The prospect of a Twitter timeline determined not by date but by some arbitrary algorithm has me questioning my devotion to the now decade-old platform.
And I'm not the only one.
In an exquisite piece of irony, the current top Twitter trend is #RIPTwitter, a hashtag devoted to decrying a new Twitter timeline algorithm that may arrive as early as next week. If it does, most people predict the end of Twitter.
I don't entirely agree, though I know a timeline based on "the most interesting and most relevant, most important thing that's happening in your world," as Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey put it, will irrevocably alter the service.
People say Twitter is becoming Facebook, but in all fairness, Facebook became a bit more like Twitter first.
It was easy for Facebook to make its world larger. To go from a network of friends and content about them to a place that also connected you to the news and events of the moment. People were certainly annoyed about Facebook's news grab, but I think now they are quite used to reading news on the platform.
It's harder, I think, for a service that started out about everything and anything, with no allegiance to one person or kind of content, to transform into something that tries to focus your attention. Twitter will do that, when its millions of users turn their attention to something important, but they won’t be steered.
Twitter is special
Twitter has long been Facebook's inscrutable cousin. Clearly, they're related. Both had posts, though one calls them tweets, and both connect human to human. Of course the differences are vast. Twitter is open and public, and consuming its content can feel like dog-paddling in the middle of a shipwreck. So much floats by, you're not sure what to grab onto, what's important, like another passenger, and what's useless debris.
I long ago learned to navigate these waves and shifted from paddling to swimming and now surfing along the surface, expertly consuming what I want and adding to the mix when I think I can offer value.
Twitter’s struggle, though, is that most people are not like me; they never got over platform's messy nature. I’ve always believed that hashtags, which arrived after Twitter's launch, were an excellent organizing principle. When Twitter figured out how to display trending hashtags, I thought it was a godsend. But it wasn't enough for regular people who, perhaps, still associated the hashtag with telephones.
Twitter has been trying for years to make the service more obvious and accessible, right up to the new Moments, a feature they've force fed to existing users and one that has failed to inspire new ones.
Algorithm this
Reordering the timeline with a very Facebook like algorithm is, obviously, a terrible idea. It will destroy one of my favorite things about Twitter: serendipity.
Facebook isn't big on serendipity, because your network is usually defined by family and friends and less by those you might follow outside of your core social circle. When you craft a Twitter social network it's like an abstract painting that only gains meaning the longer you study it. You follow seemingly random people until they reveal their value. Sometimes it's because of someone else they retweeted, who you then follow. Your Twitter abstract is a living thing that grows and reshapes itself, constantly offering up new surprises.
An algorithm will squeeze that surprise right out of Twitter. You will see what Twitter thinks you want to see. Sadly, you might not notice what you're missing because, well, you didn't see it anyway.
In all honesty, I love Twitter and I wonder what will happen to me if Twitter makes a drastic change that not only fails to grow the network, but begins a rapid deflation. This algorithm has that potential. It could drive away core users like me and fail to attract the others who are quite satisfied with Facebook.
I will stick around and hope for the best, though I'm pretty sure this algorithm is far from the best.