This week, Twitter was abuzz about a new Twitter Grader. The grader takes several points into account and gives a person’s Twitter stream an overall score. With the release of this, some suggested that Twitter also add a “thumbs up / thumbs down” feature for individual tweets in order to increase “signal” and decrease “noise”. While the idea has its merit points, I just don’t agree with it. Let’s take a look at some things:
- – No matter what someone says, there are few people that handle criticism well. By adding something that criticizes people on an individual (vs. aggregated) basis, two things will occur: the number of new, “Creators” will decrease as well as the amount of tweets. However, you may get more “silent” listeners (aka Critics). Those who only thumbs up/down, but never post anything. To me, those people are not nearly as valuable as the Creators.
- – I love the fact that Twitter is so diverse. You can use it for anything– an RSS feed for your blog, play by play of what you’re doing, sharing ideas, meeting up with people in your area, etc. What happens to that freedom once you implement a grading system? While you may get a more “newsworthy” signal, you’re going to lose a lot of the extra stuff. Noise isn’t always “bad”.
- – To expand on that point, Twitter’s diversity makes it a unique medium and allows it to evolve based on what people think they should be using Twitter for. A grading system will limit that piece of creativity as well.
- – By allowing users to rate each individual post, you’re going to lose a lot of the “raw” ideas that people post now. Members will think twice before posting and you’ll lose a lot of the “blink” tweets that are out there. Yes, a lot of “blink” tweets are noise, but there’s also a lot that are insightful or lead to breaking news.
- – For other sites, thumbs up/down works great. But, those sites don’t necessarily involve personal thoughts and ideas. Unlike posting elsewhere, a few of the main ideas behind Twitter are it’s fast, spur of the moment and immediate. By making people think twice about what they’re tweeting, you’re going to lose a lot of those “gut feeling” tweets. For example, how long does it take you to write a blog post? I don’t know about you, but I spell check and reread my posts before publishing. A lot of my initial, knee-jerk thoughts get left on the cutting floor in return for conciseness. I don’t do that with Twitter. Twitter is that knee-jerk look into what I’m thinking. As another example, how many tweeted their initial reaction to McCain’s announcement about his choice of a female running mate? I did. I also deleted the tweet after the fact… I didn’t want comments on my political opinion. By adding the grading system, you’ll get a lot more deletes. Now, how many have blogged about McCain’s choice? I haven’t. The majority of people who made Twitter comments on the subject haven’t blogged about it either.
- – Now, let’s take your Facebook or MySpace status update which have a similar idea as Twitter. If you’re not feeding your status update from elsewhere (i.e. Twitter), how much thought do you put into it? I know I pause before updating. I’ve watched friends update theirs. They pause. They write. They hit backspace. They rewrite. The end result? A quality update. However, the update is different from their original thought. And while the update is quality, what was lost was the inside look into how the person truly felt.
- – Will thumbs up/down increase quality for interactive savvy users (aka people in the “industry”)? Quite possibly. Will it scare away new users and the mainstream from tweeting? Probably. Will it result in more “private” Twitter streams? Most definitely.
If you’re so concerned about signal to noise, stop following the people you consider “noisy”. Wow, what a simple solution.
I’m pro rating tweets for 2 reasons:
1. We need a better to grade tweets so long as tools like Tiwtter Grader exists. Relying on frequency to drive the score will simply increase noise the expense of quality. Keep in mind the tweet rating doesn’t have to be mandatory. It’s the prospect of being rated that will keep people honest. For example, it might just stop Jason Calacanis from always linking to Mahalo
Though, probably not. If we remove the tool Twitter Grader, we don’t need a means to rate tweets.
