Twitter's new retweet feature is the worst ever.
Twitter recently turned retweets, an organic behavior on Twitter, into an official feature. Now retweets posted by people I follow show up in my feed as they were originally posted – even if they were from someone I don’t follow.
Ev Williams recently defended the feature’s implementation at length on his personal blog.
While Ev is right about the downsides of organic retweeting, his solution has damaged Twitter’s usability and encouraged the worst form of communication on Twitter.
Twitter’s feature looks confusing. Tweets from strangers appear in users’ feeds with little explanation. The company should have realized this when they tested the feature months ago. In late September, Justine Bateman was so confused by the feature that she thought she was getting spam, and called several prominent Twitter users “shitheads” for breaking into her feed: http://gawker.com/5367094/ The public embarrassment of this episode should have taught the company to rethink its approach, but they seem to think their feature will become intuitive if they just explain it to every user.
While current users may get used to the feature, it’s going to alienate new users. Twitter isn’t like Facebook; it can’t boast the same network effect that makes Facebook indispensable. So it needs to keep things simple for new users. But now each new user will need to understand why much of their early friend feed will consist of messages they didn’t subscribe to. To understand this, they’ll need to learn the meaning of a new symbol. I expect that in trying to understand it, many of them will end up accidentally retweeting messages they didn’t want to see in the first place.
Second, retweets are one of the less innovative uses of Twitter. They simply spread an identical message to a larger group. By making it easier to repeat a tweet than to comment on it, they discourage users from advancing a conversation. This prevalence of retweeting will further encourage all users to simply parrot the few crowdpleasing accounts that already dominate Twitter. The common use of a retweet is for a small user to repeat something a more popular user said. Very popular celebs are retweeted by fans every time they update. This use will further skew the hierarchy of Twitter until the site is known not as a place where anyone talks to anyone but where famous people and organizations get their message out, merely in a more “viral” way.
Further, by encouraging direct relays over advancing conversations, retweets will be responsible for the next iteration of Amazon’s Gaygate: The first version of the story (“Amazon banned gay books”) will keep spreading long after the real story (“Amazon accidentally recategorized some books, has no problem with gay literature, and is working on the problem”) comes out. Retweeting magnifies Twitter’s biggest weakness: The tiny space only provides the briefest thoughts, and most people simply truncate the truth and move on. Twitter is not for complicated stories.
As someone who doesn’t appreciate retweets, I have one recourse: To unsubscribe from my friends’ retweets one person at a time. The biggest step Twitter can take to prevent retweets from ruining their service is to let users opt out altogether. Otherwise they risk a massive exodus from confused and frustrated users. The second step is to encourage conversations: Show threaded tweets together on a user’s page, and add more support for replies and responses. Otherwise, Twitter’s gonna be the new Facebook in just one way: they’ll be known more for user rebellions and screwups than for the good that they do.
