Twitter’s new features distract from its beautiful, anarchic simplicity

By Tom Flynn

Way back in 2009 when I signed up to Twitter (a long distant era in the digital world), it was a much simpler social media channel. Short messages of 140 characters contained nothing but text and ‘retweet’ was a manual function that involved copying and pasting a tweet, adding ‘RT’ at the start of the message. Over the years, the social media giant has vastly improved the platform through new features that have enhanced user experience. Many of these were controversial at the time, such as doubling the character limit of a tweet, but have proved to be broadly positive moves – from images and video through to the ‘like’ function and quote tweets.

But in recent months, Twitter has unveiled a series of features which distract from the platform’s core functions. These borrow heavily from successful features on other social media channels but add little to the Twitter experience. A good example is Fleets, (inspired by Instagram Stories which was itself borrowed from SnapChat) which appear at the top of the screen on the mobile app and last for 24 hours before disappearing. Who needs time-limited content in an environment where tweets can rise to prominence and disappear again in a few hours?

Last week Twitter announced two more new features – Super Follows (to compete with Patreon and, depending on content rules, potentially OnlyFans) and Communities, which has been hailed as Twitter’s answer to Facebook Groups. But on Facebook’s timeline, we interact with our friends – groups are a way of communicating with people who share our interests but are not close contacts. On Twitter, that’s already the model – we can see content from people all over the world when it is shared by accounts we follow, or by searching relevant hashtags. Super Follows runs the risk of antagonising Twitter’s loyal user base who are not used to being denied access to content on the free-for-all platform.

Whilst Communities is probably low risk for Twitter – if it fails, they can just quietly remove it – Super Follows takes them into new territory by turning the revenue model on its head. Will Twitter users tolerate being both the product (i.e. the recipients of paid advertising) and the paying customer? Only time will tell – but as a daily user of the platform for over a decade, I can’t think of many people I’d pay for access to their premium tweets. That model can work well for the sort of longer form content provided on Patreon. In the wild west of Twitter, it could go down very badly indeed.