2. I like twitter. I don’t love it, but I like it. What keeps me from loving it is the noise. You don’t see as much noise on the blog circuit. For example, look at David Armano’s tweets and compare them against his blog posts. I’d argue there is better quality in the blog posts, although you get less frequency. I don’t think it’s a case of following the “right” people. If everyone is too noisy and we simply stop following them, the entire twitter infrastructure would fall apart, because very few people would be following anyone
Perhaps what twitter needs is a color coding system for tweet authors that works like tags or categories for blogs. Yellow for personal, blue for business, purple for response, red for question/answer request, etc. That would allow people to quickly scan through the garbage of people’s twitter stream and only focus on what they want.
Less noise or an ability to filter noise would grow twitter.
Lastly, where does responsibility come in to play? Don’t we have a responsibility to make the twitter community valuable? It’s kind of like making sure we all do our part to keep our road’s clean. People are so called industry leader have even more responsibility.
I have to say I am moving more in the direction of zero policing of any type in Twitter. I think this article is moving well in the direction of outlining the value-in-the chaos as it were.
Normally I am a very quality oriented, filtration and control freak and at first I was inclined to favor the idea of dding mechanisms of judgement. I considered how to augment thumbs-up/down by forcing the user to add acoment before submitting (for more qualitative judging) etc.
But I have to say with Twitter, that there is something special about the total openness toward purely personal expression, toward the nature of a random thought. If Blogs are more like personal testimonies, essays, and other types of self publishing. Twitter is more like the casual things you say to a friend, the random thought, the outburst. Sometimes there are nuggets of high culture, sometimes it’s “This soup sucks!”
In a way when I look at my Twitter account, I feel like it is sort of an existential dashboard of the personal lives of people I know. It really does make me feel connected to the inner texture of people I might not see or hear from for months on end otherwise. Similar to Facebook which is a sort of social dashboard of casual (and not always casual) encounters among my friends and acquaintances. The author of this article may be correct in saying that these mechanisms would weigh down the spontaneity and openness that makes this environment as fertile as it is for a more productive form of chaos.
That all being said, I am still largely interested in quality thoughts of whatever kind, probably along similar lines as Adam who wrote the response above, and i would like to get more of that in my Twitter account. Perhaps what is needed is some kind of semantic associator that helps us find people with common interests. (I can’t imagine that there is not already something like this out there, I just have not looked.)
Adam-
Your first comment that I *almost* agree with
To clarify, I thought Twitter Grader took into account the frequency of updates and the number of followers (among other things). Sitting there and tweeting all day would decrease your “grade” if you didn’t have enough followers.
Now that that’s out of the way…
In theory, the idea of a color coding system is great. But, in reality, difficult to implement. To put this into action, I’m envisioning assigning a letter to each color/category similar to how ‘d’ is used for direct messages. But, here’s the reality:
1. Would people actually do it? When it comes to organization, I’m totally anal and therefore totally would do this. But, what about others? It (a) requires extra thought and (b) extra effort.
2. To expand on #1, one of the things I love about Twitter is that it can be accessed through SO many channels – mobile, web, desktop widget, email, etc. Color coding while not on the actual site may prove difficult, especially via SMS. (P.S.- I’d LOVE to see stats on the percentage of updates per channel)
2. We are not the mainstream. Adding a letter in front of our tweets? Easy cheesy. But, for others, not so much. The “mainstream” people I’ve taught to Twitter just barely get the concept of ‘d’ for direct message. Can you imagine adding x more letters? This level of complexity will scare off new, mainstream users.
3. To my orginal point about creativity, categories will limit what people *think* Twitter should be used for. People will start to feel pigeon holed.
Maybe, one step in improving filtering is to expand on Favorites (you know, the star next to each tweet). People can either start using them more often or Twitter should expand the feature to make it more useful / community oriented.
P.S. – added link love to the original post. Since I wrote this as an agrument to your post, it’s only fair
Carlos –
Thanks for the comments. Any day I can sway someone away from Adam’s viewpoint is a fun day. Thanks for making today fun
The closest thing that I’ve seen for finding common interests are tools like http://www.summize.com which allows you to search Twitter.