Retweeting is Killing Twitter, and More Histrionics
The utility of any service, I am thinking is directly proportional to the slope of the degree distribution of its network.
To explain:
When Twitter was first getting popular, it followed a power law in its degree distribution. A few people at the head, the rest distributed in an asymptotical curve downward, with fewer and fewer connections. In this type of power structure, retweeting made sense. It was a tool to progressively bubble discourse up the network to reach a wide distribution. A way of taking discourse out of a closed and small network, and open it up for seeding through the larger connectionist networks at will.
But as the power-law curve of connections on Twitter has now started flattening out, with more and more at the head, and more in the middle and a lot in the tail, retweeting is only serving to echo discourse that more and more people have already seen.
Today, nearly three quarters of the tweets I received were retweets. And most of those retweets I had already seen the original of. Just tonight, Facebook reverted their terms-of-service, and Mashable immediately tweeted it. Then four people on my follow list retweeted Mashable. Why? They have nothing to add, nothing to contextualize it, nothing to inform and nothing to say. They just say it.
I understand twitter is casual conversation, but it should be conversation. It should be people saying things, not resaying them. I understand the “collection” mentality that drives this. Here is something interesting: please also find it interesting. It’s the same culture that creates mix-tapes, makes DJ’ing such an amazing experience, makes us want to teach and inform people of things. But there are better ways of doing this.
It used to be people would curate links, provide meta-commentary and then drive quality content through that. Some people (Andy Baio, Jason Kottke) do this to great effect. But more and more, I’m seeing people that used to be noted for the quality of meta-discourse devolving into mirrors. And it’s mirrors upon mirrors.
Mirrors don’t add anything unless the quality of the glass is bad. And I’m afraid its becoming a veritable funhouse in Twitter land.
What I am most afraid of is what will happen during SXSW. I’m pretty much afraid to even look at Twitter:
@blah1: RT: @blah a party at Stubbs!
@blah3: RT: @blah1 RT: @blah a party at Stubbs!
@blah4: RT @blah3 @blah1 @blah a party at Stubbs!
I have a feeling while 2007 was Twitter’s coming out party at SXSW, 2009’s SXSW and the plague of retweeting is going to kill its utility for a lot of people. Me included.
Here are my suggestions then:
- Twitter – please add a retweet filter at the software layer, like how we choose notification methods
- Those that feel the need to retweet everything they find interesting, compile them instead into a twice-daily updated blog entry that you then tweet the URL to
- Anyone who has a retweet ratio greater than 50/50 people should unfollow. Or said people should setup a separate “retweet” account. Make it opt-in.
- People need to start being original again.
Rant over.
It definitely is an annoying trend. But wouldn’t you say that it’s just a more convenient way of sharing a link? The annoyance depends on how useful that link is.
So yeah, anyone who retweets a Mashable story is kinda silly. But someone who retweets someone sharing an obscure link that not many have seen is very useful.
The remove follower button is there for a reason!
I agree. I started mass-pruning my followees today – I’m sick of seeing garbage make it to my phone.
I have a simple philosophy – If I don’t want to see it on my phone, I stop following the user. If over half of their tweets are ‘worthless’, i unfollow them.
To me this is an unfair headline, Retweets aren’t killing Twitter, although they are clearly killing the author’s individual experience of twitter. The fact is that retweets are the way that most people discover new people to follow, which in fact helps grow Twitter, not kill it. Sure, Twitter has scalability issues, but so are there are also individual issues in just following more people.
End of day, you chose who you follow, and you chose which apps filter the content (Tweetdeck with Groups etc) …that’s what controls your experience.
Ethan, my response is meant to be rhetorical and not by any means an attack on you:
What better way to see which ideas or news items are really popular and which are not? Wouldn’t you like to know what things other people agree are good? Isn’t that part of “crowdsourcing,” which is gaining adoption?
How about understanding how quickly or broadly something passes through the twittersphere? You can have analytics for that, but that doesn’t necessarily alert you to “real time” occurrrences that may be worth watching.
Why the arbitrary 50/50 ratio? Why did you follow some of these people in the first place? Perhaps another useful tool (someday) would be filters based on some sort of criteria that better recommend who you should follow and who you should not.
Lastly, “People need to start being original again” is a pipe dream. Many people are followers and most don’t do much that could be considered “original. They find someone to follow and then emulate/promote them for their own validation. That’s why you see people wearing jerseys of their favorite football player. That’s why they put a Nascar decal on their vehicle with the number of their favorite driver. That’s why they retweet Scoble, Kawasaki, GaryVee, Chris Brogan, et. al. on Twitter. Some of the retweets have no value whatsoever to another follower or are redundant. But acknowledge that these followers are excited about being part of that ecosystem. There’s nothing wrong with that. You can always encourage them to “favorite” something rather than retweet it, but until people get tired of retweeting, the onus will be on you to unfollow them if you find no value in the relationship you have agreed to with them in the Twittersphere.
The most annoying thing about retweets is that there already is a built-in feature for flagging interest and amplifying others’ tweets—they’re called favorites.
The problem, though, is that favorites are only about 1/3 of the way to being retweets. Favorites need to be optionally spooled into a user’s tweet stream, with an option on the receiving end to ignore them.
FriendFeed does this, showing the “likes” from friends. I also “retweet” on FriendFeed by including the RSS feed of my Twitter favorites over there. Of course, that does a crapload of good since that’s on FriendFeed and the potential audience for them are on Twitter.
While it’s not a perfect solution by any means, I’ve started using Twhirl’s filter on the (happily very occasional) days when retweeting flares up in my timeline.
A simple “-RT” in the filter box seems to catch the overwhelming majority of the offending tweets.
Oh of course.
But Twitter is having to work so hard just keeping the fucking thing online, it’s forgetting to add such must-have *features*.
Up with favourites. That is all.
Let’s all calm down here before things get crazy. There is a simple solution: follow a wider variety of people. I notice that the geek cluster is pretty much saturated, with little new action going on.
It’s true! I agree!