If Twitter implements this, the few Twitter feeds I pay any attention to will be deleted from my bookmarks and I won’t go back there again.
An algorithm-tampered timeline is completely useless and is another concession to the moron contingent — the same ones who can’t stay off Facebook — and not something that I’ll find usable even as an observer (I do not and never will have a Twitter account myself).
Like Firefox, Twitter seems hellbent on destroying its one (in this case, small) advantage over other services.
Good luck to them with that.
For reference, this is how goddamn clueless the Twitter engineers are about their own product. Comically idiotic.
If you’re not the paying customer, you’re the product. For that reason, all the appeals to reason under the #RIPTwitter hashtag amount to pissing in the wind. I mostly liked that blog post you linked to on your other blog about possible replacements for Twitter. I begrudgingly admit that he’s right about the next thing having to be monetizeable, but monetization is also the reason (the only reason, in my opinion) Web 2.0 sucks. At some point end users have to shell out. I would suggest that point should be hosting accounts. Make the process of buying server access less painful (the author of the blog post said something about setup shouldn’t require key pair generation, for example) and things like setting up Diaspora* pods (as opposed to just user accounts) are done by a larger percentage of the users, which in theory should mean no need to monetize audience attention or DRM or usage data to pay a hosting bill. I’m sure there are other costs, but people hosting their own content should go a long way in the direction of people owning their own content. The other key point, as I saw it, was “protocols, not platforms.”
The problem is most people just aren’t very interested in helping themselves, even when it’s something that has a major effect — positive or negative — on their lives. This is especially true in the world of technology and surveillance (two peas in a pod, these days) as I am sure you know.
Capitalism while it is good for some purposes, tends to ruin most things.