The Twitterverse dilemma

The internet as a social sphere has now been around for over a decade. It’s been long enough to establish norms and form patterns of behavior. The sudden explosion of interconnectedness onto mobile opened up waves and waves of people joining the conversations from all places and all walks of life. In this crossing, everyone’s voice and opinions are given equal weight by the platforms hosting them, which consequently leads to several problematic sitcom-esque misunderstandings and as we’ve seen a lot of lately — complete loss of context or nuance.

Social media apps live in a strange spectrum of intrinsic user motivations, ranging from “wanting to keep in touch with my friends” to “networking with like-minded peers” to “stalking casual acquaintances from college.” The organizations running these platforms aren’t prioritizing product decisions based on user cohorts and needs or wants, they’re doing it based on expected growth or projected revenue. The companies want to maximize users, after all, so they won’t enforce what should and shouldn’t be discussed on their platforms (save for the extreme cases of violence and hate speech). This leaves all social media users in a free-for-all battleground scenario where the rules for how and what should be said is determined by the userbase.

Let’s use Twitter as an example. By now, we know that Twitter drops you into a bubble based on your likes and interests. If you follow someone, it will show you suggested users to follow based on who else is in that bubble. It strengthens its own recommendation algorithms this way and is able to display more relevant content to you. I myself am very deeply embedded into “Design Twitter” and “Gamedev Twitter” based on the network of some four thousand people I’ve followed over the past ten or so years that I’ve been on Twitter. Users in a given bubble can also be a part of other Twitter bubbles. There’s a “Desi Twitter”, a “Fitness Twitter”, a “US Politics Twitter”, an “Artists Twitter”, a “Digital Nomad Twitter”, and so on. Bubbles are sort of like subreddits, but without the designated URL. It’s all just blended into one feed (unless you segment by topic or use custom lists).

Since humans are multi-faceted people with multiple interests, they tend to be a part of multiple bubbles in Twitter. Often, one viral meme or joke in a Twitter bubble gets so popular that it escapes that bubble and bleeds into the others. It starts showing up on the home feeds of other users who aren’t necessarily part of that bubble. To those users who aren’t part of the tweet’s originating bubble, the platform makes it seem like the tweet is a part of the global conversation and that it’s worth reading. Twitter is telling those users that it’s worth their time and attention to read that tweet. And very often, it falls flat. The meme probably contains nuance that only those in the tweet’s originating bubble will understand, so it feels irrelevant to display it to users without that context. Herein lies the problem with most of the misunderstandings and agony on the platform.

I’ll use myself as an example to illustrate what I mean. I joined Twitter to network with designers and to this day still use it for that purpose. Most of the people I follow are designers and most of my tweets are about design, save for the occasional jokes or whimsical thoughts. I’m not deeply embedded into other Twitter bubbles, but do frequently see viral tweets from other bubbles on my home feed. When emotions run high, users aren’t able to see the underlying causes for why Twitter displays them the content it does and tend to react instinctively.

For instance, let’s take some recent global conflict. Users on Design Twitter will frequently make posts claiming “I cannot believe no one is talking about this” or “Wow, you all will be up in arms about a logo change but have nothing to say about this genocide happening in [country].” And I get it. It’s an important global event that people should pay attention to, and it can be infuriating when people don’t treat it with the same level of emotional urgency that you deem it deserves. But why even expect users in Design Twitter to even have an opinion on it? Their expertise and interest lies in design, not in mass geopolitical conflict. Sure, there’s probably a right side to choose and a stance to take, but don’t expect people who joined a platform for a specific purpose to suddenly be up in arms about an entirely different issue.

Going back to how the algorithm tends to display tweets to outside of the bubbles, imagine this scenario: an Armenian designer who happens to be a part of two bubbles, Armenian Twitter and Design Twitter, is seeing a flood of tweets in Armenian Twitter about Turkey yet again not recognizing the genocide of Armenian peoples. In fact, it’s the only thing that bubble is talking about. While scrolling through the home feed, the Armenian designer also sees tweets from Design Twitter about a logo rebrand or a website redesign. This in turn infuriates the Armenian designer because they cannot believe that someone could think a logo rebrand is more important than an unrecognized genocide. The Armenian designer then sends out a tweet aimed at Design Twitter, something along the lines of “Unfollowing everyone who’s tweeting about [x] company’s logo redesign instead of speaking out against Turkey right now.”

