
Twitter Should Kill the Retweet - smacktoward
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/twitter-should-kill-retweet/574321/?single_page=true
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jungler
I had an experience recently where Twitter failed me on every level and so
have been staying off of it:

1\. Someone I don't normally interact with was algorithmically pushed into the
timeline.

2\. The topic was a sensitive, negative topic(workplace abuses) and involved a
personal story I was tangentially involved in.

3\. I opted to share my part of the story in a reply but the small size of
tweets forced me to split it into two parts, awkwardly crammed together.

4\. Since notifications appear in reverse order the second part is easy to
read out of context. It became the subject of a quote-retweet saying that I
was, in essence, doing harm, which garnered 10 likes.

5\. I apologized and then a day later they apologized too, saying, "I didn't
see this earlier".

In essence, what Twitter has is a product that cannot be relied upon for
anything remotely important. If high engagement is happening because of
miscommunication, you've made a platform which is basically only useful for
sports and celebrity trash talk, and bland business PR and announcement type
services. But this setup has been awkwardly adapted into a universal
discussion platform suitable for news, politics, creative conversations,
personal thoughts, etc. It constantly breaks down when it goes outside its
wheelhouse.

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skybrian
The worst thing about likes on Twitter is that they often get treated as
retweets and there's no opt-out. It's hard to find people to follow who don't
hit the like button on things I don't like.

Retweets are easier to deal with. You can unsubscribe to retweets from your
"following" list. I highly recommend it.

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guiambros
10x this.

Likes and Retweets are _very_ different behaviors, so I can't understand how
they came to the conclusion that Likes should show up in other people's
timelines. I imagine it was done to increase discoverability (particularly for
users following few folks), but still a pretty bad UX decision.

For users who carefully curated the folks they follow (and who went through
the trouble to disable retweets), having Likes showing up every now and then
screws up the experience. Thankfully this seems mostly limited to mobile.

I'd rather still have the Like button as a subtle head nod between the reader
and the author, but seems Jack want to kill it altogether. So be it; I'd
rather see it gone than continue to be a pseudo-RT.

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iwiririwo
Are there any users on Twitter except for politicians and journalists, hyping
each other's mistakes, and as third group people who try to be funny every
Tweet?

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catacombs
You have a fourth group, the trolls, who want nothing but to watch the site
burn. Otherwise, you nailed it.

