Comments on: Retweeting is Killing Twitter, and More Histrionics

By: Bill Wilson, esq.

Bill Wilson, esq. — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:05:19 +0000

Let’s all calm down here before things get crazy. There is a simple solution: follow a wider variety of people. I notice that the geek cluster is pretty much saturated, with little new action going on.

It’s true! I agree!

By: Boris Mann

Boris Mann — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:11:36 +0000

Up with favourites. That is all.

By: Robert Andrews

Robert Andrews — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:47:54 +0000

Oh of course.
But Twitter is having to work so hard just keeping the fucking thing online, it’s forgetting to add such must-have *features*.

By: whitneymcn

whitneymcn — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:38:26 +0000

While it’s not a perfect solution by any means, I’ve started using Twhirl’s filter on the (happily very occasional) days when retweeting flares up in my timeline.

A simple “-RT” in the filter box seems to catch the overwhelming majority of the offending tweets.

By: l.m.orchard

l.m.orchard — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:06:28 +0000

The most annoying thing about retweets is that there already is a built-in feature for flagging interest and amplifying others’ tweets—they’re called favorites.

The problem, though, is that favorites are only about 1/3 of the way to being retweets. Favorites need to be optionally spooled into a user’s tweet stream, with an option on the receiving end to ignore them.

FriendFeed does this, showing the “likes” from friends. I also “retweet” on FriendFeed by including the RSS feed of my Twitter favorites over there. Of course, that does a crapload of good since that’s on FriendFeed and the potential audience for them are on Twitter.

By: Joe Zuccaro

Joe Zuccaro — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:03:25 +0000

Ethan, my response is meant to be rhetorical and not by any means an attack on you:

What better way to see which ideas or news items are really popular and which are not? Wouldn’t you like to know what things other people agree are good? Isn’t that part of “crowdsourcing,” which is gaining adoption?

How about understanding how quickly or broadly something passes through the twittersphere? You can have analytics for that, but that doesn’t necessarily alert you to “real time” occurrrences that may be worth watching.

Why the arbitrary 50/50 ratio? Why did you follow some of these people in the first place? Perhaps another useful tool (someday) would be filters based on some sort of criteria that better recommend who you should follow and who you should not.

Lastly, “People need to start being original again” is a pipe dream. Many people are followers and most don’t do much that could be considered “original. They find someone to follow and then emulate/promote them for their own validation. That’s why you see people wearing jerseys of their favorite football player. That’s why they put a Nascar decal on their vehicle with the number of their favorite driver. That’s why they retweet Scoble, Kawasaki, GaryVee, Chris Brogan, et. al. on Twitter. Some of the retweets have no value whatsoever to another follower or are redundant. But acknowledge that these followers are excited about being part of that ecosystem. There’s nothing wrong with that. You can always encourage them to “favorite” something rather than retweet it, but until people get tired of retweeting, the onus will be on you to unfollow them if you find no value in the relationship you have agreed to with them in the Twittersphere.

By: eunmac

eunmac — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:53:15 +0000

To me this is an unfair headline, Retweets aren’t killing Twitter, although they are clearly killing the author’s individual experience of twitter. The fact is that retweets are the way that most people discover new people to follow, which in fact helps grow Twitter, not kill it. Sure, Twitter has scalability issues, but so are there are also individual issues in just following more people.

End of day, you chose who you follow, and you chose which apps filter the content (Tweetdeck with Groups etc) …that’s what controls your experience.

By: Viss

Viss — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:37:29 +0000

I agree. I started mass-pruning my followees today – I’m sick of seeing garbage make it to my phone.

I have a simple philosophy – If I don’t want to see it on my phone, I stop following the user. If over half of their tweets are ‘worthless’, i unfollow them.

By: Conrad

Conrad — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:34:44 +0000

It definitely is an annoying trend. But wouldn’t you say that it’s just a more convenient way of sharing a link? The annoyance depends on how useful that link is.

So yeah, anyone who retweets a Mashable story is kinda silly. But someone who retweets someone sharing an obscure link that not many have seen is very useful.

The remove follower button is there for a reason!