Again, the people in Design Twitter mostly only care about design. The venn diagram between Design Twitter and Armenian Twitter in this scenario could have only a handful of tweets to show, so the most relevant tweets to display to this Armenian designer at this time are either the viral popular tweets from Armenian Twitter, which are all talking about the genocide, or the viral popular tweets from Design Twitter, which are all up in arms about some logo rebrand. See the disconnect? The algorithm fails to context match the emotional state that the user is in and forces the user to criticize an entire bubble of users for not being well-informed or outspoken enough about an issue that’s extremely relevant to an entirely different bubble. This problem could be solved if Twitter allowed the Armenian designer to direct that tweet to Design Twitter and only show it to a specific subset of users, but that’s not possible on the platform.

Social media apps like Twitter are self-selecting bubbles where users indirectly declare their interests through the people they follow. Asking them to suddenly care about important issues in other bubbles will never work because their intrinsic motivations are completely misaligned. We all live very different lives and have a limited amount of time per day to devote to this app. Ideally, we want to use it to catch up on conversations within the bubbles that actually interest us, not feel emotionally guilty about not caring for a different issue.

Furthermore, there is no point in amplifying the issue within the same bubble. If you have an opinion about something non-design related within Design Twitter that follow a roughly aligned moral compass based on the same first principles of equality, compassion, tolerance, and goodwill, then chances are that everyone in your bubble already agrees with you. This is not the audience to preach to in order to get meaningful change to happen for the issue at hand. It’s the “echo chamber” effect in action, where you perpetually see thousands of tweets saying the same thing with which you already agree, but the message isn’t getting across to the right bubbles that it needs to go to.

During the Trump administration, I was constantly outraged at every single thing coming out of the White House. Every policy, every press briefing, every dumb decision, and every appearance by that orange moron. And yet I rarely ever tweeted about it despite being fairly active on Twitter. Why? Because everyone in my bubble is also feeling and experiencing the same things. There’s no point in channeling the outrage into others who feel and think the same way I do. That’s not how I cope with things. Making an active change requires engaging with those who don’t live and think the way I do, and that doesn’t happen within the Twitter bubbles.

This is not to say that these conversations aren’t important. In fact, they’re so important that they shouldn’t happen in a vapid bubble of like-mindedness created by an algorithm to filter users based on interests to target ads to. I frequently have conversations about these important issues of politics, geopolitical conflict, genocide, racial unrest, social justice, and immigration constantly with my partner, my family, and a close circle of trusted friends where the conversations can lead to a nuanced discussion. Sure, this audience isn’t as wide as what Twitter could offer and sure as hell doesn’t incorporate the diverse perspectives, but at least the conversation isn’t being lifted out of one bubble entirely and plopped into another asking uninformed users to engage with the topic at hand.

The takeaway from this post is not to “never have conversations irrelevant to the bubbles you’re in on Twitter.” I’m just highlighting that like yourself, many of the users that joined a social media platform did so for a specific purpose and intent. They may not be actively aware of their actions and thoughts several years later, but when a deep-seeded subconscious thought inside of them tells them not to tweet about something they don’t know much about or they decide they’d rather just stick to tweeting about design, let it be that way. Don’t blame the people for making this choice, blame the way the platform works and segments users into bubbles and keeps important conversations out of the main feed.

In many ways, Reddit’s platform works better for this. There is a main homefeed (/r/all) that hosts the most upvoted posts across all subreddits, but users can subscribe to specific subreddits (similar to Twitter’s bubbles), all of which can be accessed through custom URLs and a custom home feed (the front page). Better yet, you can post directly to specific subreddits rather than send out your thoughts into the mysterious ether like on Twitter, not knowing where your content will end up and whose home feeds it’ll show up in. The subreddits preserve context about topics and interests so that even if it’s viewed by someone outside that subreddit, there is some shared mutual understanding about what the intent was. Twitter is ambiguous and confusing by design, whereas Reddit’s dedicated subreddit structure allows for better topic filtering when browsing and reading. Of course, both platforms have their fair share of social media issues despite the different approaches, so neither has solved the problem entirely yet.

The rise of smaller communities in Slack and Discord may be a direct response to the problems with these larger sites, where you know that someone has to put in the work in these micro-communities to be an active member in order to form close-knit bonds that foster a shared sense of knowledge. Discussions tend to be more detailed, misunderstandings are quickly cleared up, intent is usually communicated clearly, and there’s a stronger sense of obligation from the people making the posts knowing that it’s going out to a select group of people. In many ways, this harkens back to an evolutionary response where humans only evolved to survive in groups of some hundred and fifty or so large tribes. Large social media platforms like Twitter have forced us to scale to thousands and sometimes even millions, and it’s no surprise that humans aren’t able to keep up with the sudden demands of the attention economy. Some day, there will be intense analysis of the speed at which we adopted these social media platforms despite our brains being absolutely unprepared for it, and I really wonder what they’d have to say.