Diversity or Consistency
A while back a Kiwi user asked how to view Twitter’s trending topics. When I replied that it wasn’t possible with Kiwi he was confused. He told me that a Twitter client without trends just wasn’t useful at all. That seemed crazy at the time, no one I knew used that feature at all.
Kiwi had only recently launched, most of the feedback I received then was from beta testers and close friends: people who I followed on Twitter, people who were a lot like me. I still view trending topics as an odd curiosity, to me they read like gibberish most days, which is fine. Trends have nothing to do with how I use Twitter.
These topics are trending though, so there must be a lot of people using this feature. And that means that as well as the Twitter users I know about, there is another large group using the same social network, at the same time, in the same language, but in a completely different way. That group and my group are so different and interact so little that we hardly know the other group exists. The groups are like silos of users: Near each other but almost totally isolated.
After nearly two years of Kiwi feature requests the silo pattern is apparent everywhere in Twitter. API flexibility, an abundance of clients, and vastly differing platforms leads to diversity. All while groups self select their own members while curating their timeline. In retrospect it seems like the obvious outcome of this environment.
My guess is that Twitter’s diversity was a key to their success too. Several competitors tried to clone Twitter, some even seemed to better it. In reality though, they only cloned the silos they knew about, leaving the others largely untouched. It’s no surprise, heterogeneous populations tend to be more resilient in nature too.
Recently Twitter has been seeking consistency, attempting to homogenize the user experience. Perhaps it’s for some yet to be unveiled reason, but my guess is that they’re simply trying to become more attractive to advertisers. I can’t argue with the logic, advertisers will pay more for a more predictable audience.
But I can’t help but wonder whether eliminating diversity might leave Twitter more exposed than it ever has been before.
