RIP Twitter

Sorry to see you lost your identity, and forgot what made you unique. #RIPTwitter.

Lately on Twitter there is a new hashtag that is breaking twitter, it is actually #RIPT. The death of a network, from a user's perspective (not monetization here), is when an algorithm decides what you will see and not organic reach. That's when Facebook became a dead zone and LinkedIn Pulse lost its ROI for the user. 

This is exactly what seems to be happening to the doomed and dumbfounded network, our beloved Twitter. That the honesty of a Twitter feed will now be displaced showing tweets out of order, is hard for the die-hard fan of it to fathom. It's like a pivot that ruins your platform for the people who actually care about you. 

This idea of showing content that's relevant instead of recent, is the mark that Twitter really is in the fry-pan of monetization where it will abandon its users like all networks have done for a bit of twinkle and a last hurrah. Remember folks, it's not the quantity of users that makes your network good, it's the user-experience and engagement with it. This is how Facebook is dead to a good majority of the western world. 

Even if the algorithms are opt-in, it creates confusion and deviates from the unique value proposition that Twitter was famous for, the idea that I could follow your feed in real-time and here what you really think! That was a revolution, and now more machine-learning is coming between me and you! I'm all for technology that works, as I write this LinkedIn's spell check is anticipating what I'm writing and auto-correcting me and getting it all wrong 50% or more of the time (making it seem like I can't spell). 

When you implement technology and haven't tested it properly it ruins the user experience. Twitter is a channel that is all about being organic and authentic, and giving algorithms flex to distribute content it deems as noteable or salient to me, is sort of like Instagram shuffling my selfie deck to show my best face forward, it's fake. 

Twitter's desperation to stay relevant is not something new, when it copied Instagram hearts as likes and now going the Facebook route with algorithm, it has permanently changed from its true nature into something optimized by a profit-centric machine rather than a user-centric experience. This disturbs me, since innovation should be about the experience and not what some board members in Silicon valley tells you, you need to do. But as I mentioned in my last article on Twitter, Is Twitter Dying,  it has been bleeding money so I do understand. 

The twitter community is showing serious outrage as well. You know, the few active users that are left and all.

What's a bit perplexing about this, is while iGen think Facebook is old and LinkedIn isn't genuine, they think Twitter is actually very cool. But kids can't save the great exodus of talent that is now Twitter. If and when Yahoo and Twitter disappear from the tech ecosystem, will we remember them in 5 years, in 3 years? There's always a more innovative network ready to take its place, but the interface and the experience will never be replicated. 

With the changes that are scheduled to roll out as soon as next week, here are the Top 5 things you need to know. #TwitterTakeover.

The great irony of a Twitter algorithm is we stay on twitter because it's not like Facebook.