If you’re a Twitter addict you’ve probably noticed that it’s become harder to read the responses people leave on your tweets. Half the tweets people send to you simply do not appear in the replies on your individual tweets—the only way to see them is by checking your “mentions timeline.
Obviously, this makes it difficult to carry a conversation. You can’t follow threads of discussion when so many replies are missing. If you log out or view the thread in Chrome’s incognito mode, you’ll see them—but replying to them can be just as much of a hassle—and tweets you’re replying to will appear unavailable to everyone else.
This happens even when you have every one of Twitter’s new blocking and muting functions disabled. Twitter filters out replies whether you like it or not.
This has the effect of allowing only influential accounts with large reaches to thrive—while others are walled off from interacting with each other.
It’s a source of many complaints, but Twitter has yet to address the obvious issue, and seems to be more keen on releasing new features to convert the once-open platform into a “safe space” on the Internet. Twitter has been mum on the topic, leading many to conclude that they don’t intend to fix it.
We’ve seen the decline of other social media websites as developers prioritized poorly conceived algorithms to moderate and shape their communities in ways nobody asked for. Digg, a site that once drove most of the Internet’s news traffic and trending topics, died when it implemented an algorithm that penalized its power users.
Like Digg to Reddit, MySpace to Facebook, and Snapchat to Instagram, users have been quick to abandon ship when they felt they were not listened to. In general users like to feel appreciated for the time they spend on the platforms they invest in.
Perhaps it’s time Twitter stopped leaving all the community management to its CEO Jack Dorsey, and hire a team of active users actually familiar with Twitter to give insight into the future of the social media network.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
