journal Science, Twitter users retweet false news almost twice as much as real news. Other Twitter users, desperate for validation, endlessly retweet their own tweets, spamming subscribers with duplicate information.

Retweets were introduced, ironically, to make Twitter better. At the time, the co-founder of the company, Biz Stone declared "We hope that interesting, worthwhile, or even simply funny information will spread quickly in the network, allowing people who want or need to know to make themselves more efficient." Retweets were an early way for the company to ensure that the most interesting and engaging content bubbled through the stream and entertained users.

But for more than two and a half years, the company has shown users tweets based on an algorithmic accounting presenting exactly the most interesting and attractive content (part of this algorithm takes into account the behavior of the user like retweets). He also tested the possibility of suggesting tweets, recommending interest-based accounts, and creating Moments to generate tweets worthy of interest in news events. The retweet is not only dangerous, it is redundant.

It is therefore not surprising that users are also thirsty for a version of Twitter without retweet. A browser extension that removes retweets has been in vogue since 2013. In April, my colleague Alexis Madrigal explained how he uses a script to eliminate retweets from his calendar and how it improves his experience. "Retweets account for more than a quarter of all tweets, and when they disappeared, my feed was less shocked," he writes. "Fewer screen copies: Someone who says exactly the wrong thing.Less repetition of big, big news.Less than memes, I've seen them a hundred times." Less breathlessness And more than what people I thought were thinking, It's still not perfect, but it's much better. "

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