[spectre256]

The missing piece which the Twitter thread author only touched on is that how a tweet is received by a reader depends a lot on whether or not they come from similar communities and have similar context to the author. By surfacing tweets to people that the author doesn't know at all, it's likely the responses will be more negative in general.

Anyone with a large twitter following knows roughly what the makeup of their follower base is, and they compose tweets accordingly. While always necessary to some extent, it's usually hard to contextualize every single tweet as if it could be read by anyone, so it often isn't done.

As a silly contrived example, lets say I am a software developer that focuses on operating system performance and I tweet something like "I'm working on an algorithm to make killing children an order of magnitude more efficient". (note to real twitter users: never tweet that)

My followers know I'm talking about killing child _processes_ on a computer. So they reply things like "oh, that would be great, it would make this one shell script I have a lot faster to execute" or maybe even "personally I'd rather you encouraged users to use threads rather than forking lots of processes". There might be a heated discussion, but it will be with a HUGE shared context of information.

Now the Twitter algorithm picks it up, and the tweet gets seen by lots of people who don't know anything at all about operating systems. They are, understandably, completely appalled. They start responding with anger. Threats, abuse, etc.

So, Twitter changing the dynamic from "your tweets will primarily be seen by your followers" to "your tweets will frequently be seen by your followers followers" can actually have a big impact on the platform. It will at minimum take some adjustment. Operating with the assumption of one dynamic when there is in fact the other will be...painful.

[jupp0r]

I get what you are saying, but isn't this what everyone was screaming for years ago when the filter bubble terminology came up? Now we are criticizing networks for showing things outside of our filter bubbles? You can't have it both ways.

[spectre256]

Yeah, this definitely is a way to break the filter bubble.

But thinking about it a bit more, it might be one of the worst ways to do so.

For example, assuming roughly that both favorites and retweets represent general agreement, using those mechanisms to surface new tweets to people makes sense. If someone you follow (and presumably respect) quote retweets someone you don't follow with "Yes this!" or something similar, then you're already primed to agree with the person you follow.

But, often at least, replying and not faving/retweeting could very well bais for DISagreement. Now instead you're going to see someone you follow and respect arguing about something, and you're primed to agree with them, and potentially pile on to the original tweet author even though you might not have cared about the topic a minute ago.

Twitter ALREADY has a way to signal that you want all your followers to see a tweet you saw: retweet. And even showing your followers things you favorited at least means they'll see things you probably like. But it seems there's at least a reasonable argument that showing your replies to your followers is setting up a situation where pile-ons to the original tweet are likely.