The dire consequences of Twitter’s direct messages… so far
On April 20, Twitter unveiled a change to its direct message function, allowing users the option of receiving messages from anybody, rather than just those they follow.
Before the change, direct messages were restricted to people the recipient was following, which made communication less than fluid, and at times impossible: if somebody you didn’t follow asked you something and you thought the reply wasn’t going to interest anybody else, what you normally did was to reply through a direct message, but in this case, the right thing to do was to follow the person so that you could reply by the same channel, a system that was clumsy and slow.
Twitter users had been calling for the direct message feature to be opened up for some time: many of us argued that a message limited to 140 characters can facilitate functional and agile conversation, exchanges of information that in many cases are a valid alternative to emails or instant messaging. Twitter has traditionally been a company very open to what the market is saying: a large part of its product innovation has been about incorporating features that have been “suggested” by the community of developers or users. Functions such as @reply, the retweet, or hashtags, which are now seen as key characteristics of the service, all came about when users invented them and began employing them spontaneously.
But the interesting thing about opening up direct messages has more to do with what we might call “channel exhaustion”, a phenomenon characteristic of human communication, and studied within the burgeoning science of media choice behavior.
In this case, we see that as a particular communication channel becomes popular, we eventually tire of using it, or radically limit our use of it. There are any number of examples: we no longer open the door to people selling things, we throw flyers away without looking at them, we let the phone ring off the hook, and of course we don’t bother opening email that we can clearly see is spam.
What has been the use pattern for direct messages in the month or so since Twitter’s change? Basically we have received more spam: more unwanted communication from people who, for whatever reason, think they are authorized to be part of a group sending a particular message. These are messages that we wouldn’t want in our email, but that are now mounting up in our direct message list: conversations in which somebody has asked if we want to take part, or greetings, or advertising, or invitations to “follow me”. Let’s be clear about this: if somebody wants to invite me to take part in a conversation, they surely know that the right thing to do is ask if I’m interested, and not barge into my in-tray. Is that so hard to understand? Is it so difficult to put yourself in the position of the recipient? This is unacceptable behavior that if generalized will soon make the Twittersphere unsustainable, and we will end up returning to the old system whereby only those you follow can send you messages. This in turn will create distance, making for a less friendlier environment, but that seems to be unavoidable if every day we’re going to find irrelevant messages in what you hoped was going to be a fluid communication channel with people you wanted to talk to.
Of course it is possible to highlight spam or abusive content on Twitter, but do we really want to start an arms race in this way, when all we have to do is apply a little common sense? It seems obvious that if opening up direct messages means it becomes a source of spam and unwanted messages for those of us with large followings, then many of us are going to have little choice but to return to how things used to be.
This raises the question of just how to establish the rules of use in a communication medium that has only just been born. How many of us will bother keeping the direct message option open if things carry on like this? At this rate, Twitter’s initiative will enter the history books as the communication channel that burned out faster than any other. Which would be a great shame.
(En español, aquí)
