In contrast, if Twitter does not recognize new habits and sanction them – not all good for the community – more often than not, it is in the position of just braking or fiddling with a button that switches between “less Twitter” and “more” Twitter ” where “Twitter” is not defined by Twitter itself, but by hundreds of millions of people who simply do not unsubscribe so that they do not lose their chance to see or be seen on the One True Feed.
Part of it depends on how Twitter works at a basic level. “Twitter has preserved an architecture in which the public emerges on any topic, including how Twitter works,” said Prof. Burgess, who works at the Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Center. “It makes it difficult for the company to make major changes because they have this really active mobilized user community,” she said, “especially when they don’t seem to emerge from user practices or norms and are just mimicking characteristics” from other platforms three years later . “
In their book, Prof. Burgess and Prof. Baym suggest that Twitter has been in the transition from its “Open Innovation” paradigm for almost a decade – the one where Twitter impressed its users by pushing the button towards “More” turns Twitter ”- and into an advertising-driven end product in which“ user metrics must be contained and controlled ”. So if an open top-down Twitter can’t work, then at least the company can make sure it’s monetized.
Twitter can of course do what it wants. It is often humiliated by its collective users, but it also often disappoints them. (In some contexts, “more Twitter” is synonymous with harassment.) It is also a profitable company that is pulling billions of dollars out of this process; What Twitter users do together isn’t actually a great mystery, just surprisingly specific and, it turns out, extremely sticky.