Please, Twitter, Go Algorithmic.
It’s the only way we won’t be saying #RIPTwitter
I love the idiosyncrasies of the Twitter feed. I love the secret language of @’s and #s, the strange network of media/politics reporters, art fags, distributed systems nerds, and real life friends across multiple continents I’ve haphazardly followed over the years. And I love the chaos of the reverse chronological order, the torrent of micro-thoughts, links, and GIFs. It’s a gorgeous mess that unapologetically refuses to cohere.
But consuming Twitter is more and more like watching a middling film student’s movie. You can see the ambition of democratically representing the world in impressionistic snippets, but the execution falls far short. Extensive contextual knowledge and mental assembly is required for even basic enjoyment of the current Twitter feed.
It is no surprise that a method of organizing this information that remains unchanged since the days of Usenet is failing. The number of tweets in my feed has exploded from early Twitter (a few an hour) to now (thousands a day). The pool of potential tweets that may interest me outside those I already follow has become an ocean.
I’d like to warmly invite @Jack and team to come in and fuck up my linear Twitter feed: please, before it’s too late, before clinging to outdated mechanics means Twitter is too esoteric to thrive.
The #RIPTwitter campaigners’ fear of Twitter undermining its democratic qualities is understandable.¹ Vigilance is warranted where algorithms are invisible. But in the communications deluge that is 2016, the question isn’t whether or not a social media platform should deliver its feed algorithmically. It is how those algorithms should work.
Feeds are machines for information, and linear timelines are their least evolved form. A feed takes a set of inputs (who you followed, what you engage with) and produces an output (items for you to look at). The cogs and gears that fill in the middle can do many things. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a machine with more complex innards.
When people fear change in the Twitter feed, they imagine its simple, transparent chute replaced with Facebook’s hulking black box. Facebook optimizes for attention, brutally. The emotional experience of Facebook’s feed is tinged with suspicion that you’re being manipulated. (This is why you find yourself 200 items deep into your News Feed before your conscious mind even kicks in with the question, “Why am I here?”)
Twitter need not fight in the same attention wars as Facebook; Twitter already has a stunning lead in the now wars.² In many ways, Facebook sacrificed its potential to win “now” back in 2011 when it introduced the algorithmic News Feed which prizes “interesting” above all else, regardless of when you show up. The Twitter and Facebook feeds need not be the same just because they’re both algorithmic. Every factory doesn’t make peanut butter.
Twitter can go algorithmic and optimize for fidelity and relevance to the present moment. It can satisfy its core users and embrace its competitive advantage. For most, “now” does not look like the last 1,000 utterances, in reverse order, from a smattering of people I elected to follow at some arbitrary point in the past. The product challenge is extraordinary—thinking about the API changes alone makes me break out in a cold sweat—but it is very much possible.
The amplification of new and rarely heard voices would be a key part of getting “now” right. If Twitter were to really take the challenge of doing so to heart, they could expose in general terms the workings of their feed. Finding ways to build transparency about composition into the core feed would also wildly differentiate the product.
Twitter needs an algorithmic feed to keep being Twitter. I hope they’re working on it right now.
¹ That said, I actually think that the current, increasingly broken feed is just as detrimental to these ideals. With the current level of noise, I am actually less likely to see the quieter, more marginalized voices (individuals without major media mouthpieces), and much more likely to see those who have the resources (programatic, monetary) to optimize what times they post, have multiple shifts of social media reporters, etc, etc. A feed rendered only in reverse chronological order is rapidly becoming no more democratic than television.
² Periscope was a brilliant acquisition to help it keep that edge.
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