David Cole

Originally written in 2016 for the Quora design blog. This is an extension and application of a previous post, Why Mechanics Design.

Twitter occupies a unique and powerful position in our culture, fostering both revolutionary change like the Arab Spring as well as large-scale harassment campaigns like Gamergate. Both extremes are made possible by the same product mechanics.

Twitter's stated mission is “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers” [1]. The key distinguishing phrases here are instantly and without barriers.

Here's how the product mechanics support the instantly piece:

• 140 character limit: This limitation means that the content on Twitter is rapid to both read and write. Capture a thought almost as you’re having it, and it can be read within seconds.
• Chronological ranking: This means that what you see in your timeline is the very latest in what people are writing or sharing. If there's a conversation happening right now, you can open Twitter and trust that you will see it, and that if you write everyone who follows you that is checking Twitter will also see it.
• Retweets: This makes it as low friction as possible for users to rapidly spread information.
• Hashtags: This allows people to follow a specific event or conversation as its happening.
• Push notifications: Twitter is more aggressive than most when there's something happening right now that you might be interested in.
• Periscope: Being able to embed Periscope streams inside of tweets allows rapid distribution of truly live content, and discussion around that content.
• Live content integration: Embedding partner content like NFL games directly into the app means people can both watch live and comment live in the same space.

And here's how the mechanics support the without barriers piece:

• Public content: Most content on Twitter is accessible to everyone, making it infinitely searchable and sharable.
• Asymmetric following: Meaning both parties don't need to mutually agree to see each other's content (contrast this with how friending on Facebook works). This does a few things:
  • It lowers the friction for information to flow from one individual to another — only one of them has to have the interest and make the decision.
  • Group conversations can grow and shrink organically, rather than requiring an all-in or all-out dynamic you see in other group products with “membership” mechanics.
  • It allows for figures like celebrities and journalists to treat Twitter as a one-way broadcast tool.
• No account limitations: Pseudonyms, organizations, publications — anyone can make an account, enabling content that wouldn't make sense or be acceptable to share if it had to be attached to an individual's real identity (as in Facebook, Quora).
• @-mentions: This allows users to direct information to other users, even if they aren't following each other. This enables ad-hoc communication between strangers.
• Hashtags: This allows people and content to organize around a single topic with very little work, eliminating the need for an existing social graph for distribution.
• Moments: This creates opportunities for people to follow events without having to build up a relevant graph or repeatedly searching for the same event.
• Embeds: Tweets can be easily embedded in other webpages and products, allowing them to spread in a wide range of contexts and networks.

Taken together, these mechanics make Twitter uniquely suited to capitalize on their mission. If Facebook wanted to compete directly with Twitter, they would likely have to adopt comparable mechanics, which would be in tension with their existing goals like privacy and intimacy among friends.

However, being the best at something often requires making extreme trade-offs. These mechanics come with many downsides:

• Harassment: Few limitations on account creation combined with the multitude of ways to get people's attention makes Twitter a potent vector for harassment and abuse. The instant distribution also leaves no window for formal moderation or effective community review.
• Context collapse: The ability for content to be distributed rapidly and unpredictably to many other people means that users can never be totally confident about their audience they're writing for. [3] Over time, users can become very conservative with what they share on Twitter, effectively becoming politicians who fear being taken out of context and so only say banal things.
• Relevance: Chronological ranking means that the first tweets you see have a lower chance of being the most interesting tweets, as opposed to a system that takes many other factors into account when deciding what to show you. They're currently addressing this with ranked sections mixed in with chronological tweets, with some success.
• Onboarding curve: Many of these positive dynamics depend on users having already built up good follow graphs, an understanding of unique concepts like retweets, and checking at times when interesting things are happening — all of which make it hard for new people to get consistent value out of the product.
• Conversations: Due to asymmetric following, reply chains can be jumbles of different social graphs which makes them very hard to parse and difficult to share.
• Misinformation: The rapid spread of information without any checks for quality or accuracy means rumors and lies can go viral fast, and later corrections/retractions naturally tend not to get as much attention.
• Long-form: It's possible to string tweets together to create long-form writing but it feels awkward and when individual pieces get shared, context gets lost.
• Evergreen: Old tweets that are still good tend to disappear forever, due to the chronological ranking.
• Attribution: The glut of anonymous accounts means there's little accountability for theft of content.

Given how directly tied these issues are to the core mechanics of the product, Twitter will have a tough time trying to address these without compromising the many positive dynamics.

References

1. About Twitter
2. Bloomberg: The Future of Twitter: Q&A with Jack Dorsey
3. Context Collapse