stephanie

The internet has started to reverse a trend that began with the printing press. After a four hundred years of declining public sphere, Twitter among others brought us a new Agora. I think the value of this change is hard for us to comprehend because it has been gone for so long.

The intellectuals of Twitter are not the celebrities, scientists, journalists, comedian podcasters, academics. They are the mass of anons and little accounts, people willing to think out loud, doubt publicly, and use the gifts of anonymity or sincerity to speak true sentiments.

By mixing these people, Twitter becomes a check, however small, on ideological thinking. It also offers you the chance to befriend those who are doing, living and flourishing. It is the easiest way to publicly think and do, and by these acts, perhaps you will find your people.

I once wrote that "I don't think even @jack fully appreciates the nature of the thing he has built. He is still concerned with just who should be promoted, or who might best be an arbiter of truth or content, over other ways of organizing the platform. [cont]

I understand why some people welcome the feature. Plenty of people today gave compelling reasons to want to reduce the public nuisance burden. But we are witnessing the very slow closing of a large door. This isn't the first new feature modulating replies & it won't be the last.

I hope Twitter seriously considers what they are doing, but I think it will be easy to pass over this quickly. Less nuisance, happy celebrities, maybe engagement even stay the same. What we lose is much more subtle.

How many of you do I follow because of some comment on a public voice? How many others have you found this way? How many brilliant people sit a while on the shore of nothingness, because they have no popular friends to retweet them, then decide Twitter isn't worth it?