nullrend blogs

A modest proposal to improve Twitter—and perhaps the world

Source: The Case Against Retweets – The Atlantic

I went ahead and made the change on tweetdeck, the interface I use on the desktop:

But this doesn’t take any effect on my mobile client of choice, Talon, and it’s a total pain in the ass to go hunting down a tweet that scrolled off the screen.

Meaning I had to rethink my approach. In the next few days I’ll be disabling retweets for pretty much everyone I notice retweeting more than they actually tweet or reply to other’s tweets. Just in the time I wrote up this blog post I disabled RTs for ten people. The threshold seems to be when someone hits the RT button for more than 4 tweets out of every 10.

It’d be nice if twitter enabled an option to disable RTs globally and then you decide if you want to turn them on for someone… but this does not favor their advertising model since you’re purposely limiting the amount of viral content making it to your timeline regardless of the client you’re using.

This is probably a good thing, all in all.