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Online, the value is quantifiable. The value of a person, an idea, a movement, a member or a tweet is often based on a count of actions: tastes, retweets, shares, subscribers, views, answers, applause and raids, among others.
Each is an individual action. Together, they take on an inordinate meaning. A YouTube video with 100,000 views seems more useful than a video out of 10, although the views – like almost all forms of online participation – can be easily purchased. It's a paradoxical love story. And it's far from an accident.
An increased commitment is good for business, and the impetus to check the score is an easy way to get users back. As Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said at the WIRED25 conference last year: "We currently have a big button I like who has the heart and we make people want to see the number increase "and to have more followers.
But these tactics are attracting more and more attention, about their impact on the health of the Internet and on society in general. Publicly measurable indicators, such as opinions, retweets or others, are "one of the drivers of radicalization," says Whitney Phillips, a media manipulation researcher and associate professor at Syracuse University. It works both ways, she says. A user can be radicalized by consuming content, and a creator can be radicalized by users' reactions to their content as they adapt their behavior to what most interests their audience.
These concerns are driving some companies to explore ways to promote "conversational health". Over the past year, Facebook, Instagram (owned by Facebook), Twitter and YouTube have decided to mitigate or eliminate key indicators to promote health. user engagement. The trend has given rise to a word that you will not find in dictionaries: demetrization.
Yet, some of the users they were supposed to help, who view metrics as an essential part of their experience, decried the changes. This leaves the platforms in the delicate position of detoxification of the users of an addiction that they had initially introduced.
Over the past year, even rumors of demolition have plunged users into panic. When Dorsey responded to his comments about "I love" wondering if the button itself should exist, people turned away. User panic reaches its climax a few days later, after a Telegraph The report mentioned a meeting at which Dorsey would have questioned the usefulness of the "I love" button and said that it could disappear "soon". Users have flocked to Twitter to denounce the decision. Dozens of tweets criticizing the idea quickly became viral – without Twitter saying anything about the fate of this feature.
The same thing happened in March, after users got wind of a test in the twttr application of Twitter's semi-public prototype application, called "little t" internally, which masked some one and retweeted. The change was intended to encourage users to focus on the content of tweets rather than those that were most popular.
The metrics were visible to the "little users" who had typed on the tweet, and the update had not been pushed to the official Twitter app. But the first reports on the feature sent users in a tizzy. The indignation over the possible change was so fast that Twitter issued a statement that it was just a test.
In recent months, Twitter has continued to test functionality among "small users," with mixed results. The experiment has resulted in a reduction in overall commitment, confirmed a spokesman, which bodes ill of his chances of being pushed to the main application of Twitter.
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